by David Leite
Back on Brownell Street, the Sisters of the Spatula had had a default hair-trigger response whenever any of us seriously pissed them off. It was usually some variation of: “You’re going to drive me to Taunton State, [insert name of that sonofabitchin’ kid]! Right to Taunton State, in a straitjacket!” To the others, it was a goof. They loved to see how far they could push before their mothers would point two fingers—a lit cigarette cocked between—and start braying. Me, I took it literally. The hospital loomed dark and constant in my thoughts. I was preoccupied with it. Most twelve-year-olds’ biggest fears were plebeian: dark cellars, thunderstorms, hell and damnation. Mine, from as early as I can remember, was going insane, sitting side by side with my mother, whom, I was certain, I would have sent there, each of us wiping drool from the other’s mouth.
Lose my mind or carry on? No contest. But carrying on was only beneficial if the effects were cumulative, like snow blanketing the pain, whiting out the panic. Every morning, though, something reset, and I had to begin again. Each insight, each comfort, each moment of lightness I’d achieved the day before was wiped out when I awoke at four or five in the morning, listening to the low murmurs of my parents as they had breakfast before my father went to work. I lay there feeling shards of electricity shooting through me. My legs fizzled with so much energy, I had to shuffle them constantly to stop myself from running out to the kitchen and seeing my parents’ faces fall as they realized I once again wasn’t sleeping. Around seven, I’d get up, a facsimile of myself.
“How’d you sleep, Son?” my mother would ask.
“Fine.” I always lied. On the snack bar was my morning banana with its futile wishes: Have a Good Day! We Love You! God Bless!!
During the day I felt like I was peering at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. People looked small and far away, sounds, distorted and muffled. My mind wandered in class, and whenever I was called on, I was startled. I was too busy scanning my body for signs it was happening again. “Hypervigilance,” psychiatrists call it. I didn’t have the vocabulary then, but I was acutely aware that if I stopped my internal scans for any rumblings, any blips on the screen, I’d be blindsided. Like that time I was in the second-floor library flipping through an old Life magazine, doing research for a project. I turned to an article on World War II and came face-to-face with a picture of a man’s severed head propped up on an army tank. He was still wearing his helmet. His skin was charred black and awful, burned down to the bone on his nose and around his mouth, making him look like a snarling dog. I grabbed my bag and took off. The librarian yelled in the hall that I couldn’t leave without a pass, but I was out of the building and panting in the parking lot before I realized what she had said.
It was short-sleeve weather, so it must have been May or June, four or five months later. My backpack of school books slumped, unopened, against my father’s La-Z-Boy. Near the breezeway door, my Top-Siders sat pigeon-toed where I’d mindlessly stepped out of them. My Baracuta jacket was crumpled next to them. I curled up on the floor in front of the TV, my head tucked into the crook of my elbow so my mother couldn’t study my face for signs that it was happening. Rusty, protective, was lying against my back, like he was trying to leach the pain from me. Through the open windows, I could hear the neighborhood kids playing. Please don’t make me go outside, I begged my mother in my head. I just couldn’t do it. Out there unnerved me. Sapphire sky, backyard like a crocheted green quilt, street full of friends. Although the rightful place for an almost-thirteen-year-old, it gave me no relief and reminded me just how troubled I was.
I cranked the dial on the TV, looking for channel two, WGBH. A riptide of anxiety was pulling at me, as it did every time. Please let me watch it. Please let me watch it. Please let me watch it. I’d had a bad day. I deserved this.
“You’re going to twist that thing right off,” my mother said. “Then what?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled into my elbow.
Just then the jaunty music from The French Chef mingled with the rhythmic thonk and hiss of my mother’s iron as she pressed my father’s underwear. Suddenly the hamster wheel of punitive thoughts in my head slowed.
As I watched TV, mist from mother’s spray bottle would every so often arc over the board, and I turned my face to its coolness. Show after show, Julia wrestled with pots, wielded a sword over her famous kick line of fowl, and thwacked pieces of meat the way mothers back then would swat the asses of bratty kids when they misbehaved. This soothed me, ebbed the riptide so I could float, like that time with Russell Cantor. Wide sky; quiet, warm breaths; slow heart. Julia accomplished something very few people could: She helped me forget myself. I felt normal, a concept whose meaning was growing increasingly meaningless.
