by Greg Johnson
“Mom?” he’d said finally, “I guess I don’t have a shirt. Would you mind ironing one for me?”
This kept her busy for the last hour. Abby had wisely stayed at her place most of the day—he couldn’t blame her, since after all she’d been dealing with their mother full-time—but at 3:30 she rapped on Thorn’s front door. Dressed as if reenacting a Sunday morning from twenty-five years ago, when they’d don their church clothes and troop off to mass, the three of them left for Howell Park.
To Thorn’s relief, the weather had cooperated: it was a mild, windy Saturday, and though he’d expected a good turnout he was startled by the huge crowd that had assembled near a row of benches facing a large open area of the park. Thom remembered that the organizational skills of Warren and some of his friends—especially a lesbian couple, ubiquitous local activists whose Rolodex of Atlanta’s gay “A-Iist” was second to none—were formidable. There were several rainbow-draped card tables where people were serving refreshments, taking donations for a Project Open Hand gift in Connie’s memory, and handing out professionally printed “memorial cards” featuring a photo of Connie, a brief biographical sketch, and some of his favorite quotes from Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde. Under a spreading water oak squatted a young man busily inflating white balloons from a helium pump, tying them with string. There was even a Port-o-let, which made Thorn’s heart sink: how long a service had been planned? He knew that several of Connie’s friends were going to speak, but he’d assumed their remarks would be brief; he’d heard that a couple of local writers, acquaintances of Connie’s, were going to read poems they’d written about him. But Warren had insisted no one would use the occasion for fund-raising or speechifying. Past memorial services he’d attended had taught him, however, that people could seldom resist the temptation, once they were given the microphone, to depart from their prepared remarks and start rambling; that often people not scheduled to speak would decide they wanted a turn, after all; that there was a general reluctance to bring such services to an end, as if putting off the wrenching moment when the balloons were given up to the sky and the grief-stricken silence descended, and there was nothing left but to go home with a hole in your heart.
Self-conscious in his jacket and tie, his mother and sister in their pretty spring dresses on either side of him, Thom joined the crowd and found Warren chatting with Pace near the handsome caramel-colored boy who was filling the balloons and tying them in batches to several stakes in the ground. Warren and Pace were watching him, idly, while they talked, so they hadn’t noticed Thorn’s arrival.
“Am I interrupting something?” he said, smiling.
Startled, they looked up. Pace grinned sheepishly, shaking his head, but Thom was startled by Warren’s appearance: he was drawn and pale, his face creased with exhaustion.
While Pace chatted with Abby and Lucille, Thom said to Warren, “Hey, how are you doing. You don’t look so good.”
Warren kept staring at the guy squatting next to the pump, filling balloon after balloon. Warren’s eyes weren’t red from crying, which Thom would have preferred: instead they looked vacant, faraway.
“I’m all right,” Warren said. “Still kind of numb, I guess.”
“You don’t look numb,” Thom said. “You look like you’re hurting. After this is over, why don’t we—”
Warren put up a hand, as though to block Thorn’s words. “Thanks, but like I was just telling Pace, I need to be alone right now. If it weren’t for all the work Patsy and Miriam put into this, I wouldn’t have even come. I—I didn’t want to come.”
Thom said, feeling awkward, “I’m glad you did.” He didn’t know what else to say, so he was relieved when his mother stepped over and hugged Warren; he hugged her back, holding on for several seconds. Thom and Abby looked at each other, then glanced away.
Another group joined them, including one of the organizers, Patsy, with whom Connie had traded jibes at Thorn’s Christmas Eve party. She introduced the men she’d brought over to Lucille, who spoke to each of them graciously, holding out her white-gloved hand. One of the men was introduced as James, and now Thom glanced over to the handsome boy working on the balloons: of course, it was Reginald, whom Connie had identified as a “mulatto,” peppering his monologue with those other insouciant, tactless remarks Thom wished he could not remember.
Thom was thinking of this, paying no attention to the conversation, when someone touched his arm. Abby was smiling. Today she wore a dress Thom hadn’t seen before, a sleeveless pale-blue silk, plain but elegant; her short hair looked fuller, brushed and swept into dramatic curves behind her ears. She wore pearl earrings, necklace, bracelet—a matched set Thom thought he remembered from her college years. She might have been a college student, looking so young and untouched today with her shining hair and eyes, and this clever little smile, almost a smirk, she was giving him.
