Little Boy Blues

by Malcolm Jones

  “I will. But would you just show me some things sometime? I mean, like the way you play.”

  “I mean. I mean. Don’t start a sentence with ‘I mean.’ Are you listening to yourself? I mean this. I mean that. Don’t let that get to be a habit. And how do you think your teacher would feel if she found out I was going behind her back?”

  It was tempting to say I didn’t think she’d care, but I said nothing. The effort that cost me must have shown in my face.

  “Don’t scrunch up your face like that. You look like Frances Brady behind those smudgy glasses when you make that face.”

  Frances Brady was one of three other women who carpooled out to the county school where they all taught, and as far as I could determine, she was my mother’s archenemy. Hardly a day passed that Mother did not come to report some new slight from Frances Brady.

  “She looks back over the seat at Daves and scrunches up her face just like that. I want to tell her how it looks, because I would want someone to tell me, but I know she’d take it the wrong way. And I don’t know how she sees out of those glasses. They look like they’ve been smeared with jelly.”

  The women in the carpool called each other by their last names because there was Frances Brady and Frances Daves. So when Mother talked about them, it was Brady and Daves and Vickery. It always sounded like tough-guy talk in the movies when she did that, and I couldn’t stop the image of all of them talking out of one side of their mouths while balancing a lit cigarette in the other corner. Brady had joined the carpool only that fall. She was a single woman who lived at the YWCA, and, in Mother’s words, “a pill.” Brady and Mother didn’t get along from the first day, but Mother wasn’t going to stand for it.

  “I don’t know what I’ve ever done to that woman, but I’m going to win her over.” Mother had been complaining about Brady long before she met her. It began over the summer, when Vickery called to say there would be a new member in the carpool and could they change the stop where they picked Mother up. Could she drive to the Y and then they could all leave from there, because Brady didn’t drive? Mother went around for a week threatening to drive herself to Kernersville, but her mechanic at the Shell station told her not to drive her ten-year-old used car that far every day. Now it was coming up on Christmas, and the cold war between the front and backseat was still raging. Further infuriating to Mother was that Daves and Brady were getting on, as she put it, “like a house afire. Sometimes I wonder if I’m in that car at all for all the attention they pay me. I hope you never treat anyone that way.”

  We had reached our neighborhood. Every block had at least four or five for-sale signs in the front yards. I noticed that the Morgans had not sold their house yet. Maybe that meant that Sam, the only boy my age left in the neighborhood, wouldn’t have to move after all.

  “Do you think Ethel will move?”

  “Oh, honey, don’t say that.”

  Ethel was a seamstress who made all my mother’s clothes. They had met when Ethel still worked at the hat shop downtown, before the hat shop went out of business because ladies weren’t buying hats anymore. They became friends when it turned out Ethel lived two blocks from our apartment. We went over to her house almost every Saturday night to eat spaghetti and watch Bonanza. Ethel had a color set. She also owned her home, and like all the other homeowners in that part of town, talked about little else but how the Negroes were moving in and taking over.

  Ethel said she didn’t plan to move. She didn’t care what color her neighbors were as long as they were nice. But Ethel had a grown daughter who lived down in the country somewhere, and the daughter was always after her mother to sell out and move in with her.

  Mother pulled into the small parking lot in front of our apartment.

  “I think she would have said something to me if she had any such idea.”

  “Aren’t we going out to eat?”

  “Not tonight, honey. I’ve got choir practice, so we’ll just have chicken pie, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Yeah,” I said enthusiastically. The “yeah” earned me a look. “I mean—yes’m.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I mean. I mean. I mean. What are we going to do with you?”

  Not Minding That It Hurts

  It was still hot outside when we left the movie theater. I had expected that. It was the darkness that took me by surprise. We had gone in while it was still broad daylight, and now it was full dark, an impenetrable darkness made even thicker and blacker by the humid heat of a late-summer night and the myriad tiny white-hot lights burning in the ceiling that projected well past the ticket booth, all the way out over the sidewalk, where the lights mapped a bright island on the concrete sidewalk. The ceiling supported an electric sign that spelled out, in a foursquare block-letter style, the word WINSTON, blazing in the night. Time had gotten away while I wasn’t looking.