Sometimes I’d even feel enough like myself to do a rousing imitation of Julia for my mother. I’d stand and plant both fists on my hips, lifting my head like I was about to crow. “Welcome to The French Chef; I’m Julia Child,” I tootled, my voice rising and plunging. Then I added the only phrase I remembered from French class: “Comment allez-vous aujourd’hui? Allons à la piscine!” (How are you today? Let’s go to the pool!) She’d fall back against the door and laugh. Her fingers, red from housework, would burrow under her cat’s-eye glasses to wipe away tears—as much from relief as delight, I now suspect.
Boeuf Bourguignon. Coq au vin. Quiche Lorraine. French onion soup. I recall her food in the abstract, in the collective, although I have no memory of her making it. I think my mother mistook my fascination with Julia for an interest in cooking, so she bought me Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cookbook. Flipping through the pages, I was charmed by the drawings of kids my age making bunny salads from pear halves, using raisins for eyes, almonds for ears, and pom-poms of cottage cheese for tails. There were recipes for cheeseburgers, sloppy joes, Mad Hatter meatballs, and tuna-and-potato-chip casserole. One dish that especially captivated me was cube steaks. Not for the recipe (“sear floured cube steaks in butter”), but for the illustration: a blond boy poking at the steaks in the pan with a fork, and another boy, his head just inches from the other; both smiling. I stared at that drawing so much that the book’s binding, now forty-four years old, is broken open to that page.
Inspired by the recipe for simple spaghetti, I decided to wing it and make lasagna as my inaugural supper in our basement kitchen. I clattered around for my mother’s square Pyrex baking dish. Ignorant of the existence of mozzarella and ricotta cheese, I made my Italian classic with layers of Prince lasagna sheets, Ragú spaghetti sauce, and thick slices of Cracker Barrel Extra-Sharp Cheddar cheese. To call it a “brick” would be kind, but when I slid it onto the Formica-topped trivet my father had made, you’d have thought we were hosting a White House state dinner. A sudden formality descended over the table. My mother cooed something like, “That’s beautiful, Banana!” and my father sat up straighter, beaming. We all choked down a square, and my father even held out his plate for seconds. But in time, the book lost its power to soothe and was swallowed by one of the boxes in our basement. I needed fresh distraction.
“I want to be a writer,” I announced one afternoon when I was feeling unusually calm. When I was smaller and spent the weekends at my grandparents, I used to hunch over my grandfather’s old clacking Underwood typewriter, with arms that catapulted the letters onto the page. I pretended to write, but what I really loved was the look of letters, the way their shapes revealed their sound. How a g reminded me of air gathering in my lungs and threading its sinuous way up my esophagus and out my open mouth. How an S looked like a slithering snake, hissing. A B was lips puffed with plosive air about to release. Yes, I told them, I wanted to be a writer.
“Here!” my mother said a few days later, tossing a bag on the bed where I was lying.
“What is it?”
“Well, kiddo, you’re just going to have to open it to find out.” Inside was a Big Chief writing tablet. “You want to be a writer—I figured you needed something to write on.”
I
said some wiseass thing like, “Why not a typewriter?” which caused a bolt of anger to flash across her face.
“Give an inch, take a yard.” She sounded so disgusted. “That’s all it is with you, isn’t it?”
She wheeled around, then stopped herself. I could feel the colossal energy it took to shake off the fury, rolling her shoulders back and collecting herself. A bird of prey folding its wings into place, refusing to kill. Turning back, she said with a warmth that shamed me: “Why? Because real writers write longhand.” I knew I was being an asshole. I’d been an asshole for weeks, and I didn’t know how to stop it. Everything was pissing me off. I held my frustration underwater long enough to say, “Thanks, Ma.” As she leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, her coat fell open, and I could see her pink Courtesy-Booth Girl jacket underneath and smell her perfume, Chantilly.