“I was asking the others,” she said, “if they knew something else about today. Why it was a special day.”
His mother was smiling cleverly, too, and only then did he remember. As did Warren, who managed a ghostly smile and put a weightless hand to Thorn’s shoulder.
He said, “Happy birthday, Thom.”
Then came a general surprised chorus of “Happy Birthdays!” from the others gathered around—several people had joined them, young men who looked vaguely familiar though Thom couldn’t place them—and Thom gave an embarrassed grin.
“Thanks, but this is Connie’s day,” he said.
Pace barked out, “Now Thom, you know I never remember people’s birthdays. But happy birthday, goddamn it!”
The others laughed and moments later, once the conversation had shifted back to Connie, he felt Abby’s warm breath close to his ear. He inhaled her faint but sweet perfume, which made him think of pink roses.
“Happy birthday, angel,” she said, kissing his cheek. “I have something for you, when we get home.”
“C’mon, we already celebrated,” he said, pleased. “You already gave me something, back when Mom first got here.”
“But today’s the day,” Abby said. “You’re not getting off that easy.”
Lucille stood close to them, eavesdropping. When Abby stepped away, his mother came forward, bringing with her the matronly scents familiar since his boyhood: the same harsh but oddly pleasant smell of her hair spray, the sweet odors of her skin cream, makeup, perfume. He’d thought she was about to say something, but instead she kissed him, too, a moist and breathy kiss she planted half on his cheek, half at the edge of his lips. “Happy birthday, honey,” she whispered. “And I—I’m sorry about Connie. I know he was a wonderful friend.” Startled, he resisted the urge to wipe his mouth; he assumed her lipstick had left a crimson smear. He knew from experience that Abby, or Lucille herself, would take a tissue from her purse and daub the blaring red mark away.
Yet how many years had passed since this had happened, his mother hovering suddenly close, bright-mouthed, unexpected—and then pressing her half-parted lips against his cheek? When he was a kid, her breath would be sickly-sweet from the gum she’d chewed constantly through those years: Juicy Fruit. Today her breath had been clean, minty. Now she stepped back, glancing up at him shyly, and he tried to compose his face into the semblance of a smile. A grateful smile. He could tell from her face, and Abby’s, that he hadn’t quite succeeded.
So he added, “Thanks, Mom,” and gave his salesman’s grin. Before she turned away her face softened, just perceptibly, as if she were satisfied with that.
One kiss had stayed with Thom Sadler throughout his life.
After three decades he could still recall the greasy surprise as he touched two fingers to his cheek—then the sight of them blood-smeared, a bright vivid red—then the stale heavy smell as of spoiled berries as he brought them to his nose.
Later he’d raced into the house, into his room. His cheek flaming, burning. Stopped breathless in front of the mirror where the smeared lipstick reminded him less of blood than war pa
int, his pale small-boy’s face taking on a cockeyed glamour since the other cheek was white, untouched, giving him an unbalanced look. He turned sideways to see himself in profile, his eyes cutting sharply to the right until his eyes ached. No, not war paint, and not even a kiss any longer, just a smeary red stain that wasn’t anything but itself. Opening his palm he’d rubbed savagely at the kiss, the mark, whatever it was, then he’d rushed into the bathroom and used a soap and washcloth until his skin stung.
His cheek felt aflame for the rest of the evening, but the kiss was gone.
That day had been his birthday, too, and it had begun as the most exciting of his life. For this was the first time he’d had a real party, one to which he’d been allowed to invite his friends. There were eighteen children in his kindergarten class, which was run by the nuns at Sacred Heart but taught by a lay teacher, Mrs. Simpson, a sweet pink-faced woman with upswept blond hair. For weeks he’d been pestering his classmates with reminders about the party. His previous birthday celebrations attended only by family members seemed to him babyish, something he’d left behind. Now he’d started school. Now he had friends, and they were coming to his party.