  “What are you waiting for, honey?” my mother said. “Let’s go.” I was stuck in that island of light. We had crossed the thickly carpeted lobby lined with wall sconces generating just enough illumination to make the small room resemble a cave. We had pushed through the lobby’s heavy metal doors draped in lush velvet curtains, passing out of the twilit dimness of the lobby into the abrupt brilliance of the outside foyer. And there, between the theater and the real world, with my mother marching ahead, already almost to the sidewalk, I stopped to let my eyes adjust to the hot light that seemed to set the night on fire. The first things I saw when my vision returned were the heavy chrome and glass cases set into the walls flanking the foyer. Each case contained half a dozen stills from the film we had just seen, and every image shimmered like a tiny mirage. And there I stopped.

  Mother was still speaking, but I barely heard her. I was too busy concentrating on the scenes depicted in those glass cases. My eye moved from one image to the next, dawdling the longest on Peter O’Toole as T. E. Lawrence striding down a sand dune toward a dynamited train lying on its side in the desert. Beside it was one of Lawrence smeared with blood after butchering Turkish soldiers on his way to Damascus. The movie ate up all the space in my head, addling me so thoroughly that I could not find words to express what I felt. I was not the same person who went into that movie theater, and I was having trouble catching up with myself.

  Lawrence of Arabia was by far the most complex film I had ever seen, starting with an early scene in British headquarters in Cairo where Lawrence was a mapmaker. A soldier pulls out a cigarette. Lawrence lights it for him and then lets the match burn all the way down to his fingers. When another soldier tries the same thing with a lit match, he drops it, exclaiming, “Ow, it ‘urts! What’s the trick?” Lawrence calmly replies, “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.” A few minutes later, a black-clad Arab guns down Lawrence’s guide in the desert and then threatens to take his compass. “Nice English compass,” the killer says. “How about I take it?” Lawrence says, “Then that would make you a thief.” Impervious to pain, brave, resourceful—Lawrence’s exploits looked like the stuff of Boy Scout training manuals. Then, a bit at a time, it all came undone. He lost his Arab army and then his confidence. The capture of Damascus from the Turks felt hollow, even to me, although I wasn’t ready to give up on Lawrence. I walked out at the end not knowing what to think. Part of me was still mentally charging toward that wrecked train. But another part of me grappled with Lawrence’s uneasiness in his role as hero. I didn’t know quite what to make of him—it would be years before I understood that I wasn’t supposed to—and this disturbed me, had been disturbing me, in fact, since the movie started.

  No sooner had the opening credits disappeared off the screen than Lawrence got killed in a motorcycle accident. The death of the hero in the first five minutes of a movie was not something I was used to, and for a while I nursed the hope that perhaps he would come back to life, injured but alive. But no: the rest of the movie, all three hours plus, was a flashback. And in case you forgot how it all started, the filmmakers had inserted a scene at the very en
d where Lawrence, on his way home to England from Arabia, sees a motorcycle—the very instrument of his death—coming toward the car in which he’s riding.

  “Honey, hurry up!” I looked up out of my reverie to see my mother standing fifty feet down the sidewalk, waiting for me to catch up. Reluctantly, I followed her, and as soon as I passed from that pool of light—that enchanted territory—the spell was broken. The vividness—so intense that almost fifty years later I can still remember almost every detail of that movie and every detail of what I felt while watching it, even what I ate and drank while I watched—all that vanished in the split second in which I passed from light to dark and hurried to catch up with my mother.

  I stared at the grille on the dashboard. It was a grille for a radio, but there was no radio in our car. That Plymouth was built in 1952, the year I was born, when radios were still optional luxuries on automobiles, although I didn’t know anyone else who didn’t have a car radio except my Uncle Tom, and with him it just seemed part of his preacher profile: black Chevrolet, black suits and black lace-up oxfords that he wore even on vacation.

