The World of Normal Boys

by K. M. Soehnlein

  On past visits, he’s looked at Jackson’s decrepit form and felt hatred, as if Jackson was willfully doing this, an act of vengeance. Now, such an idea is ridiculous. Now, battered by the day’s betrayals—first his mother, then Todd—Robin wants to go back home and beat Larry into a stupor, as if that might release Jackson. A trade-off, one casualty for another.

  An hour, two hours. The bedside chair offers comfort, so he stays there, a blanked-out sentinel, oblivious to time. The nurses smile sympathetically, bring him orange juice and animal crackers.

  One of them calls his mother. She whooshes in—sunglasses, head scarf, raincoat, smudged scarlet lipstick—a movie star hiding in public. “Visiting hours are over,” she says dryly.

  She smells of wine and cigarettes; will she smell the beer soaked into him?

  She drives them through streets already flashy with Christmas kitsch. Santa’s sleigh and two token reindeer nailed to a roof; dwarf-sized, plastic Nativity sets glowing eerily from front lawns; houses smothered in schizophrenic blinking bulbs. He does not account for his hours missing, lets her believe he was at the hospital the entire time. She chain-smokes and does not say where they are going.

  Eastward for half an hour, a steady grade uphill until they are in a parking lot atop the Palisades, overlooking the Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge, the New York City skyline. The engine stills. They stare through the windshield.

  The city looks entirely different from inside out, he thinks. From here, at this distance, it is only beautiful, an island fortress with candles in every window. Now that he’s been there without his mother, without money, without even a coat, he wonders if that beauty is just one more lie. He recalls the dim, shabby terror of Vincent’s apartment and, afterward, the way the streets seemed unnavigable, the peril endless. Has he been fooled into trusting New York because he was protected from really knowing it?

  “Not so long ago, we could never get you to shut up,” Dorothy says. “Lately, you’re so quiet.”

  “Lately life sucks.”

  “Yes, well ...”

  Silence envelops them. Each of her smoky exhalations is like wind in a tunnel.

  “Can I have one?” he asks, taking her Pall Malls from the dashboard.

  “Don’t be difficult.” She eases the pack from his hand.

  He watches her try to start speaking, the way her face reveals the formation and discarding of possible opening lines. She rubs her temples. “I have such a headache all the time. The TV is on so much these days—”

  “That’s because of Nana and Uncle Stan.”

  “Yes, well, I never wanted my children to watch television. We didn’t have a TV when I was growing up. And when I finally saw what television was, when I started living at Smith, I couldn’t believe it. I had always thought a TV would bring theater and opera into your home—but when I turned on television, it was nothing but bad jokes. Milton Berle, for God’s sake!”

  She is suddenly animated. Robin manages a brief, encouraging smile despite his impatience. He wants her to address what Larry told him today, but it is a small comfort to hear in her voice the rhythm and enthusiasm of the private talks they have shared together in the past.

  “Oh, I know I sound like a complete snob, but I was such a romantic. I fancied myself an intellectual. I read Mary McCarthy. I went to Smith—even if it was only because my mother worked there.” She pauses and smiles sheepishly, amused by her own pretension. “Actually, I was more of a snob before I even got to Smith than anyone from my background had a right to be! Every year of my life I saw them, like an endless parade of princesses. All the rich girls shopping in town over the holidays. The expensive cars driven from New York and Boston. It shaped me. When I began attending classes at Smith, I was still living at home, but I managed to make friends with two suite mates—they were Philadelphia Irish, nouveau riche, a couple of Grace Kellys. After an initial period of enchantment I realized they were vacuous. Their parents bought them televisions, which were always on. I wanted to write poetry and study the history of painting and sculpture, and they would hang around drugstores reading True Confessions. I vowed I would never buy a television, and I vowed when Clark moved his in that I would keep you three away from it as much as possible. I think I’ve done a pretty good job protecting you from the banality of the boob tube.”

