by J. G Hayes
I did. I do.
When you had changed his tears to laughter by and by, he was ravenous, ravenous, and you filled the two of you with blueberry Pop-Tarts. That was his favorite then. You had toasted them out in the kitchen, shouting to him “No peeking, no sniffing”; it was a surprise. You arranged them in the pattern of a wheel on an old tray that had belonged to your grandmother. The tray depicted songbirds of Ireland. The ice-cold glasses of milk you served with them had wobbled as you carried the tray back into the bedroom. The two of you had eaten them at the end of the rumpled bed on your bellies, watching the TV, the blue light washing over his naked body. You couldn’t get over the white silkiness of him. You’d known him all your life, had seen him every day of your life, and now this. There was the darkness of his hair, the reddish tan around his neck, and then a plunging into uninterrupted whiteness to the soles of his feet. His body was a smooth line that rose and fell and rose and fell and rose and fell. Neither one of you could concentrate; you kept looking at each other and laughing. It seemed an antidote to everything sorrowful in the world, having it be okay, allowable, to reach over and stroke the flesh of his behind.
That was how it was the first night. And so many like it afterward.
THE SHOWER WATER STOPPED and your reverie did as well. He had come back here with you now, ridden silent in the cab with you. You had shown him what you had done to the place. You had bought the other unit upstairs five years ago, had knocked down walls. There was someone in The Program who crafted handmade furniture, and you had bought one or two pieces a year. You had covered some of the walls with old barn board. You had found an old fireplace on the second floor, and had opened it up. Last, you showed him the bedroom. You had put French doors on the back wall, and it looked out onto the walled garden now. You had taken out the rusted clothesline, the old cement patio. There was a tree at the far end and you had draped it with blue Christmas lights. You turned them on so he could see the neat rows of beans, the tomato plants humped along the south wall, the sunflowers lining the north wall like nodding sentries. There was a statue of an old saint under the tree; you’d found it in a junkyard. You told him how you put birdseed on the shoulders of the saint and that the birds came for it every day.
After the tour he asked if he could use the bathroom, freshen up after his flight. Otherwise you hadn’t really spoken. The two of you had stared straight ahead on the cab ride home.
Once he was in the bathroom you had vacillated, but then finally you stripped. You were lying on the bed now, naked. You thought if he came out of the bathroom fully dressed and ready to leave you might not survive the humiliation.
Yes, you would. There was a meeting at 7:30 and you would go to the meeting if worse came to worst. You’d been through too much. To calm yourself you murmured a favorite old song of your grandmother’s, a love song. Your grandfather had wooed her with it. Why you thought of that now, you didn’t know at first:
No matter I’ve waited a very long time
To ask you if you could but spare me some time
But you couldn’t recall the tune really and you kept getting it confused with “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” which you had both sung in the third grade for the May procession.
The bathroom door opened. He turned the light off behind him. A puff of Ivory soap scent floated into the bedroom before he did. He was still drying off his backside with the white towel as he stepped into the hall. He was being as boldly tentative as yourself. Other than that, he was naked. Your eyes, your jaw, tightened with heat. Again, you understood his pride. Or was it fear?
When he saw you like that on the bed, he froze. Your hands were behind your head to keep them from trembling. You had draped the edge of the comforter over your groin to hide the ridiculousness of your tumescence in case he should emerge dressed.
By the sodium streetlight you could see his jaw tighten, his head turn away. A sob came out of his mouth. He disguised it with a cough.
You rose from the bed. At first you didn’t go to him; you lit candles instead. You had set out a flock of candles on the night tables, on the dresser by the wall. The room warbled in the light. You could feel his eyes on you.
You walked over to him. You looked at each other. The years apart fell away like parched cocoons; you could almost hear the sifting of them as they fell and blew off. You touched him on his arm, traced your finger down to his fingers. He closed his eyes, his mouth fell open. The groan out of him was like scorched eiderdown, soft, yet burning. You took him in your arms. His towel fell to the floor. He really lost it then, convulsions running through him.
“Shhhh, shhhh,” you soothed him, your hands like devouring eyes on the back of him. “Welcome home, Timmy,” you said. “Welcome home.”
It wasn’t the poetry you wanted, but it would do.
You’re Always Happy When You’re Rich
Danny padded down for breakfast on the May morning of his nineteenth birthday, and found his mother bustling around in the kitchen, burning things. Inadequate blocks of sun rested on the kitchen floor, too small to warm or really lighten.
“Hi. How come you’re home?” Danny rumpled his dark bed-messed hair and yawned. He stood uncertainly in the middle of the room, wearing the white T-shirt and plaid boxers he’d worn to bed the night before.
“I’m going in a little late,” Mrs. Sullivan clucked. She hustled over to Danny and kissed his cheek. “And I’ll tell you why: Happy birthday, honey! I’m making you French toast!” She was wearing a white cotton dress with small bunches of scarlet roses on it, one she wore only in summer. The dress was hopeful and made Danny think there might still be Possibilities.