Kneeling at my bed, I grabbed a pen. The tablet had the smooth, putty-colored paper we used in math class, the lines a thick sky blue. I began writing, a story about pirates. Halfway down the first paragraph, I tore out the page. My handwriting wasn’t right. The letters didn’t lean at the same angle—they weren’t identical like the letters on my grandfather’s typewriter, and if I was going to be a writer, not only was the story going to be perfect, so was my penmanship. I copied the paragraph on a fresh page, this time going slow to make it right. I turned the pad counterclockwise a bit and leaned back: All the letters were parallel. But by the bottom of the first page, I stopped. I knew nothing of pirates, of armadas, of the sea. As a boy, I knew I was supposed to like pirates, but I didn’t. Actually, I detested them; they were thugs with bad dental hygiene and awful taste in clothes. Feeling defeated, I flung the pad across the room, pages fluttering, and it hit the wall, like a bird slamming into a window and falling to the ground. Dead.
“What happened?” my father asked when I walked out of my room. “I thought you were writing a book?”
“I don’t have a story to tell,” I said, as I curled on the couch and turned on Candlepins for Cash.
Sunday drives through Newport, parties, ice skating on a pond in Somerset. My parents tried everything to rouse me. When I wanted to be an artist, they enrolled me in private classes. When I showed interest in science, they bought me a chemistry set and microscope. My mother started a Saturday bowling league just to get me out of the house. My father encouraged reading, but it was rare that I could wring meaning from the words. And I didn’t really like books. I liked the concept of them, but I seldom read them, which most likely contributed to my staggering lack of knowledge about pirates. No Long John Silver, no Captain Hook for me. When I did read, I’d stare absently through the book, my mind wandering. Sometimes my mother, lying next to me on the couch, would toe me in the leg when I forgot to turn pages.
My parents traveled miles for sleepovers. Too often, though, the mental distraction I was hoping for ended in burning humiliation: My friends and their families huddled together in their pajamas, looking on in the middle of the night while I called my father and explained how some stomach virus had suddenly hit. I’d learned that bugs and viruses were the ultimate excuses because, unlike with faked fevers, there was no way of checking their validity. Plus, they had the added advantage of making everyone all too happy to get me the hell out of their house.
Eventually, sleepovers ended, because of a tumult of violent night terrors in which I’d thrash or scream in my sleep—full, alarming sentences that sent friends’ parents flying into the bedroom goggle-eyed. At home, the terrors worsened. One night I was standing on the bank of a river, and huge snakes were slicing the water into big typewriter S’s as they approached. I screamed for my mother, but it felt like a fist was jamming the words back down my throat. A man grabbed my arms and yanked me into the river with the snakes. The water roiled as a frenzy of huge jungle jaws closed around my legs, fangs puncturing muscles, snapping tendons, crushing bones. I slugged the man in the head, trying to get away.
“Son! SON!” My father’s voice. What is he doing in the river? I wanted to tell him to get away, but I was being shaken and pulled. Disoriented. The river began meandering around my bureau. Snakes swam through my aquarium, glowing yellow in the corner. I found myself standing, unaccountably, on my bed. I looked at my father, who was standing in his pouchy underwear below me. Lying to my right was my mother, crying.
Confusion stopped my breath. “What’s the matter, Ma?” She explained through stuttering sobs that I had hit her in the head as she was trying to shake me awake.
They tucked me into bed, and I apologized to her again. She shook her head. “It’s nothing, sweetheart.” She kissed me and told me not to worry. “Okay?” she asked, giving me her Courtesy-Booth Girl smile. From their room, I heard her muffled cries. She must have had her face buried in my father’s chest.
In the end, happenstance was the best I could hope for. Maybe Mr. Dunn would say something in science class that would make me laugh—he was fond of stupid puns and jokes—or Mrs. Santon would once again scream, “Sacre bleu!” in French class when startled. It made all of us titter because it sounded like “Suck my blur!” And anything with the word suck was funny to a room of seventh graders. Or maybe I’d have that dream again, the one where I was Dave, the seventh Brady kid, and I’d awaken happy. At these times, I forgot myself for just a minute, and I reasoned that if I could feel better for a minute, I could feel better for two . . . three . . . maybe ten . . . fifteen . . . thirty, and then even an hour. And eventually, I’d be well again. But night would always erase the chalkboard in my head of all my hard-won tricks, so that in the morning all I could do was start filling it up again, top left to lower right, with happenstance. When I first learned in English class of Sisyphus and his never-ending task, I asked for a hall pass from Mrs. Hopf and slipped into a stall in the boys’ room and cried.