  She looks to him for more encouragement, but he cannot keep it up. He has heard this story before, its details always slightly rearranged. (Last time the suite mates were from New Haven, “a couple of Katherine Hepburns.”) Usually this inconsistency is part of the fun of her stories, but now it is just a frustrating diversion.

  He takes a deep breath and blurts out, “Why didn’t you ever tell me about how you and Dad got married? Did you want to protect me from that, too?”

  She stubs her cigarette out in the ashtray, defeat in her eyes. “I’m getting there, I’m getting there. God, I despise confessions.” She lets herself out of the car and indicates that he should follow.

  He takes a Pall Mall from the pack on the dashboard and grabs the matchbook. The coldness of the night is abrasive, and his knee aches from the skid he took today on his bike. He winces as he jumps up on the hood.

  “Are you hurt?” she asks.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Your cousin didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  “No.” He remembers the threat he made to Larry during lunch. He can still taste a hunger for violence in his throat. “Not physically.”

  Sitting beside him on the warm hood, Dorothy links her arm in his. “If it’s of any help in redeeming my virtue, I’ll just start off by saying that I never liked sex that much. I liked it now and then, but not all the time and not with someone I hardly knew. I was scared to death of getting pregnant—that’s partially why—but also I just loathed feeling cheap. I had made it to New York City; sex just reminded me of the girls I went to high school with, who were all married and pregnant by age twenty. I thought, ‘There but for the grace of God go I, and damn if I’m going to let some flashy stud have his way with me.’ ”

  “So are you trying to tell me that Dad was one of these user guys who just wanted you for sex?” He sees Todd Spicer crouching above him at The Bird, smug in the knowledge of how sexy he looked to Robin, even as he tormented him.

  “Clark was the only one who never tried to lay me. He always stopped at the actual intercourse. ‘We should wait,’ he would say, and then he’d roll away and say, ‘Phew!’ and wipe his brow as if the restraint was exhausting him. And I thought, ‘No man has ever exalted me like that,’ and I stopped dating other men and decided I would stick with Clark. And after Seymour, he was just so easy. No one didn’t like Clark back then. He was just a heck of a nice guy.”

  Deep inhale. Awkward silence.

  “The irony of course was that with Clark I got pregnant. We finally did do it—about three months after we met, we started doing it every night of the week. I practically just moved in with him. He had a little place on West Twenty-Third Street, over a Chinese restaurant—”

  “I know. You’ve showed me.”

  “Of course, of course. We had only been going at it for about five weeks when I suddenly knew I was pregnant. I sensed it before I knew it. I just didn’t feel right, physically, chemically. I was unable to keep my guard up, unable to project confidence. One day I was crossing Herald Square and someone brushed past me rather roughly, as happens every five minutes in the city, and I immediately wanted to cry. By the time I made it to the other side of the street, I thought, ‘This is what it feels like to be pregnant.”’

  “It’s like you were psychic!” he says, impressed by this part of the story.

  She waves her hand dismissively. “Oh, perhaps I’m exaggerating with hindsight. We talked about not getting married, or rather I talked about it, but Clark was so convincing that next thing I knew it was my wedding day. I missed my career, and I hated being home all day, but you were a gorgeous baby, Robin, and a genuine charmer
and clearly very smart from the beginning. You were easy to like. So, as they say these days, I went with it. ”

  “Can I ask a question?” He waits to find the right word. She is looking away. He brings the cigarette he has been holding to his lips and strikes a match, asking his question through clenched lips. “Did you ever resent me?”

  “I felt so many things, and I guess some of them weren’t very nice.” She frowns as he takes a drag, her eyes registering not so much disapproval as surprise; he realizes his smoking must look rather skilled to her, which provides him a taste of rebellious pride. “Resentment? I suppose that came later, years later, in New Jersey.” Her voice softens. “One day it finally hit me—I had spent the last four or five years pregnant. Really, I just fell ill. I thought, ‘Dorothy, my God, this has got to stop. Stop having children. Three is at least one too many!’ That’s why I’m so sick lately, Robin, because I remember this so clearly—it was one of the watershed moments of my life. Jackson was in the crib and Ruby was crying every night still—she was the noisiest of the three of you—and you were a handful of curious energy, and it just hit me. I thought, ‘I shouldn’t have had this last one.’ Jackson.”

