I headed home finally, and thought of my neighborhood. The first week, the parents on my road had a meeting (three professors, their working wives, another single-mother student, and me) to organize communal day care. This meant I only had to be home one day a week at three o‘clock, when our nine kids got out of school. Every other day, I was free until six. Jason had other parents to talk to and their houses to hang out in. He had friends who gave back rubs instead of boxing matches, painted rocks instead of throwing them, and were vegetarians instead of pickers of cigarette butts. They wrote a play and invited us parents. In it, the woman worked, came home exhausted, and then when her husband plopped a grilled-cheese sandwich in front of her for dinner, she said, “What about a vegetable?”
When I got home, I still didn’t feel like going into the house and facing my books, so I decided to take a walk to the soccer field at the end of the road. I passed Jase and his friends on a porch rehearsing their new play, The Martians Invade the White House. Jason was playing the president. I heard him say, “What’s a Martian?” and Brett say, “A Martian is what’s in front of you,” and I yelled, “Clever line.”
“Hi, Ma,” he said. “Where’re you going?”
“Just for a walk.”
“Oh,” he said, which made me feel lonely, because he didn’t ask if he could come, and envious, because he’d fit right in and I hadn’t.
Once on the soccer field, I looked to my right at the school for juvenile delinquents up on the hill. I was looking for a pregnant girl I’d seen pumping on the swing set, but she wasn’t there. I wondered, like I had so many times since the first day I’d seen her, if this obsession I had with seeing her wasn’t a little unhealthy. Was I hanging on to the past? But her being at a neighboring school and our having so much in common was too much of a coincidence to ignore. Besides, maybe I could help her somehow. Maybe one day I’d get up the courage to talk to her. She had appeared in my dreams once already. She’d been on the hill pumping and pumping, but she was older and she wasn’t pregnant. I wondered if she was me.
I went home finally, opened my Norton’s Anthology, and forced myself to read.
By the spring, things were different. For one thing, Bub, the professor, had given me an A—, and I’d learned some valuable lessons in my remedial-writing course, such as using connectives like therefore and consequently in my papers, and never ending them with a firm conclusion, because conclusions were too facile, not to mention fragile. And for another, I hadn’t seen the pregnant girl for some time, and had almost forgotten about her, when I spotted a kid tear-assing down the hill and through the field, escaping. I felt exhilarated. It was all I could do to keep myself from shouting, “Go, man, go.” I prayed he made it. I prayed the pregnant girl did too. Then, a few days later, Cupcake was stolen. I cursed my rotten luck. I admonished myself for being so cavalier about her, for never locking her and leaving the keys on the floor.
My father put an all-points out on Cupcake, and miraculously, a week later, he got a call from a cop in Bridgeport, seventy miles away, who said he’d recovered Cupcake from a ghetto called Hell’s Gate. A key obviously made in metal shop was in her ignition, though her own keys were still on the floor. Then, a couple of weeks later, exactly the same thing happened. Cupcake was stolen, found in Bridgeport, and returned.
I made up a story. Then I believed it. The girl had left the school after she’d had her baby and had been forced by her mean parents to give it up for adoption. But her boyfriend was still locked up. He’d seen Cupcake somehow and had made a key to fit her. Then, when he got his chance, he climbed through the boiler-room window, ran down the hill and across the field, and stole her, driving all the way to Bridgeport, where the girl lived. He got caught, but undaunted, he did the same thing again. This time, Cupcake had been retrieved, but the kid hadn’t been caught. He was with the girl, who thought this was the best thing that had happened to her in her life when really it was the worst. In fact, she was probably getting knocked up again that very moment.
I wondered if just as it was Cupcake’s destiny to be a vehicle of escape it was mine to be linked with pregnancy and prematurely ended childhoods that last forever because they never were complete. It might be true and it might not. Only time would tell, but meanwhile, I had proof things could change. I’d made friends with people who were different. The first was Sally Dummerston, who became my best friend. She had two daughters and was the other single mother on the block. When I’d met her my first week at school, she’d introduced herself by saying, “Hi. I’m a Woman in Transition, too.” Women in Transition was a category the university lumped us dozen or so single mothers into, and at the time I’d thought, anybody who introduces herself as a category is not a person I’m interested in saying two words to. Besides, she had cheerleader written all over her. But then Jason and Sally’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth, were best friends and circumstances kept bringing us together, until one night we got drunk and I turned Sally on to pot for the first time in her life and she confessed that she wasn’t only a Woman in Transition but a Daughter of the American Revolution and then we giggled for a good ten minutes.
