I was not, in any way, shape, or form, going to be my father. I wasn’t going to be loud, frustrated, or cruel. I had no idea what I was going to be but I knew damn well what I wouldn’t be. I defined my future by contrast. I wasn’t going to be my friends, my teachers, my enemies. I wasn’t going to be middle management. I wasn’t going to be like everyone else: a debtor, a pawn, a servant, a lemming. I wasn’t going to be bored, lonely, impatient, or angry. I wasn’t going to be, I guess, human.
I finally heard a train. I picked up my bag and looked toward the stairs, suddenly deciding my sister was way out of line. She had no right to tell me where to go or what to do, I thought. What I needed to do was go back to the house and tell her so. But I didn’t move as the train rolled closer. My anger died and I knew it was because my sister was right about me. Her words rang in my head and I couldn’t get rid of them, couldn’t shout them down. She had nailed me.
So I stood there at the station, rails humming and lights coming around the corner, black leather jacket, black leather boots, a cup of coffee, a Camel, and the feeling that I was the biggest fool in the world. When I flicked the burning filter of the finished cigarette onto the tracks it landed among hundreds of others tossed there by bored, lonely, frustrated people. When I tossed the empty coffee cup into the trees behind the platform, I saw the others lying in the dirt. Hundreds of them. Nothing special, nothing romantic about any of it.
Had I been there a month ago, a week ago, anytime before my father’s murder, I would’ve felt completely different, leaning against the No Smoking sign while lighting a cigarette. Dirty jeans, dirty habits, bad attitude. Waiting at the station, like a timeless character out of a John Lee Hooker song. Most important, I would’ve felt different from the people I watched walk and drive along Amboy Road. Now, as the train rattled to a stop in front of me and the doors hissed open, I didn’t feel any of that. I felt like what I was, another aimless, restless, self-absorbed, pissed-off dope. A coward, riding out to the edge of town then, reaching the border, turning around and riding right back into what I sought to escape.
As we pulled out of the station, as the streetlight that marked the corner where my father died disappeared around a bend, I thought of his chalk outline, drawn in ghostly white under the No Loitering sign outside the deli. I thought of the family photos full of strangers that Julia had shown me on Sunday. I recalled the ugly shirt my father had worn on the carousel; I wondered what number he had worn on the football team.
I dropped into a window seat, so I could watch the island go by through the bulletproof glass. The train rumbled along the eastern edge of the island, high enough that I could see past the houses and roads and stores and look out over the vast blue sea. Farther down the line, we’d bend west and run along the docks and wharves, toward the end of the line, and the skyline of Manhattan would rise into view.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the scrap of police tape. I wound it around my scabbing knuckles as I listened to the disembodied voices of the other riders in my car. I was surprised at their number. Baseball scores and the mayor. Friends and enemies. Wives and husbands, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. I wondered where they were all going, who they were going to. Their conversations comforted me; they didn’t seem to care who heard them. It made me feel invisible.
There were certain things I’ve always prided myself on, I thought. The guys I knew in high school, the poets, the musicians, the outcasts and rebels, they’d become those faceless commuters who nodded off over the Daily News on the Boat, drooling on their ties. At work, I pulled their evening drafts as they snuck in a round or two, not talking to me or anyone else, before the wife got suspicious. I’d kept the faith, I told myself. I lived a life where I answered to no one. I’d never made the easy choice.
One day, on our way to detention, I told Jimmy I hated the football players with every fiber of my being. The connection to my father was obvious, but I’d also decided they were the biggest jerks in the school all on their own. Yet they had everything handed to them: A’s from the teachers, cars from their parents, headlines from the Staten Island Advance, coke from the dealers, pussy from the cheerleaders. They were the young gods, the screaming emblems of everything that was wrong with America.
“Look at us,” I’d said to him. “We get detention for fucking leather ties while those fuckers don’t wear ties at all.”
Jimmy just smiled. “Think of how miserable they’ll be when they realize they peaked at seventeen. We still got the rest of our lives.”
He had a point. They didn’t know that ninety-yard touchdown or that game-saving tackle had put such a charge in their bloodstream they’d not only never get it back, they’d never let it go. Now, years later, when their humanity bubbled to the surface, when they longed for people and places, longed for things that happened instead of things to own, they strapped on those old letter jackets, met their old teammates at the bar and relived the last and maybe only time they ever felt truly alive. I saw it all the time at work, Friday nights especially. And I laughed at them through the wee hours of Saturday morning, as I washed the last of their glasses and counted the tips they left.
