Decision
I HAVEN’T SPOKEN AT all to anyone, you know, not even my mother, for three months.
Here are the reasons:
The Rule of Benedict commanding silence
Grief
Anger
Self-hatred
Boredom
Patience
Speak only when there’s something worth saying. Speak only when it’s necessary. When is there anything worth saying? Can you tell me? When is it necessary?
Grief for my mother, who might never get over her dead husband.
Angry I’m a teenager with no sense at all of what it is I’m supposed to do with my life. I have a few miracles, but they’re just hints of something I can’t know yet. Everything is hidden from me.
I don’t understand the molester, the rapist, the murderer. I don’t understand why my father had to be killed. I don’t understand miracles. I don’t understand headaches. I don’t understand my friends and teachers. I don’t understand violence, warfare, but I don’t understand peace either. I don’t understand God.
This is the real truth. I’m angry at God. I’m angry at God. But who isn’t? Really, in our hearts, who isn’t angry at God?
I hate myself for my anger. I feel it all the time, the ugly, inside. I hate myself because the inside ugliness makes me ugly on the outside. All that anger at God shows in my face like a bright, black light. Pure ugly.
I’m bored. Sloth, a deadly sin. I don’t even have the energy to tell you why.
That’s a joke.
What matters more, the measure of a side of a trapezoid or the measure of heaven? What matters more, the mystery of Boo Radley and Scout or the mystery of God and Lucifer?
I’m waiting on God. In my total silence, except for this testament, for your eyes only, I’m waiting on God. I wait for the slightest noise, a whisper.
Loss
THERE IS ONLY YOU. I lost all my other friends in the silence.
Nicolo, Nick, whose father is Edo and mother Italian, and who has blue eyes and an enormous Afro, and who all the girls fear and want.
Jerome, who can’t stop stealing candy and burritos from the corner bodega, and throws a ball farther, jumps higher, and runs faster than almost anyone else I know. He might beat me by now, I don’t know.
Holly, a tomboy, who’s in love with Nick, though she doesn’t know it yet, and who’s started to give up baseball mitts to keep her hands soft. I’m just glad she still plays the trombone.
Martin the Irishman, who hit six feet two years ago and now has scraped past six five and weighs about 115 pounds. A hundred and fifteen pounds of pure gold. He stuck with me longest before he couldn’t stand the weight of the quiet.
The last time I saw them all together was Martin’s birthday party last October. He turned fourteen, and his mother invited me. I don’t know why I went. I stood to one side and watched everything as if from behind a one-way mirror. I watched Nick slide away from one girl after another, because he’s embarrassed by the attention when his closest friend, Martin, might never attract a girl. I saw Jerome balance on one foot and juggle two apples with one hand. There’s nothing he can’t do. Holly would look from Nick to me, like she wanted to come for advice. Holly was angriest to lose me, and I miss her most. I love her. Not love love. I’ve never confused her with you. I mean love. Holly frowned at me, the way she might have frowned at something she neither saw nor heard but thought she had. Then she got her coat and left.
I followed her and caught up. I had a pen and paper with me and scribbled a note to her. Be patient. Maybe not now, maybe not in a year, but you’ll have your time with Nick.
She read it and folded it into her pocket.
“You don’t know how much I miss you, Erik. Why can’t you just be normal and come back?”
I shrugged.
“Haven’t you proved whatever it is you want to prove?”
I shook my head.
“Not even for me?” she said.
Another piece of paper, and the pen started dying. I’m not trying to prove anything. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, and I don’t want to hear my voice. A lot of reasons.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You’ll lose everyone and everything.”
Another Miracle
I REMEMBER THE FIRST time I thought of you. I was so sick, and I almost died from dehydration and a fever. I thought of you, invented you, I guess, and you bent down over me, and you kissed me, and I got better.
Warm milk and honey will help you sleep. My mother told me Mrs. Phoil, our neighbor, brought this over to help her sleep after my father died, and my mother gives it to me. It hasn’t helped me yet. Not ever, I don’t think.
“You never slept,” my mother tells me. “Not even when I carried you. In me, in your crib, in your bed, you stayed awake, thinking, thinking, thinking. Not a moment’s rest. We need sleep, Erik. Sleep keeps us sane.”
I hardly ever remember feeling tired.
Now I’m not sleeping. I’m not sleeping because I have a terrible sore throat and a cough. I can’t stop coughing. There are the remedies a person can buy in the drugstore. Then there are the ones people make up, like my mother’s lemon, honey, ginger tea. Hot liquids of any kind, including chicken broth or soup. The most unusual I know about is this: a heaping teaspoon of black pepper and a teaspoon of honey mixed into a cup of milk, three times a day, won’t fail to cure a cough.
Why do sore throats hurt so much? Nothing compares to my headaches, but a sore throat, the swollen gland under your jaw that, when you touch it, secretes pain, a sore throat—. I don’t know. You don’t want to put anything in your mouth. You don’t want to talk in case a sharp letter stabs the tissue.