When he and his mother talked about the plans for his birthday (which he loved doing, darting moth-like around the kitchen while his mother tried to work) she would use the phrase “your friends” as though repeating a kind of mantra. He’d never thought about this word before. Two or three boys in the neighborhood had been his “little friends” (somehow they did not count, and he hadn’t invited them to the party), but now there was a whole roomful, boys and girls, from school. All shapes and sizes. Even a black boy. Even a girl from Korea. All these were his “friends.” (What about Abby, though? He played more with his sister than with anyone. But no, she was his sister, a word he didn’t like because that’s what the nuns were called, and Abby was nothing like the nuns, and because a fat third grader had shoved him one morning at recess, calling him “little sister,” and Thom had fallen face first into the sandy mound of dirt near the merry-go-round. Still, he couldn’t say “my friend Abby.” She was his sister, a plain fact that would never change.) In the days before his party, that new word lived in his imagination, became palpable in his mind’s eye, a solid and welcome shape on his tongue: friend. He tasted the word, heard its rich, full tones, even shut his eyes and saw the letters that had burned into his thinking in their unbreakable, changeless order.
Because his parents and Abby and sometimes even Verna read to him, and because Mrs. Simpson wrote words on the blackboard in kindergarten class, he already knew how to read, though not as well as his family bragged he did. To him, the words he did know were still new and exciting, like the faces or smells or colors of certain people. For him, Verna was a rich brown word, like her skin, the same color as the battered antique roll-top desk in the den, inherited from Thorn’s great-grandfather, where his mother sat to write the bills. He thought Abby was a sweet, girlish word, and once when they were talking about words in kindergarten class Mrs. Simpson had pointed out that his sister’s name had the same letters as baby and said that was an anagram—which was a word he didn’t like, since it sounded mean and fussy. He’d told Abby that her name had the same letters as baby, but he supposed because she was older than Thom and in third grade she didn’t seem to like the idea. Soon she’d figured out that his name had the same letters as moth and for a few days called him “Thom the Moth,” and of course he fought back by chanting “Abby the Baby,” and quickly enough by mutual unspoken consent they’d dropped the game. But he kept thinking about names, about words. His mother’s name was Lucille, which sounded like breaking glass, and his father’s was George, which made him think of a big comfortable dusty room. But as his birthday party approached, he thought mostly about friend and how it was a solid, good word, full of ordinary letters that you used a lot. He’d told Mrs. Simpson about the party his mother was planning and that she’d called the other mothers to invite his “friends,” and something about the careful way he’d said the words made her smile.
That day, she’d written the date of his upcoming birthday on the blackboard—May 1, 1970—and said in other countries this was called “May Day” and it was a very special occasion. He liked the ring of “May Day,” too, because it sounded important, and he liked words that rhymed. The day she wrote his birthday on the board was only the middle of April, and he felt the day would never come. He imagined the next two weeks as a sprawling desert of time across which he must crawl, going to sleep at night, waking in the morning, dressing and undressing, eating and drinking, going to kindergarten and coming home, doing all this patiently, impatiently, for days and days before his birthday and the party would finally happen. All this depressed him, so to distract himself he thought about words, and pestered his mother about the party and what they would do, what they would eat, what would happen, all to make the time pass more quickly.
His mother insisted they were going to have an old-fashioned birthday. They were going to have a big homemade chocolate cake (she hated those flat, white ones you got from the bakery) and six big blue candles that matched the color of Thorn’s eyes. They were going to play games like Pin the Tail on the Donkey. She’d dug an old watercolor of a donkey folded in quarters out from a dusty box in the tool shed, and she’d said it was the same one they used at her own parties when she was a little girl. The tail was missing, though, so Abby had made a new one out of brown construction paper, and the color wasn’t even close to the faded brown of the original donkey but Thom said he didn’t care. “It’s just a game,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant though his excitement made his voice squeak. He was thrilled by the idea of all his friends playing games at his party. His mother said they were also going to play “go fishing,” which meant each child in turn would be handed a cane fishing pole with a string on the end, which would be lowered behind a tarp stretched across the swing-set in the backyard. On the other side of the tarp his father would crouch, invisible, and each time a new child “went fishing” Mr. Sadler would attach a party favor to the end of the line with a clothespin. And they would play musical chairs out on the patio, with his father playing his harmonica, and whoever was the last one sitting would win another favor. Then, around 5:15—his mother had written all this out, planning how long each event would take—his friends would don their paper hats and sing “Happy Birthday,” and Thom would make his wish and blow out the candles, and then at long last, he would get to open all his gifts, and they’d all eat ice cream and cake, and Thom and all his friends would be happy, happy.
