Little Boy Blues

by Malcolm Jones

  “Can we see that again?”

  She looked at me like I’d just asked for a hundred dollars. “Can we see that again?” she said, her voice cartoonishly low, her way of acknowledging that my voice was changing. But the way she did it annoyed me: she was making fun of me, as though I were pretending to be older than I was.

  “Can we?”

  My mother laughed. “Some people go to picnics and never get enough.”

  “Some people go to picnics and never get enough” was her unvarying caution against greediness. I knew better than to pursue the issue. I didn’t want a lecture, and I’d taken the hint that Mother didn’t want to talk about the movie. In this she was no different than anyone else in my family. Movies were something you went to, not something to talk about, except in the time it took to get from the theater to the car. If the movie was based on a biblical character, they would talk not about the movie but about that character. Samson betrayed his gift. Moses didn’t trust God. The one movie I ever remember my mother’s discussing—with my aunts, around the kitchen table, over Pepsi, while I trolled the perimeter—was Written on the Wind, a Douglas Sirk movie that they had heard was based on the Z. Smith Reynolds-Libby Holman murder case in 1932, the Winston-Salem scandal that made national headlines because Reynolds was a tobacco-fortune heir and Holman, who was accused of his murder, was a torch singer (her big hit was a ballad called “Moanin’ Low”). The conversation turned not on how good the movie was but on just how far it stretched the facts. They were interested in it only to the extent that it was about real people. I wanted to know what a torch singer was. They said, just a singer in a nightclub, as if that explained anything. Nobody would explain “Moanin’ Low.” It sounded like a song about cows.

  My father was the only member of my extended family who went to the movies for almost any reason—because he wanted to see the picture or because he was bored or because it started in half an hour. He wouldn’t take me to movies for children. If I wanted to go with him, I went to see what he wanted to see, mostly Westerns. That made me feel grownup.

  My mother and I began going to the movies together all the time when I was about nine or ten. By that time Daddy was gone more often than he was around. Going to the movies was what she and I did together for fun. We started with Bible movies and then branched out to the high-class sword-and-sandal epics (Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis). We liked any historical movie or anything about the South. To Kill a Mockingbird was, as far as we were concerned, pretty much made just for us. Mother said the movie portrayed her childhood to a T. I merely saw the childhood I wanted.

  Sometimes, just to see what would happen, I kept talking about what we had seen even after she had gotten through making sure I understood the message, but all that did was irritate her. During this period there was no time when my mother did not have something on her mind—my father, her job, the fact that we had no money—something that was more important than hashing over a movie with me. It would have been about this time that I began talking to myself. From about the age of eleven or twelve, as I walked home from school or sat at my desk staring at my homework, I spun out long, intricate dialogues. Dividing myself in two seemed the most natural thing in the world. And of course the conversations stole their shape from the only dialogues I knew: movie dialogue. I scripted my interior life. And on the screen inside my head, I shot what I imagined: long shot, close-up and, best of all, telephoto, even before I knew what to call it, that beautiful combo shot of intimacy and distance. Why couldn’t the world be more like that?

  Marinza

  The phone was ringing when we got back to the apartment after supper. I was toting the mop and bucket we’d used to clean the schoolroom, so Mother was the first through the door and first to the phone. As I walked back to the little pantry off the kitchen that doubled as a broom closet, I could easily hear her end of the conversation. The phone was in her bedroom, right inside the door, but our apartment was so small that to have a private conversation, you had to shut the bedroom door. And Mother’s voice was rising every time she spoke, in a mixture of anger and bewilderment and fear. I came back from the kitchen in time to see her silhouetted in the bedroom door. She was batting at the air the way she did when she got angry or frustrated or frightened—like a bird that flies into a building and then can’t find its way out. That could only mean she had Eddie’s girlfriend on the other end of the line. “Eddie’s girlfriend” was all we ever called her, because she never gave a name, not even a fake one. We could never remember exactly when the crank calls began, just some time after school had ended, but the mystery woman had been calling all summer, two or three times a week.

  “Who is this Eddie?” Mother demanded. “I don’t know anyone named Eddie.” I could hear the hysteria constricting her voice. I hated that sound, whether it was directed at me or not. It made me think of a mainspring in a cartoon that’s wound so tight you know it’s going to explode any second.

  “I told you, I am not after your boyfriend.”

  I stood in the bedroom door, staring at my mother’s back. She must have sensed me lurking, because without turning, she shooed me away with the hand that wasn’t clutching the phone.

  “Leave me alone,” she said in that same taut voice. “No. No. No.” I went into my bedroom but left the door open.

  “I don’t go to bars. I don’t drink. You have—” Because our bedrooms were so close, I could hear the voice on the other end of the line, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  “Stop it. Stop laughing. I am not who you say I am. Stop persecuting me.”