Sally and I made a family with our kids. We cooked dinners together and ate mostly at Sally‘s, because she had a dining room with a piano on which she played Chopin, a candelabra, and cloth napkins. I learned about WASPs from Sally. I said to her, “But what do you want?” and she said, “It doesn’t matter,” or, “Whatever you like,” when whatever it was did matter. Finally, I caught on that I was supposed to ask her four or five times before I could expect the truth, because before that, Sally figured that to tell the truth was impolite. She smiled and was polite to everybody, even the troupes of boring, ugly, single professors who dropped by morning, noon, and night unannounced to get flashed by Sally’s smile and soothed by her graciousness. I know for a fact she loathed some of these guys for being smug or pompous or dull, but she offered them wine or beer and put Linda Ronstadt on the stereo and pretended to listen to them anyway. When our kids were acting like idiots, she said, “Now, children,” while I said, “Shut up.”
When Sally graduated a year before me, Jase and I were sad, but there were compensations: We weren’t really losing them because they were only moving to New Haven, and I had asked the university for and had been granted her house, which was much larger and nicer than mine, then I’d invited two men ex-students to join me as roommates.
Their names were both James and they were big and gentle, like golden retrievers. I’d met them in a class called “Toward a Socialist America” and they’d stayed on after their graduation to found a political magazine. They were the type of guys who handed out leaflets and jumped all over the university about this injustice or that discrimination. They’d get drunk with their friends and stay up until dawn debating social democracy versus socialism, throwing words like hegemony around and ending by actually singing “We Shall Overcome” at sunrise. They had hundreds of friends who visited our house. Two or three stayed for a couple of months. We had huge dinners and grand dancing parties that spilled onto the street. We sang in the car on trips to the store or laundromat with Jason. We played cowboy family during dinners. Sometimes we read poems by candlelight while we ate dessert; other times we pushed the dining table into a corner, and Jase and I taught them Saturday Night Fever dances we’d memorized from seeing the movie five times over.
Like Fay’s moving in with me back in 1971, this was a dream come true. There were two guys living in my house, shooting baskets with Jason and reading him stories, which was as good as any father; plus, these guys didn’t lionize me, exactly, for being working-class, but they were uncomfortable with their own social advantages and awfully curious about me and my family. “Does your mother vote like your father automatically, or does she make up her own mind? Is her factory unionized? What does your father think of your living with two guys?”
CHAPTER 14
THEY got the answer to that question soon enough. My father came by
to hang a spice rack that I’d requested he make me for my birthday, and didn’t offer his hand for shaking when I introduced him. Naturally, this pissed me off.
The next Sunday, I showed up at his house wearing a see-through blouse, then struck up a conversation with my mother. “You ever been to a porn shop, Ma?” I said.
“No,” she said, glancing nervously at my father, who was pretending not to listen as he watched the Giants game on TV.
“They have this doll. You blow it up human size. It’s got a hole ... ”
My father left the room, then slammed into the cellar, where in a moment we heard the screech and drone of his electric saw. This was the first time in memory my father had ever abandoned a Giants game. I considered it a victory.
“Good,” I said to my mother. “Want to watch the Bette Davis movie on channel five?”
“Shame on you,” she said.
College had not made me your model daughter. Maybe I was worse than ever. I purposely used words they didn’t understand, because I refused to curtail my speech to bow to ignorance, and insisted on criticizing my parents’ way of life to my mother. “How can you stand to have that television on nonstop? It’s like mental Novocain.”
“You know your father.”
“And you have nothing to say about anything that goes on in your own house?”
“Please, Beverly, don’t start.”