Mrs. Sullivan seemed happily oblivious to the smoke puffing from an aluminum frying pan on the back of the stove. She smiled and said, “Go into the parlor for a little while and I’ll call you when it’s done.”
Danny headed back upstairs to the bedroom he shared with his brother, George. He pulled on navy blue nylon sweatpants with orange stripes running down the sides. When he returned downstairs, he stopped at the open front door in the parlor and stood in the sunlight. He looked out through the glass storm door that would never shut tight. The view was the same as always. The jammed triple-deckers right across the street, the continuous lines of parked cars, the sky a crowded-out afterthought and not a tree in sight. For the first time Danny gave thought to the worry that had been licking at him for the past year—what if he got stuck here for life?
He shook the thought away and touched the storm door for luck. He pushed it open and leaned his head out, breathing deeply. The air was warm with sun and there was no hint yet of the sea’s tang, nor the city’s pollution—two more hopeful signs. This is how the air must smell everywhere else, Danny thought. Fresh and clear and full of Possibilities.
“Okay, honey,” Mrs. Sullivan called.
Danny slid a smile on his face and strode out to the kitchen. Mrs. Sullivan had shoved the old mail and newspapers off to one side of the round tippy kitchen table, and set a place for Danny. He saw a plate stacked high with French toast swimming in Vermont Maid syrup to which, Danny knew, his mother had added water so there would be enough. At the top of his plate sat a cracked glass with a purple lilac in it. The buds hadn’t quite opened yet. Danny could smell only the very well-done French toast and his mother’s perfume, the one she wore every day to work.
Resting next to his plate was an unopened letter addressed to him. He froze. His heart felt like it was spinning when he read the return address, that of a college twenty miles south of Boston.
“It came yesterday, honey, but I saved it for this morning, for your birthday,” Mrs. Sullivan explained, leaning against the salt-and-pepper kitchen countertop, her small pink hands clasped tightly across her stomach. She cleared her throat and sang, “I have a good feeling about this one!”
My last chance, Danny thought.
He plunked down in the creaky wooden chair and stabbed his fork into the French toast. He shoved a st
ack of four small drippy pieces into his mouth. His mother had cut it up for him too.
“It’s thicker,” she said, rushing over to the table and snatching the letter. She waved it in front of Danny’s face. “It’s thicker than the other letters.” She put it back down on the table in front of Danny.
Right after New Year’s Danny had applied to seven colleges. Six of those had rejected him.
Danny wished he’d brought the mail in himself yesterday, but he’d been working on a design upstairs in his bedroom and the day had run away from him. He wished it right now almost as powerfully as he wished he’d get into this school. His stomach squirmed with this wish.
“Well?” Mrs. Sullivan chirped, folding her hands again and working them together.
Danny looked at his mother. She was smiling but her gray eyes were large and liquidy with worry. He smiled weakly. He picked up the letter. It was heavier. He saw himself walking beneath the September shade of large sighing trees, textbooks under his arm, an ivy-covered building in the distance. He saw too what he’d be wearing. Off-white khakis, a green-and-white plaid button-down shirt with the cuffs rolled halfway up his forearms, a baseball cap the same color as his pants, new dark-brown hiking boots. There wouldn’t be anyone walking with him, not yet; but in his head he’d be entertaining the possibility that soon there would be—
“Can I have some juice, Ma, please?” Danny mumbled. He couldn’t swallow the syrupy mass with the clutch in his throat.
In a spurt, juice was in front of him. He gulped half the glass, avoiding his mother’s eyes.
He opened the envelope and pulled the letter out. It was folded in thirds. There was some kind of enclosure inside the letter, a thick, hot-pink card that skidded onto the table, face up. It was this college’s football schedule for the upcoming fall season, and some information on homecoming week. Danny’s lips pulled together. His eyes narrowed and he grew a little dizzy.
“I think I might be in,” he half-roared.
“Oh, God, I knew it, knew it!” Mrs. Sullivan cried, bringing one hand to her mouth.
“Wait,” Danny said, holding up his finger.
He flipped open the letter with a loud flick of his index finger.
Dear Mr. Sullivan,
The Board of Admissions would like to thank you for applying to our college.
Danny’s breath caught—they always thanked you first when they rejected you. Thanks but no thanks.
He looked up at his mother. She was frozen, leaning forward like she might topple, her eyes more anxious than Danny’s.
She stared at Danny’s face like it was her last meal. “Not … not bad news?” she asked.
Danny’s eyes fell to the letter again.
After careful consideration of your application and records, the Board of Admissions regrets that we cannot offer you a seat in the upcoming fall semester at this time. We do wish you every success in your upcoming academic career, and we thank you again for considering our institution.
Danny wished the letter went on so he could keep reading, reading and reading and reading, anything to avoid his mother’s eyes. He lingered over the sky blue signature—D. Kerwin MacDonald, Director of Admissions, and the small PRINTED ON RECYCLED PAPER written around an image of a green tree at the bottom of the page.