  No sooner did my mother slam the phone down than it began to ring again. She let it ring: ten times, twenty, more. And even when it stopped, when minutes had gone by, neither of us could stop waiting for it to begin again. When she finally spoke, I jumped. “Why am I so persecuted? What does she want? What do they want? Oh Jesus, I pray and I pray.” She said that over and over: “I pray and I pray.” Then she started crying and pounding her fist on her knee over and over. After a while she stopped saying anything, but the pounding just went on. I desperately wanted to help her, and I just as desperately wanted to run away, and I had no idea how to do either.

  The worst part was the helplessness, the feeling we had that there was nothing that could stop it and that it was never going to stop. It was like being thrust into a soap opera, or maybe a soap opera in a nightmare, certainly one with nightmarishly bad timing, because although the woman on the other end was always just acting, my mother was not. The idea that she would steal someone’s boyfriend—that was plainly ridiculous. But the emotions those calls provoked were real enough. Mother was scraped raw after years of putting up with my father. Half the time she didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, and the rest of the time she spent wishing she didn’t know. And always there was the nagging question: how much of his drinking was her fault? None of it, to hear her, but I think she had her doubts. Either way, she was ripe for a crank caller. The weirdest thing was the way she’d get caught up in the conversation. Instead of cutting across the other woman’s routine, Mother would listen to the accusations and then deny them, one by one, as though they were real. This would go on for minutes at a time, and no one ever strayed from the script.

  We never found out who placed the calls. Mother thought the woman was calling from a bar, because she could hear people talking in the background and sometimes she thought she heard music. I based my image of the caller on what knowledge of trashy women I’d gleaned from the funny papers: a tight sweater, too much eye makeup and a cigarette parked in the corner of her mouth. Whoever she was, she was as mean as she was clever and twice as persistent. “Who do you think you are, you tramp? Breaking up a love affair, stealing my man.” She really said stuff like that, and if she had called just once, it would have been funny, but she called again, and again and again, always at night. If I answered, she hung up as soon as she realized she wasn’t talking to my mother. If my mother hung up, she called right
back.

  Mother complained to the telephone company and the police, but nobody ever did anything about it.

  The next morning—Saturday—we were cleaning the apartment when the phone rang. Mother picked it up, and the tone of her voice told me that it was someone she knew. Before I could make out whom she was talking to, her voice went up a notch. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” For a second, I thought maybe Eddie’s girlfriend had gotten an early start, but this sounded different. Mother was upset, but about what? Before I could figure anything out, she shut herself up in the bedroom. The talking went on and on, louder and louder. This sounded nothing like anything I’d heard before. She sounded as angry as I’d ever heard her, even through a bedroom door, but more than that she sounded terrified. And that terrified me. She was the only thing between me and—what? I never allowed myself to finish that sentence. I piloted my broom toward the front door, as far as I could get in the apartment without going outside. When I finished sweeping, I turned on the television and tried to watch cartoons, but even with the sound up, the hysterical crying cut right through Acme’s best explosions. Looney Tunes went off and Huckleberry Hound came on, and she was still talking, and I was still trying hard not to listen. I dreaded fights and scenes more than anything. Finally I went out to the little front porch and tried to concentrate on a story in Boy’s Life about army ants slowly but thoroughly consuming everything in their path as they marched across a stretch of beach toward a shipwrecked man with a broken leg. That’s where my mother found me a half hour later. She had washed her face and brushed her hair, but her eyes were still red.

  “Hurry, honey, don’t just sit there, we have to get going.”

  “Was that her?” I asked, standing up. “Was that Eddie’s—”

  “No, that was your father.” She called him that only when she was upset.

  “Is he coming to visit?” Daddy had been living outside of Charlotte for several months, working in a drying-out sanatorium patronized mostly by wealthy businessmen. He had gone there as a patient and wound up working as an orderly or, as my mother described it to me, “a male nurse.” (This casual comment proved devastating several weeks later when I, ever the obedient parrot, carried my mother’s description to school one day. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake. Later, I went through all the answers I could have given, any of them better, probably, than the one I gave. I could have said what my mother did for a living. She was the breadwinner in the family, after all, as she so often pointed out. I could have said I didn’t know what my father did or even where he was, which was as close to the truth as anything I did say. But as they went around the classroom, each child in turn saying what his or her father did for a living, I felt myself freeze up inside. Doctor. Doctor. Lawyer. Doctor. Office-supply salesman. Doctor. Newspaper editor. Lawyer. When my turn finally came, I didn’t pause. I just blurted out “Malenurse.” It came out too loud, but I didn’t have time to worry about that, because the whole class had erupted in laughter. “There’s no such thing as a male nurse,” someone said. I started to say something to defend myself—that’s what my mother had said the other day when I had asked her exactly what Daddy was doing down in Charlotte, where he’d been living for months: “He’s, well, a sort of male nurse,” she had said, and now, thinking back, I could hear the indecision in her voice when she said it. The laughter just went on and on, and I could feel my face grow hot. I had transferred to a new school that year and only a few days into the first quarter, I hardly knew a soul, and I certainly didn’t have any friends. The teacher was saying something, trying to get the class under control. But all I could hear was the laughing. Which of course went on all day, at lunch, on the playground, any time the teacher turned away. The worst part was that I could see how funny it sounded. If it had been anyone else, I would have laughed, too.)