At Thanksgiving, I suggested my father and brother do the dishes. I got laughed at. I turned on my mother. “You put up with it. What’s the matter with you? You must like it. You’re a martyr.”
“You do what you want in your house and I’ll do what I want in mine,” she finally said, and I shut up about it.
But that didn’t mean my mother shut up about me. One weekend my last semester at college, I dropped Jason off, as I often did on Friday nights, leaving him there until Sunday. This Friday, she said, “Honest to God, Beverly. Don’t you ever look at your son? Look at him. Just look at him.”
“What? What?” Jase said, looking down at himself.
The kid had dirt under his nails, greasy hair lying like strings on his forehead, and rumpled, obviously worn-too-many-times clothing. Until she’d mentioned it, I hadn’t even noticed. I thought back and could not tell you the last time he’d bathed. I felt terrible about this, and on the drive home from my mother’s house, it set me thinking. First I thought about Sasha, the woman who lived upstairs from me for a year and a half in the gray shingled house. She had a three-year-old son named Armond, who, if you asked me, she was overprotective of. For this reason she never joined in on our communal day care. Armond hardly left the apartment, even to play in the yard. Periodically, Sasha would go off her rocker and stomp down the stairs with Armond under her arm like a football and knock on my door. When I answered it, her face contorted with anger, she’d say, “I’m taking Armond to the orphanage. He’s a very bad boy. I can’t stand him anymore.” Then Armond would cry and Sasha would make him promise to be good, then end the dramatics. Or if she was really furious, she carried it further, dragging the kid to the car then off to some building she told him was an orphanage. Anyway, one day I’d gone somewhere and not returned until dusk. Maybe Jason had done something to piss her off, like tease Armond, or maybe Sasha was just being a nut, I don’t know, but when I came home she was standing in the hallway livid. “You’re a terrible mother,” she said. “You don’t deserve to have a child. How could you leave an eight-year-old for five hours? Five hours unattended?” At the time I thought to say, At least I don’t threaten my kid with an orphanage, but instead I just shrugged.
Now I thought of what Sasha had said in light of my mother’s pointing out the physical neglect of Jason, and I thought the two of them had something. I was becoming a more terrible mother than ever. I wondered, in fact, if I weren’t dissipating altogether.
There was plenty of evidence. For one thing, I was smoking marijuana before class more and more frequently. For another, I had on occasion taken to mixing Kahlúa with milk and substituting it for coffee in the morning. And last semester I’d gone to my dean, sat Jason on my lap as evidence, then asked to drop a class. I said, “It’s unfair that at this university there are students who have a maid come in to clean their bathroom when I have to carry the same course load, cook and clean for a kid, plus work part-time at a job (as an editorial assistant, ten hours a week).” The dean had simply agreed and said, “Sure. If you want, drop the class. We understand it’s more difficult for you single mothers.”
That gave me more time, so what I did was take up with a drug dealer named Sonny Tune, who drove a Lincoln Continental and carried a gun in a briefcase. Half the reason I went with the guy was to be able to tell people and to see the look on the Jameses’ faces when I let it drop that Sonny kept his gun under the bed every time he slept over. Sonny didn’t last long though. Since he could only call me from phone booths and I could only reach him at the same, he was hard enough to get in touch with, but once a judge put a subpoena out on him, it was impossible.
Next, this final semester, a couple of weeks before, in fact, I went to a bar in Hartford and picked up this muscle-bound ape named Rocky who drove a white Caddy. When we went into his car to snort some cocaine, he rolled up a thousand-dollar bill for the purpose and said, “Do you swing?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You know. You and me and my buddy Sal?”
“Sure,” I said, “we’ll arrange it.” Then gave him a fake phone number.
So this day in the car, envisioning the way Jason had looked when I dropped him at my mother‘s, I thought he resembled a nine-and-a-half-year-old David Copperfield after his mother died, and I decided I should stop this slip-sliding before I got carried away. I figured my dissent was the result of the minor breakdown I might be having due to my imminent graduation from Wesleyan.