He heard the click of his mother’s lighter as she lit up a cigarette, heard her waving her arms as she flailed the exhaled smoke away from her. He could taste his disappointment, his tongue curled with its acidity. He felt his cheeks redden with humiliation: to have his failure observed by his mother, by anyone. It would have been the same with a stranger from the street, called in as a witness.
“Dan-ny! Dan-ny! Dan-ny!” his entire eighth-grade phys ed class had chanted when he’d tripped running into the gym—over nothing, over himself—and sprawled out on the waxed wood floor. He could hear them again in his head now, out in the street, upstairs in the hall, inside the oven—
He carefully folded the letter back into thirds, placing the pink football schedule inside. Then he ripped it up.
“Danny!” his mother wailed, her voice breaking.
“It’s okay,” Danny heard himself say. His voice sounded dead. He looked down at the congealing French toast, the flowery pattern of the chipped plate.
“What about UMass honey? They’ll take anyb—I mean, you could start there, and with your brains transfer … transfer anywhere.”
“It’s too late,” Danny mumbled.
“Too late? What do you mean, too late? For Chris’sake, it’s only May. How can it be—”
“I called them last week just in case,” Danny said. He pushed the French toast away. “The deadline was two weeks ago for fall … admissions.”
“Jesus Christ! Don’t these people know about the busing? Don’t they know what happened to the schools around here?”
They didn’t know, Danny knew, or if they did, they didn’t care. The forced busing to achieve racial integration had begun Danny’s freshman year. Riots, helicopters overhead, the National Guard and baton-wielding tactical police, to say nothing of stone- and bottle-throwing parents, had prevented Danny and his brother from going to school across town more than three days the first two quarters. The school administration had been notified by the courts that absenteeism by white students was just a form of boycott in an attempt to disrupt justice, and that such students, if they didn’t show up, would be failed. In everything.
Sophomore year had been almost as bad.
They didn’t have the money for private schools. Mrs. Sullivan would have put the house up for sale to afford that expense—if she owned it. She had said that twenty times a day those two years. If I owned this house, kids—
Danny’s brother, George, had dropped out, but was lucky enough to get on part-time with the gas company when he was sixteen. Now twenty-one, he was full-time and “set for life,” as he told Danny and his mother. He was saving money and dating a teacher that he’d probably marry.
Danny thought he’d rather die than work for the gas company for the rest of his life.
By junior year things had calmed down a bit, though the schools— without books for many of the students, and with fights every day— were in little danger of turning out Rhodes scholars. Unlike students in the snow-white suburbs west of Boston—where lived the judges and legislators and newspaper owners who were determined that busing, in Boston, would be implemented no matter the cost—it was difficult to learn anything when each day was a variation on a theme of chaos.
But junior year also had seen the rotten blossoming of That Other Thing, the thing that ate at Danny night and day.
The only relief had been his design work, the plans he drew for houses and buildings far from urban noise and every kind of confusion.
“Well … well then, next year, honey,” Mrs. Sullivan said. “Next year, that’s all.” Her face puckered as she sucked on her cigarette.
“Yeah,” Danny mumbled. He looked up at his mother and smiled. “Yeah. Next year. You better go, Ma.”
“I know, honey. Call me if you need to talk. Are you all right?” She leaned over and kissed her son on the cheek.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Fine.”
“Okay, well… well, happy birthday, sweetheart.” She smiled, and turned and put her cigarette out in a half-full cup of cold coffee in the sink. Then she grabbed her oversized pocketbook and trooped out the back door.
“Yeah,” Danny whispered. “Happy fucking birthday.”
And Ma had had a good feeling about this one. Danny snorted. He appreciated her support, in everything—but her problem was she couldn’t tell the difference between a good feeling and a wish. When Dad had left after an especially loud midnight fight, she’d told Danny and George he’d be back in a month, that he just needed some space. That was six years ago. Since then she’d redoubled her concern for her two boys, now that the hovering she lavished on her husband was in reserve.
You’re so smart, Danny—you can be anything y
ou want. she’d always tell him. You’ll be a fantastic architect. Now, sitting at the quiet kitchen table, he was trying to remember why he’d ever believed her. He was a loser. His mother was just too wonderfully loyal to see this.
He’d always liked building things. As a child he delighted in taking a pile of toy blocks or sticks and making something out of nothing. He and George would dump out a clattering barrel of Tinker Toys or Lincoln Logs onto the parlor rug. George would get bored after fifteen minutes, but never Danny. When he was eleven, he built a flying saucer that twirled around while he held it, and when he sent the plans to Tinker Toys, they’d reprinted them in their instruction booklet and sent him a check for twenty-five dollars.
He’d started designing houses when he was twelve. When he was thirteen he moved inside these houses, planning where each room would be and how it would flow into the next one. He would assign furniture for each room, and then, finally, think about the life he might lead in these rooms among this furniture when he became a man, passing from room to quiet sunny room. The rooms would be fragrant with the smell of nothing.