Five days I rolled around in a fever. It broke a day ago.
I’m sick of being sick. I think. I pray. I can’t read, since my eyes are swirling in my head. Sometimes I feel as if I’m better, and I stand up only to feel weak, almost too weak to get to the bathroom.
Where’s my mother? Working.
My mother works for the post office. She has a degree in fine art, and I know she would rather draw than talk, weigh envelopes, or give out stamps. We need to eat, so she does what she has to do. And the whole time, the public has to face Helen of Troy.
Kids stare at my mother. Dogs wag at her. Everyone, everyone looks at her, surprised, sometimes embarrassed, sometimes angry. Mostly, though, men look at my mother. She has a weirdly young, childlike expression, as pure as a doll’s, like she’s never suffered a thing in her life. Teenage boys not much older than me get confused and gawk at her, too, wondering if she might be close enough to them for love.
Also, and I hate to write this, everyone tells me she has a gorgeous body. She once nearly caused an accident when she bent over to tie her shoe. I was there. I saw the driver, a man, take his eyes off the road, forget himself, maybe wonder, as if he had all the time in the world in that split second, how a bird like my mother could have flown all the way from some secret forest on the other side of the planet, how she could’ve gotten so lost, and if he could ever, in a hundred lifetimes, capture her.
I used to ask my mother every day when she came home from work, “How many men tried to take you home today?”
“A couple.”
“None.”
“Too many to count.”
“Oh, today, Erik, was a double-take day.” This meant everyone seemed to need a couple chances to look at her before moving along.
“You’ll see,” she says. “You’ve got it, too. It comes from your grandmother.”
My mother can’t escape the attention. How many times could she have replaced my father if she wished? She might have married a lawyer or taken off with a surgeon.
My mother said, “I’m not for sale, Erik.”
“What do you mean?” I said. I must have be
en ten.
“I mean a man can’t think his checkbook will deliver me from the post office into his arms.”
“It would make life easier.”
“Yes. It would,” she said. “Yes. But your father was a man I can’t forget, and I like having you to myself.”
“Why can’t you forget Papa? I barely remember him.”
“We had eight years together before you were born and thirteen before he died. We were young together. He had everything I wanted in a man, and I believed in him. We would’ve found our fortune together.”
“We’re poor,” I said.
“No, not exactly poor. Just not well off. We have to earn, and we have to be careful.”
“What about Mr. Munson down the block?”
“He’s nice,” she said.
“He drives that fancy car.”
“You hardly care about money.”
“I think you do.”
“Be careful, Erik,” she said. “I can’t be bought. When the time comes, I’ll open up to a man, date him, and you’ll have a say. For now, like always, I think about your father. I hear him. I see him. I breathe him. Only him. Understand?”
By then, she was crying.
There was a time when I thought my mother fell in love with another man. A year and a half ago, in the summer. We visited her uncle who lives on the beach in Maine. It didn’t take long before the usual herd started gathering around my mother. We’d go for ice cream, or to a movie, or to dinner at a lobster shack, and the teenage servers, girls or boys, would stare at her. She wore a bikini and denim shorts with her black hair, then just past her shoulders, pinned up, a few loose strands dangling down her neck, sunglasses. I heard a woman tell her husband, “Just stop making it so obvious.”
Her uncle, a confirmed bachelor who made a small fortune as a jingle writer, lived in semiretirement. I liked his friends. They all seemed funny, smart, good-looking, and laid-back. They were young and old. Some had kids my age, but not many.
One of these friends of his, Lincoln, worked in advertising, too, a writer. Tall, quiet, and funny in a way that goes right by you most of the time, he treated my mother respectfully. He never looked too deeply into her eyes, never put his hand on her hand or her shoulder, never tried to get to her through me, pretending he was my best friend. I knew he was what people call a gentleman, and I knew I wanted to be like him when I grew up.
Lincoln made my mother smile, and he seemed to make her feel a little nervous, a little giggly. He was a dark kind of handsome. He could make you laugh without laughing himself, or make you feel good without seeming to feel good or happy himself. He had an effect on my mother. You could see it. Sometimes she tried to avoid him, to walk to the other side of the room away from him, to look for an escape when he came in. It was like she couldn’t trust herself around him. Like she might jump into his arms, or beg him to come home with us.
Lincoln was married.
Where was his wife? My mother didn’t know. Her uncle wouldn’t say.
Lincoln was married, and my mother left him alone for her own sake, and his, and mine. Maybe for his wife’s, too.
It was Lincoln who was sitting on the deck the morning of a miracle.
At my great-uncle’s, there’s a wall I can jump off of and land on sand. I can climb it, too. One morning that summer, when I was twelve, I wanted to go swimming, and Lincoln Reynolds sat in a beach chair reading.
“Hello, Erik,” he said. “Got plans?”
“Swimming.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes.”
He looked out over the water. “Sounds cold,” he said. His book was closed in his lap, and he was marking the place with his finger. “Your mother’s the most radiant woman,” he started.