As the train rolled on, it was their yards, their flower beds, their pools I looked past to see the ocean. But I wasn’t laughing at them now. So what if I put on a leather jacket and went looking for a fuck or a fight, went out looking to play conqueror for a night? So what if hatred was my lightning bolt, the only charge that really made me feel alive? What was the difference? One part of my life, one part of my heart, ruled all the others.
Did I really pace that different a cage than those guys? I saw them as cowards because they had fallen so easily into the trap. In high school, I mocked them because I envied them. I mocked them now because they’d walked into the middle-class cliché without a second thought. But had I done anything different in becoming the angry young man? Different clothes, different schedule, different attitude, same set of blinders. I had been so fearful of becoming certain things that I hadn’t become anything at all. I had run so hard from becoming one cliché that I ran right into another. Hadn’t my mantra at one point been the complete opposite?
I was an adult, at least chronologically. But by my count, I’d been seventeen for fourteen years. And the past few days had forced me to realize I was fucking tired of being seventeen years old.
FOURTEEN
I SAT NAKED ON THE END OF MY BED, FRESHLY SHOWERED AND shaved, elbows on my knees, listening to the rhythmic clicks of the dog pacing the wood floor in the apartment above me. A cigarette burned in the ashtray at my feet. I watched the smoke spiral and curl though the sunlight up toward the ceiling. The clothes I’d run through the day before, getting ready to visit Molly, lay scattered on the bedroom floor. The late afternoon sun heated my bare back. I could sit here forever, I thought. That was what I wanted. Just to sit. Never answer the phone, never answer the door. Let the mail pile up in the mailbox. Let the world turn, indefinitely, like an empty carousel, without me.
But the cigarette would burn out. The sun would go down. The dog overhead would settle in a comfortable corner somewhere and give up his pacing. These things always happened. The ball game always ended, no matter who won or lost, the bar always closed, whether I had made the rent or not, Molly always went back to David, no matter what we’d done in bed the night before. And in a couple of hours, my sister would drop one of her new black dresses over her head, pull on her heels, sling her purse over her shoulder, and walk down Richmond Avenue to Scalia’s funeral home.
All the way home I’d felt well-martyred enough to justify leaving my parents’ house. I hadn’t abandoned Julia; she had sent me away. I was just doing what she’d told me she wanted. But now, a few miles and a couple hours away from the scene of the crime, I doubted my decision. I didn’t doubt her relief at finding me gone, but I realized I’d simply repeated myself. I’d walked away and left her alone with everything.
I thought of her, preparing to s
pend the evening with our dead father, memories of our dead mother, and a smattering of play-acting strangers. Preparing to spend the evening alone, again. It seemed too much to ask of her, no matter what she said she wanted. It sure as hell wasn’t something I’d want to do. I wiggled my toes on the floor, getting restless again already. Hollowed-out as I felt, I didn’t know what I had to offer Julia if I went.
I couldn’t pretend I’d forgiven our father, or that I’d even begun to understand him. I understood him, and me, and us, less than ever. In fact, I’d started to miss the man I’d leaped the bar over, whiskey bottle in hand. I missed the man who smiled drunkenly at me as I reeled into the family kitchen, a tire iron clutched in my fist. I recognized I had a sick list of father-son moments to look back on, a selection quite different from the photos in Julia’s box. But I knew the men frozen in those moments. I understood their reasons and their roles. They were the devils I knew, and losing them destroyed the only compass I had ever used. It left me with only the devil I didn’t know. Me. Now.
But Julia wasn’t asking for forgiveness or understanding, of me, of her, of our family or anyone in it. She wasn’t asking me to plan my future, to tell her who I was, or what I would be. She wasn’t asking me not to be hurt, or angry, or confused. All week, she’d really only asked one thing of me. Show up. Be there. She asked me not to be so fucking selfish. To not be so fucking scared. To be brave her way, brave with an unclenched fist.
I knew this was my last chance. The funeral would be too late. And my relationship with my sister, which I cherished and neglected with equal force, which already had been fragile for years, would fracture beyond repair. My family, which I had spent so much time and energy trying to deny and escape, would be gone. And I could never touch this bed, walk in this room, look in any mirror, without knowing I was the one who killed it. There’d be no yellow tape and there would never be an investigation; there wasn’t a single witness. But none of that would matter. I would know.