  She is trembling at his side. He thinks he is like an older brother to her in this moment. She says, “I feel so responsible. For all of it.”

  She slides off the hood and totters toward the stone wall at the edge of the parking lot. Robin watches her enter the landscape, wondering if she’s stumbling because she’s emotionally overwrought or just intoxicated. A stream of her words rushes into the air plaintively. “And your father is falling apart, he’s really becoming so much like his father, just petty and unflinching. He was always so bumbling and sweet—who knew that in his grief he would harden like this? And Ruby’s gone Catholic on us, for which I blame my mother, though I have no right to complain. I’m a lousy mother for Ruby. I have no idea how to raise a girl. I’ve always said that I wouldn’t raise her like my mother raised me, which has basically meant that I haven’t raised her at all.” She wraps her arms around herself. “I’ve made a mess of everything, and I feel incapable of being any other way. Sometimes all I can come up with is that I just want out, that I just don’t want this to be my life.”

  He stands up, wanting to reach out to her, to offer a tonic to this sadness, but she unexpectedly spins around, and her voice is full of accusation. “And what do you want from me, Robin?” She marches back to him, takes the cigarette from his fingers, and finishes it off.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve become the household juvenile delinquent, and I’m completely beside myself about it. I didn’t raise you to be like this, so I know it’s not natural behavior for you. I assume you are crying out for attention. This is why I brought you out here tonight.”

  Where did her vulnerability go? Why is she suddenly so cold? He feels like he’s been slapped and he wants to slap back. “You just don’t understand me.”

  “No one understands you as well as I do. And no one loves you as much either.”

  He hears no uncertainty in her voice and wants to argue with her, to offer contradictory evidence, but the headrush from the cigarette and her abrupt mood swing have fuzzed his thoughts. And then she is speaking again, more quietly this time, as if tapping away at his shell with a small, sharp chisel.

  “I remember when I discovered that you were buying teen magazines, those tacky, mass-produced things with pictures of tacky little TV stars. Tiger Beat. You were six, seven years old. You used to take the money Grampa Leo gave you and buy yourself a copy of Tiger Beat on the way home from school. My God, you were a six-year-old boy with the obsessions of a ten- or twelve-year-old girl.”

  He glares at her, distrustful. He remembers sneaking those magazines into his room, staring at David Cassidy and Leif Garret, then sliding them under his bed. What ever happened to them? Did she throw them out? And why is she bringing this up now? He tries to pull his arm out from hers, but she senses his intent and clamps down. “I thought you wanted to talk about you, not about me,” he says defensively.

  “I am talking about me. At least I’m trying to. After I found your Tiger Beat stash, I started looking, really looking, at other boys your age. I would study them while I talked with their mothers on the sidewalk after school. And it was very clear. I thought, ‘Robin is not like any of those other boys.’ I couldn’t even describe the difference. I mean, I could, but it would sound cliché. He was gentle. He was emotional. He was sensitive. You know what it was? You were flirty. You were this delicate blond boy who knew that people were attracted to his looks. Boys and girls, and mothers, and teachers. You flirted with them all. A first grader, batting your eyelashes at other boys and saying, ‘I’ll tell you a secret.’ There was no other boy at your school, or anywhere that I looked, who had this quality.”

  “Mom, I think you’re exaggerating,” he says, but he’s not sure she is. He remembers saying, I’ll tell you a secret, to Jimmy Woods in second grade; he doesn’t remember what the secret was but he knows that he and Jimmy had their pants down together one day in the woods behind the playground and showed each other their boners, and he knows that afterward Jimmy Woods never looked him in the eye again. It was like that time with Larry in Nana’s cellar, and there were others, too, back then: boys he convinced to show him their boners. He remembers these things like rides he once took at an amusement park: there’s the blur of sensation—the thrill and the terror mixed up together—but no real beginning, middle, or end. His mother is organizing the memories into something with a point. She’s never spoken like this before, about him, to him, and he doesn’t like it.