I nodded, and for a moment, I thought he was going to act like all the rest.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was rude. Stupid.” He glanced at me and smiled. “Go for your swim. I’ll be right here, just in case.”
When I got back from the ocean, swum out and cold, I climbed the wall and lay down on the wood deck. I was still wet.
“How was it?”
“Great.”
“Not too cold?”
“No,” I said. Then: “You’re married, right?”
“Yes, I am.”
“But you come here alone.”
“Yes.” He frowned at the ocean. “My wife loves the city and is no great fan of sand and surf.”
“Do you have children?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Do you wish you’d met my mother sooner?”
Lincoln laughed. He actually laughed. “Wow. One good turn,” he said. “Yes, I do. A man would have to be out of his mind not to—.” He interrupted himself and thought for a second. “I have no right to make any of us sad over it.”
I said nothing. The sun dried me out, and I fell asleep with my arms straight out to the sides and my legs together, like I’d been crucified. This has always been comfortable for me. I woke up for lunch alone, Lincoln gone. When I got up, there was a water stain from my back on the boards of my uncle’s deck. You could see me in the form of a cross in the wood. It was full sun, just about lunchtime, so I thought I’d watch the stain evaporate. I waited and waited. A year and a half later, there’s still the image of my crucifixion in the deck.
Unrealistic Love
HERE’S A LETTER I wrote to you last year. Invisible you. It’s not long.
I know you were born today. I’ve never seen a winter day like this. January 20, and it hit 73 degrees in the park. Streets turned into streams of melted snow. The whole city splashed. The hot sun made strangers kiss, and the sad danced. Murderers and thieves slept. It’s a Saturday, so I sat on a bench and watched the traffic lights turn red at the same time and the cars stop all at once. Everybody listened to the birds sing. She’s found her way in, I thought. Now all we have to do is find each other. We will. Of course, we will.
Resolution
CHRISTMAS CAME AND WENT. Christmas Day, my mother and I ate in silence. When I cleared my throat, my mother dropped her fork on her plate and looked at me with such hope I felt ashamed. I thought: Does my silence hurt her? Does the fact I haven’t spoken to her stab her heart?
I wanted to tell her, “You make the best turkey in the world.” I wrote it on a piece of paper instead. My mother cried, and I had no right to beg her to stop.
For New Year’s Eve, we ate pickled herring. I could eat a whole jar of herring. Actually, whatever you’d think to feed a seal would be good for me. Anything from the sea. I have small ears, and I sometimes bark like a seal, ahr, ahr.
I love you, I wrote my mother. Happy New Year.
“I love you, Erik, very much.”
I waited, and then I wrote, Mom, you’re too sad.
“You look so much like your father,” she said.
Then listen to him.
“What’s he saying?”
I don’t know. Maybe he’s saying, Magda, the next time a man asks you out to lunch, say yes.
“Is he?”
I’m sorry I wrote that.
“You don’t communicate anything for so long, and then this?”
I’m sorry.
“You should be,” she said. “You don’t know how much I hurt, Erik. You don’t know anything about it. You’ve never asked. You’ve been in your world. We’ve gotten by. I’ve gotten us by.”
I nodded. I could feel my silence, my darkness. Why does anyone speak or write?
“The tricky thing is this,” she said finally. “You’re right. I’m dying on the vine.”
I made resolutions yesterday. Here they are:
Write more, read more, think more
Volunteer at the soup kitchen at St. Barnabas
Try to get Mom to sleep in her bed
/> Stay alive
Pause
I WANT YOU TO hear the silence. I want you to breathe and listen. Let the gap represent all the things, unimportant and important, I’ve decided to keep to myself.
Kiss
MY MOTHER HAD TO rely on babysitters. No getting around it, a single mom. The one she used most, Janet Gill, began sitting for me when I was seven. Janet always wore dresses. That’s how I remember it. Dresses no matter what the weather was like. She was five and a half years older than me and almost twice my height. At least it seemed like it. Most of her height was in her neck.
I remember the first time she made me feel like a giant.
She nearly laughed when I dragged her huge schoolbag into the apartment. My mother had raised me to be a gentleman. I carry bags when I can. I open doors. I stand when a woman enters the room. I offer my seat. I walk on the outside. So I brought in Janet’s bag, and she said, “Let me feel your muscles, big boy.” I must have blushed, because she smiled. I saw row after row of tiny bright teeth. “Come on, bashful, let me feel.”
I made a muscle for her, curling my skinny arm. My body shook I tried so hard to make a muscle worth showing. I dreamed up muscles to impress her. Janet pinched my arm between her fingers and nodded once, a weird frown of approval. “You’re a strong boy,” she said. “It’s like a little stone in there. Imagine what you’ll be like when you’re grown up.”
I felt proud. Every time she came to the house, I wanted her to touch my arm, or my legs, or my shoulders and tell me I was strong. She touched me, and she smiled, and I became a giant to keep her company.
Finally, everything changed. When I was nine and Janet had been around for two years, we had a turning point, I guess you could call it, over her homework.
Fell of Dark Page 2