Beyond that moment, Thom hadn’t given a thought.
On the morning of the party Thom was behaving, his father grumbled, as though he’d had ten cups of coffee, racing around the house, double-checking that everything was there for the games, asking his father if he was sure it wasn’t going to rain (his father pointed up at the cloudless sky, not saying a word), asking his mother if they should call his friends and remind them (No, his mother had insisted, that wouldn’t be polite—of course they would remember), and asking Verna if she’d remembered to make the punch. Had his mother bought enough ice cream, enough party favors? “Yes, child!” she’d cried, shaking her head. Verna worked for the Sadlers from eight until noon, and Thom caught her watching the clock; though Thorn’s mother had offered her double her hourly wage to “work the party,” Verna had claimed to have business in town; she’d slapped her man’s felt hat over her sour-smelling black curls and left at twelve on the dot. When his mother called each of his classmates’ mothers, she’d told them it would begin at four and end by six, and by 3:30 Thom was so frantic and darting from room to room so often, and so aimlessly, and asking so many questions he’d already asked that his mother ordered him to sit at the kitchen table and eat a cookie and drink a glass of milk.
“And take some deep breaths,” she said, rolling her eyes.
When he heard the doorbell ring at ten minutes till four, of course he dropped the milk, and
the glass shattered on the kitchen tiles, occasioning a deep groan from his mother—“Why couldn’t Verna have stayed this one afternoon,” she muttered—and half the milk had splashed onto his shirt and shorts, so he’d had to run up and change, and by the time he got to the den, sixteen of his friends were there. (Two of them never showed, a fact that later, whenever he thought about it, made his chest ache.) The mothers had conferred, and four of them had volunteered to carpool. The four cars had arrived in unison, like a funeral procession, each disgorging four children, and at six o’clock four different cars would arrive to pick them up again.
It was a perfect Saturday, a sunny May afternoon. His birthday.
When he came into the kitchen, though, dragging his feet out of shyness when he saw the brightly chattering kids, the breakfast room table piled with gifts, his sense of time shifted abruptly. The party careened along from the first moment his friend Danny saw him and shrieked “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” and all the kids began circling him like bees, the boys punching his arm, the girls trying to kiss him, Thom giggling and fidgeting all the while, the back of his head tingling with nearly unbearable excitement, pleasure.
Happy birthday! Happy birthday!
The words flew at him like tossed flowers through the rest of the party even as his mother took control, informing the children of the activities she had planned and shepherding them along, first into the den for Pin the Tail on the Donkey, where Thorn’s parents handed out cloth napkins to use as blindfolds, summoning them one at a time (“In alphabetical order,” Thorn’s mother insisted) to approach the wrinkled, melancholy-looking donkey profile tacked against a giant bulletin board, which Thorn’s father had brought home from his office. One by one, they approached blindfolded and tried to pin the tail (actually, thumbtack the tail) in the right place. The other children watched quietly for the first couple of tries, laughing uproariously when Susie Blanchard stuck the tail onto the donkey’s rear hoof, shrieking with delight when Tim Daniels pinned it directly onto the animal’s exposed, balefully staring eye (several of the children grabbed their own eyes, crying “Ouch, I can’t see!” and “Oooh, where am I?”), but even as Thorn’s mother determinedly made her way through the alphabet, the children began to lose interest in watching, preferring instead to don their blindfolds and walk into walls, into each other, laughing and shoving, deliberately falling on the floor, so that Thorn’s mother announced anxiously (Thorn’s father and Abby had watched all this from the den sofa, smiling) that they should go outside for the next activity, and even Luther Washington and Amy Zins, who hadn’t yet had their turn at the donkey, didn’t seem to mind. So Mrs. Sadler corralled them all into the backyard, where Thorn’s father had already affixed an electric-blue tarp to the swing-set against which an impossibly long cane pole was leaning, prompting Kenny Martindale to shout, “Hey, Thom, is that the switch your dad uses on you?” More shrieks of laughter from the children. “Yeah, Thorn’s got to have his birthday spanking!” one of them yelled. “Yay, Thorn’s going to get his birthday spanking, yay, yay!” the others cried.