  “How did you like that?” Mother asked me.

  “I liked the part where they blew up the train.”

  “That was good,” she said without much enthusiasm. She looked over. “Did you rinse that thing out like I told you?”

  I was holding a plastic orange fitted with a green straw that I had bought at the concession stand. It said Weeki Wachee on the side and it had held orange soda.

  “Yes’m.”

  “Not many girls, though, hmm?”

  “What?”

  “You mean to tell me you didn’t notice there weren’t any women in that movie?”

  I didn’t answer right away. This was one of those questions that had hooks in them. When my mother liked something—a person, a movie, a flower arrangement—she said so. I always liked that about her, and almost always agreed with her. Lately, though, the assuredness that I admired in my mother had begun developing cracks. About the time I turned eleven, she had stopped saying what she thought so forthrightly. She had taken to asking questions, and that usually meant some kind of trouble. It could mean that she didn’t like the movie we had just seen. But it could also imply that she was unsure, that she was waiting to hear what somebody else thought before she cast her vote. Her trick, I had learned, was not to appear indecisive. Don’t be wishy-washy, she told me over and over. “Remember what they said about your great-grandfather: ‘He was a man of strong opinions.’”

  “What would a girl do in that story? And it was true, right? A true story?”

  “Well, you’ll be noticing quick enough.”

  I hated it when people talked like that, told me I’d be shaving soon and looking at girls—treating me, in other words, as though I were still a little boy. Coming from my mother, it was even more galling, because over the course of the last year, I had become her confidant. With my father out of the picture more often than he was in it—I knew better than to ask when he’d be coming back—she had begun talking to me as an equal, confiding in me about her fear of being alone, of how to make ends meet, about the peril and the embarrassment of living with an unreliable alcoholic.

  I shouldn’t call it confiding. As far back as I could remember, my mother was a talker. But lately, she had begun rattling on all the time. She talked when I was in the room and she talked when I wasn’t. It was a monologue that never stopped, a litany of complaint and worry and unhappiness without end. I didn’t know what to say to any of this, and luckily no response seemed required, although I was determined that I would never let her down, that I would step up and help out and be responsible. But then in the next breath, she’d be asking if I’d done my homework or telling me to get to bed or pick up my clothes or be nicer to one of her friends. It was all very confusing, and all I knew was that I was sick of being a kid. More than anything, I wanted to be grown up.

  My mother, though, never talked for long about anything having to do with sex, and without any prompting from me she changed the subject.

  “Thank you for doing such a good job on those bulletin boards.”

  Before the movie, we had spent the day in her classroom, getting ready for the first day of school. I put up her “Welcome Back!” bulletin boards around the class, cutting the letters out of construction paper and then using the leftover paper to cut leaves and stalks of corn. I wanted to draw a horn of plenty, but she said that could wait until Thanksgiving.

  It was the end of August, and still hot, even at night, so I rolled my window down and hung my head out to catch the breeze. By propping my elbow on the armrest, I could put my whole head out the window.

  “Be careful, honey.”

  “I’m fine, Mama.”

  “Where did that ‘Mama’ come from? Who says ‘Mama’?”

  “You called your mother ‘Mama.’”

  “I just think Mother is so much prettier, don’t you? Pull your head in.”

  I unlatched the vent window and angled it to get the breeze on my face.

  “Are we going to the diner tonight?”

  “No, honey, it’s Monday, the diner’s closed. We’ll go to the K&W. The line won’t be long now.”