  I tried again. “Is he coming home?”

  “No,” Mother said, shaking her head and turning back into the apartment. She looked around like she had never set foot in the place, then shook her head again like she had water in her ear and walked over to the scrub bucket she had set down in the hall when she went for the phone. She headed into the bathroom and reached for the mop. I followed her.

  “What did he want, then?”

  “He just needed to talk to me about some things. Honey, really, get moving! Get out of those clothes. Did you finish sweeping?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Clean the bird’s cage?”

  “Mmm.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Do we still have to go shopping?”

  “Unless you want to start your new school looking like a bum we certainly do. Somebody has to be responsible for something in this family,” she said with an urgency that baffled me. I knew my mother’s moods better than I knew my own, but I had never heard her sound like that before.

  For weeks after that, it seemed that every phone call she received made her cry. She began closing her bedroom door before she even picked up the receiver. Sometimes it was Eddie’s girlfriend, and I knew enough about how those calls went to be able to piece the conversation together even with a closed door between us. But there were other calls. I didn’t know what they were about or even who my mother was talking to, and when I asked, she just said it was nothing I needed to worry about.

  “We have to give oral reports on our countries.”

  “What’s your country?”

  “European Arabia.”

  “Saudi Arabia?”

  “I don’t know. Mr. Montague just said European Arabia. He wouldn’t tell me what that was.”

  “That’s why your uncle bought you those Britannicas. So go find out.”

  I decided that European Arabia meant all the little bits and pieces of the Middle East controlled by European countries, mostly protectorates like Aden and Kuwait. The encyclopedia entries on those countries were frighteningly thin.

  I delivered my presentation in front of my mother the night before it was due. She watched and listened with a frown and seemed disturbed when I finished in under three minutes.

  “You need to make it more dramatic,” she advised. I liked the sound of that. Mr. Montague had just cast us in a performance of Robin Hood, and I was the Sheriff of Nottingham. “Maybe you should wear a costume.”

  I liked the sound of that even more. As an only child, I was, to put it mildly, indulged. I did not have more toys than other children. What I did have was the undivided attention of nearly every adult in my life, and all of them, except my father, seemed endlessly willing to play along with my fantasies, however bizarre. When I was seven, I decided that I wanted to be Santa Claus. So someone made me a little suit and a beard. My red wagon became my sleigh, and my aunt would pull me around her yard while I delivered presents to my imaginary friends and the occasional squirrel. Content and innocent inside this impermeable bubble of indulgence, I lived until adolescence like a pint-sized Robinson Crusoe, stranded on my own island of make-believe. Adults dropped in to deliver supplies—marionettes, magic tricks, drawing materials—but otherwise I survived without much of a clue as to how the rest of the world got along. My mother, who I would later discover lived on a similar island of her own, was my chief enabler in these endeavors.

  “A costume? You mean like Lawrence of Arabia?”

  “Something like that.”

  I went back to my room and in no time, I had turned the entire report into the story of Lawrence, who I took pains to point out did not die as soon as he got back to England, as you might think from watching the movie, but in fact had lived for many more years, joining and rejoining the army, writing books and riding not one but five motorcycles. Lawrence was one of the Englishmen who, in a treaty with the French, carved up the Middle East into protectorates. When I came out and delivered the second presentation, this time attired in two bedsheets, my mother burst into applause when I finished. “Just do it that way when you get to school and you’l
l be the best one.” When I received a C for the project, the first C I’d ever received, I went to see my teacher after school. He said the reports were supposed to be about a country, not a person, and that I had been instructed to report on Arabia, not a lot of little colonies. I did a makeup presentation on Finland, which I delivered dressed in my normal clothes. It didn’t occur to me to blame my mother for the way the first presentation went, but the next time she made a suggestion on how I could jazz up a report in class, I listened politely and then ignored everything she said.

  Almost every memory I have of my mother is of a woman in motion moving at top speed. Only at the very end of her life, really only during her last year, did she slow down considerably. That was the clearest sign, even to those who barely knew her, that she wasn’t herself any longer: my mother at rest was not my mother. “Why aren’t you ready?” was the sentence I heard the most as a child, and my most familiar sight was my mother’s back as she rushed to get somewhere. She hurried off to teach school at the crack of dawn. She hurried home to pick me up so that we could run errands before the stores closed (“Why aren’t you ready?”). We hurried off to supper and then rushed through that so that she could get home and start the evening’s work of grading papers. She moved like someone being chased. I don’t know if she was like that before her marriage, or if she developed her manias for speed and order as barricades against the chaos that constantly threatened to overwhelm our lives. Photographs of my mother as a young woman show someone who looks a lot more carefree than the mother I knew. Snapshots taken when I was growing up show a woman forcing a smile in every shot.