Late summer. Rummaging through boxes under the basement stairs, I came upon a blue book with yellow letters: Boys & Sex. I could feel my neck swell as my heart beat faster. The book’s spine was cracked open to the chapter: “Homosexuality.” Do Mom and Dad think I’m a faggot?
I read. “All but one of our states have laws which provide jail sentences for adult males who engage in homosexual activity with each other.” Provide. What a funny word to use in this case. As though they were offering these men something, like all-you-can-eat buffets, a free happy-hour cocktail, complimentary towels at the pool.
Mr. Goode popped into my head.
“Your honor, for our first witness, the prosecution calls Mrs. Adele Goode, a neighbor of David Leite, the accused; and the former wife of Mr. Goode, a pedophile who introduced him into this life of perversion and filth.”
And in a later paragraph: “. . . boys who have sex with each other can be ajudged juvenile delinquents and sent to institutions.”
Bobby Romeu, a kid a few years older than me, couldn’t be a delinquent. Come on, he was in a model-airplane club. He liked to show me his creased picture from a dirty magazine, of a woman with saggy breasts and nipples like Ring Dings. He’d flick his thumb against his zipper as we looked at it. I was disgusted by her, but couldn’t stop watching what he was doing with his hand. Then we’d play tag, and he’d wrestle me down where the yard sloped out of sight and lie on top of me, grinding his hips into mine.
“I think the evidence will show that the accused was actually not chased by Mr. Romeu, but rather, using his substantial tricks, the accused lured the poor young man into the shadows to have his way with him.”
And all those times I locked myself in the bathroom and paged through the Sears catalog, looking at the men in their underwear.
“In closing, Your Honor, let us not forget that the true sign of a pervert is not just how he degrades other men, which is a horror in itself, but how he thinks and acts when alone in the sanctity of his own home.”
So this had been my problem all along? This was going to be my life? First I was going to be shipped off to Taunton State, and then when I turned eigh
teen, hauled into prison. I deep-sixed the book back into the box. My mother’s yearbook from Durfee High School, class of 1956, caught my eye. I opened it. It smelled of must; tiny black dots of mold peppered the pages. I tilted my head left and right, reading all the inscriptions. She was pretty, so young, my mother. Looking at her, I shriveled with shame. She had no idea she would have a son who was broken, a deviant, a boy she and her future husband could never fix.
11
HAPPINESS BACKWARD
Alone in the house, I was dancing at the stove in my underwear. A big metal spoon as my microphone. A steady curtain of snow falling outside. The hi-fi blasting “The Bitch Is Back.” I was screaming the lyrics; it felt good to curse with impunity. It had been a good day so far. Somehow I’d managed to forget myself all morning. Unusual, but I knew better than to consider it anything more than happenstance. Too many times I’d looked upon a few good hours as a start, some engine inside finally turning over, only to be slapped back. A trick of the weather, a lift of the music, nothing more.
I stirred the dried matchstick noodles in the copper-bottomed skillet. Green BBs and tiny orange cubes, hard and unyielding, were growing, softening, as they sucked up the creamy sauce. To my right, an empty box of Tuna Helper. No need to refer to it; I knew the instructions by heart. When the peas and carrots were plump and the noodles soft, I mixed in a can of tuna, scooped all of it onto my plate, and levered myself up in my father’s recliner in the breezeway. Our dogs, Duke and Rusty, came over, their heads following the arc of my fork from plate to mouth. Click. A game show popped up on the TV, loud cheering as contestants in lame-ass costumes looked into the audience for guidance. I cranked the volume to drown out Elton.
Because our school was overcrowded, we were on double sessions: Upperclassmen went in the mornings; lowerclassmen in the afternoon. Being a ninth grader, I was home alone until noon. Given all that free time, I chose to cook. By now, I’d pretty much broken from Portuguese food. I still had a few favorites I wouldn’t pass up: my mother’s carne assada; her galinha com molho (chicken in an oniony wine sauce); beans mixed with links of chouriço, a slab of bacon, and, oddly, hot dogs—her nod to American franks and beans. Most of all, though, her stuffed quahogs, which are a New England specialty. These weren’t those anemic half-shell jobs filled with nothing but pallid breadcrumbs and a few bits of clams. They were amped-up Portuguese-style.