  “I’m not exaggerating. I remember it very clearly. Realizing you were different was disturbing, with a life’s worth of implications—and God knows I’ll be dealing with the implications for my entire life. We both will. But oddly enough, and most importantly, it was actually the thing that made me love you more than ever before. I concluded that your particular qualities made you extremely special. I thought you were ... oh, I don’t know . . . I thought you were a prize. It was very selfish, really. I thought, if my firstborn is special, then I must be special, too. I sort of consoled myself by saying, ‘I have a special child.’ ”

  “Great. I’m so fucking special,” he growls sarcastically. “Why didn’t you put me in special education?”

  She lights another cigarette, showing no sign of having heard this remark. She is faraway, trying to make sense of something. “I spoke to my mother once about all this, but she just looked confused and said, ‘Of course Robin’s special. He’s your son,’ and I changed the subject. I certainly didn’t speak to Clark about it—it would have made him very nervous. Unable to concentrate.”

  “Because I wasn’t normal?” he asks. Again, she doesn’t answer. He feels himself growing angry at her. “You know, Mom, you’re saying some pretty heavy shit.”

  She stares him down. “This is not heavy shit, Robin. This is life. Let me tell you something: life is going to be hard. It’s going to be hard every day. That’s what life is. You get up, it’s another day, you don’t know what is going to land in your lap, but you can bet your last nickel that some of it is going to be difficult. I’ve tried to protect you from this basic fact, but there’s no reason to anymore. Just get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it! I want things to get better, to change.” In his voice he hears the unfiltered mess of his thoughts: rage and fear, determination and pleading. He adds softly, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m actually kind of depressed.”

  She takes hold of his chin, her long fingers on his jaw. She searches his eyes as if she might see “depression” written there, then lets go, unsatisfied. “Well, I asked you what you want from me, Robin. Tell me, what shall I do?”

  He slides off the hood of the car and walks toward the edge of the embankment. The city beckons like a campfire, twinkling orange and blue, filling the sky with light, the river with jew
els. Is that where Scott went? Did he take the bus on his own? Is he burrowing through the alleys by night? Robin shivers at the idea of it: Scott lost in the vastness, no one to turn to, preyed on by sex maniacs. He turns back to his mother. “OK, OK, I know what you can do for me. Will you call Mr. Cortez on Monday and ask him if he knows where Scott is?”

  She drops the cigarette and stamps it out violently. “Scott, Scott, Scott. Robin, why does it have to be this boy?”

  “Do you think I’m not so special anymore?” he asks venomously.

  “Don’t push your luck. You know, you’re very bright Robin, but still impressionable. Be careful who influences you.” He senses her resolve fading. Her shoulders have slumped; her hands are on her forehead again, circling away a headache. “I used to think I had a picture of what your life would be like, but now I have no idea.”

  He has no desire to ask her about that picture, doesn’t want to hear anyone else’s version of his life anymore, especially his mother’s. His head is already too full of other people’s ideas, of information he did not ask for but which sticks to him stubbornly nonetheless. “Please do me that one favor, Mom. I’m not asking that much.”

  “Oh, all right.” Her voice cracks. She drags herself back into the car.

  He can’t tell if she is being sincere or just mollifying him. But he has her agreement, and he will make her stick to it. He slides into the seat next to her, relieved to be leaving this place and the tension they’ve brought here.

  She grips the wheel as she pumps the gas. “This is the part where I drive us both off the cliff.” She lets out a witchy laugh—an eerie, shrill sound that, syllable by syllable, translates itself into a wail.

  He puts his hand on her shoulder and tries to soothe. Her sobs pick up force, fall into a rhythm, transform her face into a pained, tear-streaked mask. He pulls her to him, cradling her against his chest. It embarrasses him to see her like this; at the same time he feels very grown-up, very sober.