Wesleyan had given me an excellent education and paid for it, besides being like a finishing school preparing me for the upper middle class. It had given me a house and shoveled my walks. It had been like the ideal father to me, but in the end it would be just like my father of flesh and blood, who’d said so long ago, “Once you leave, you’re not coming back.”
Let’s face it, I hadn’t done such a good job on my own the first time around. I figured it was no coincidence I was using men as a means to disintegrate given what success I’d had using them for the same purpose in the past—conscious or unconscious—starting with Skylar Barrister in the backseat of a car parked by a garbage dump.
I decided to watch out and begin a campaign of good health and better morals. I would begin by instituting bath time every night and by making a date for the movies the next weekend with Jason.
As it happened, the week between my resolve and our date, Cupcake broke down. The mechanic said she needed a new alternator, which would have to wait because I had no money to fix her. Seeing Cupcake covered by a mound of snow in the backyard felt like an omen. It was my last semester. I was about to graduate, and maybe I would leave better off, with a college diploma, but I might also be reduced to the status of carless person. What would that mean?
I was studying a lot of literature and seeing symbolic meanings and foreshadowings in everything. I was being silly. I cheered myself up. There were plenty of students who went four years to college without ever having a car. I could walk to all my classes. I could shop at the little, though more expensive, comer market. I could hitch rides with neighbors. Eventually, I’d save the money to fix her. It would work out.
On Saturday evening, the night of our date, it was freezing out. It had snowed for eight hours and there were mountains of snow bordering all the roads and driveways. Ice covered the paths. Jase and I bundled up and made off to see Dog Day Afternoon at the theater on campus, stopping first to buy Jason some penny candy at the comer market.
As soon as we felt the blast of heat in the lobby, Jason took off his mittens and stuck his hand in his pocket to fondle his candy and found there w
as nothing left but a single, miniature peanut butter cup. “Oh no!” he said. “They fell out the hole.” His festive aspect collapsed before my eyes. Immediately, I felt guilty for the hole in his pocket, both because it was there and because I hadn’t known it. We sat down. Jason, who’d been chatting lightheartedly with me on our walk, was transformed into a black hole in the seat next to me. I didn’t sense him lightening up until midway through the movie, when he laughed at Al Pacino’s transvestite girlfriend/boyfriend. Then, as we were exiting the theater, we ran into an acquaintance named Dan who Jason knew to have a car. Jason whispered to me, “Do you think Dan can give us a ride?”
This reminder that once again in my life I was stuck without a car, as well as his suggestion that I rely on a man to help us out, irritated me no end. “We’re walking,” I hissed under my breath. “It’s good for you.”
Once outside, Jason started chattering his teeth and taking tiny steps like a Chinaman to signify how cold he was. Almost beside myself with loathing by now, I grabbed his shoulder and turned him around to pull his hood up. “Ouch!” he yelled, surprising me.
People stopped and looked at us.
I dropped to my knees in front of him, said, “Hold still,” and yanked his hood string so hard it broke in my hand.
“You broke it!” he screamed, which surprised me again. Next, he yelled, “You’re nuts! I’m running away.” Hysterics were not part of Jason’s repertoire. Whining, moping, arguing, yes, but hysterics definitely not. While I stood there kind of dumbfounded, he took off, leaving me in the snow, with half of the school staring, like I was a child beater.
I watched this little black figure gliding along the snow until it disappeared behind a mound and all I could see was his black sailor’s cap above it, which turned around every now and then to see if I followed. My chest felt fluttery, like I was on the verge of laughing. But Jason was getting farther and farther away, so I began running. When I was close enough, I alternately ran and walked to keep him no more distant than a hundred yards. With my kid running away from me like I was his enemy, an instance of recent child abuse came to mind. He’d had a friend over from school and they were firing rubber-tipped arrows at me and the Jameses as we prepared a complicated Mexican dinner for one of our socialist professor friends. Jason must’ve been using us for target practice for about half an hour when my ability to concentrate on what I was doing and ignore kid disturbance reached its threshold and it dawned on me that I did not have to take this. In fact this was ridiculous to allow. So I said to one of the Jameses, “Grab that Indian.” He did, and I took an egg and cracked it on Jason’s head.
Riding in Cars With Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good Page 14