  During the school year, we ate out almost every night because Mother said she was too tired to cook after teaching all day. We ate at two restaurants, alternating between a diner just up the highway from the apartment and the K&W cafeteria across town, where I slid my tray past the salads as fast as I could, heading for the relative safety of the fried codfish and chicken livers and roast beef (“Hon, you want the aw juice with that?”). Going out to eat every night was never special to me, it was simply what we did, another part of our routine, like church or Boy Scouts. I liked it at first because I got to order dessert every night. I learned to like it a good bit more once I discovered that eating my supper in restaurants made me the envy of my schoolmates, or at least, for once, an object of no more than benign curiosity. I hated being different, hated answering questions about why my father was never around, or why he didn’t have a job, or why he had a different job this month, or why my mother had to have a job at all. Here, at last, was an instance where being odd-man-out made me look exotic and sometimes even cool.

  We passed a pool hall, and the sight brought to mind a scene from the movie in which Lawrence, back from the desert, is walking through the officers’ club in Cairo and breaks up a snooker game in progress by grabbing the cue ball and smashing it into the other balls. The aggressive awkwardness of the gesture spoke to me. Lawrence was not like the other soldiers. He said the wrong things at the wrong time. People rolled their eyes behind his back. But he was a hero, a smart man who didn’t fit in but succeeded anyway.

  “I said—are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m listening.”

  “So what was the message?”

  “To be brave?”

  Movies—stories of any kind, really—had messages; so I was always taught. Bible stories, fairy tales, movies—everything had a point, like a sermon. Travis had to learn to kill Old Yeller even though he loved him once Old Yeller got hydrophobia (which, along with quicksand and rattlesnakes, mainstays of my Western movie diet, were all things of which I was deathly afraid). No one who took me to the movies ever so much as acknowledged the possibility that it might be enough to be saddened by the respective fates of Old Yeller and Travis. I had to learn that for myself and it took an embarrassingly long time, as long as it took to learn that there are some stories from which we learn little or nothing, but that those stories are good stories, too.

  “And to be resourceful. Remember how Lawrence led that attack across the desert when they said it couldn’t be done?”

  My mind leaped forward, past that scene to where Lawrence received his Arab robes from Sherif Ali, where he was accepted as one of the people he had chosen to fight alongside.

  “Even after they beat him, he got back up and led his men?”

 
That wasn’t the way I remembered it. In the movie I had just seen, Lawrence got caught by the Turks because of his own foolishness, because he insisted on going into the Turkish stronghold with only Ali to help him and then all but insisted on getting caught. Even an eleven-year-old boy could see the perversity in that. And then he had to be coaxed by the British general back in Cairo, tricked almost, into going back to fight after that. What was that about? Heroes didn’t have to be coaxed, at least not in any stories I knew. Even while I was still sitting in the theater, I was thinking that this story wasn’t adding up in the usual ways. At least my mother’s version made sense. But when I turned to tell her that, I saw her hands gripping the steering wheel the way she did when she was upset, and I braced myself. Sure enough, she was crying, which was bad. What was worse was that I didn’t know why. At times like that, the inside of our car, which normally seemed as big and boxy as our living room, resembled a chamber from which someone had sucked all the oxygen. All I could think of was how much I hated riding in the car in the summertime because my legs, where they stuck out of my shorts, glued me to the hot plastic of the seat covers and the sweat ran down the backs of my legs.

  “They beat him and beat him and beat him.”

  “Lawrence?” As obvious as this answer seemed, I knew it was wrong.

  “Jesus, darling. They beat Jesus, the Roman soldiers. That’s what happened to Jesus, just like that.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know.”

  “When I think about that, how they beat him, I just—.” She shook her head impatiently and put her arm out to signal a turn (the Plymouth didn’t have turn signals either). “You’re lucky,” she said, looking over. “You don’t know what it’s like to be persecuted.” Then, as quickly as her outburst began, it stopped, a passing storm. I was not surprised. Conversations in our household took such odd turns more often than not, and those unscheduled detours usually involved Jesus who, besides being our Lord and Savior, was always spoken of as a member of the family, or at least a close friend, someone whose life my mother knew as well as she knew her own. The way my mother talked, it always sounded like she and Jesus had grown up together. To be on the safe side—or what I hoped was the safe side, because with Mother, there was just no telling—I tried to wrench the conversation back to its original course.