And that might be enough to kill me.
Sitting there on the bed, my thoughts horrified me more than any I’d had about my father coming back from the dead, more than any memory I had of him. I looked up at the ceiling. The dog steps over my head had stopped. I looked down at my feet. My smoke had burned out. I thought again of the empty carousel, only this time it was still, dark, and abandoned. Like that, it wasn’t a carousel at all. It was just another piece of junk.
I stood and picked up something off the floor to wear. It didn’t matter what; I wasn’t headed to the funeral home just yet. First, I had to stop at the Mall and buy a new suit.
WHEN I FOUND THE ROOM, half an hour early, Julia was the only one there. She knelt before the casket, her head bowed. At either end of the casket sat a few modest pots of flowers, roses, lilies, and forsythia, my mother’s favorites, on tall wire stands. Underneath the flowers, bunches of shamrocks spilled out of their pots. Behind the casket exploded an enormous monstrosity of color. My father’s company had to be responsible for that. It was certainly nothing my mother or my sister, never mind my father, would produce.
I imagined some guy at an overflowing desk, calling a florist with an order number he knew by heart, then hanging up and unwrapping a sandwich. These were the same people who’d given my father a tie tack for his thirty-year anniversary with the company. A tiny chip of emerald at the center of a New York City manhole cover. At the time I’d been deeply offended on my father’s behalf. He’d been thrilled. He’d kept his tie on all the way home from work for two weeks.
I walked halfway up the aisle, then sat waiting for Julia to finish her prayers. Even with her back to me, she looked lovely, her blond hair at rest against her back, her shoulders straight and strong. After a few minutes, she pushed herself up with a sigh and turned. It took her a few steps before she recognized me. Her eyes popped open wide and she slowly laced her fingers together over her stomach. She stopped, and stood there, waiting for me to come to her. When I got up and walked toward her, she smiled.
We held each other for a long time, her cheek pressed against mine, one hand spread open between my shoulders, the other on the back of my head. Thank you, she whispered. I told her she was welcome before I let her go. She grabbed my elbows and stepped back from me, looking me up and down. She took another step back and crossed her arms, raising an eyebrow at me.
“You’re in a suit and you’re early,” she said. “Who are you and what’d you do with my brother?”
“You know how Dad used to hit the ceiling if we were late.” I straightened my jacket. “I didn’t want to cause any more trouble than I already have.”
Julia took my hand. “Apology accepted.”
We sat, Julia still holding my hand. “So,” she said.
“So,” I replied. “Here we are.”
We sat in silence for several minutes. Eventually, Julia released my hand and nodded at the front of the room. “You have anything to say to him?”
The question was a bit overwhelming. Anything to say? Everything. Nothing. I figured our plan for me to give the eulogy was still in effect. “No. Not now. Tomorrow.” I turned to her. “If it’s all right with you, I think I’d like to just sit here for a while and be quiet.”
She touched my face. “That’d be fine. As long as you’d like.”
So we sat there. Me, Julia, our father, and somewhere in the air with us, in the roses and lilies, in Julia’s hair, in her profile, in her breathing, was our mother. None of us spoke a word.
In the hall behind us, other mourners from other rooms shuffled past. I heard the pause in their footsteps as they stopped in the doorway. I wondered what they thought about the two of us sitting there in the otherwise empty room. The room hardly seemed empty to me. It felt, in fact, way too small to hold the four of us.
Joe Sr. came in to check on us, to ask if everything was in order. It was, we told him. The flowers? Excellent. The good father was on his way. We were in no hurry, we said. The room was comfortable? It was. He set his hand on my shoulder. There were ashtrays in the courtyard, he said. I should feel free to make use of them. I said I would. Very good, he said and he vanished. I leaned back in the seat and crossed my legs. I started to say something, thought better of it, and stopped.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”
“Oh, go ahead,” Julia said. “Say it.”
“Well, you think anyone else will show up?”
Julia patted my knee. “Sure they will. It’s early yet. Not that I care. It’s enough that you’re here. That’s what I really wanted.”
JULIA WAS RIGHT, MORE people did show up. A few men from the office, none of whom seemed to have known my father very well. They had little to say after introducing themselves, and they huddled around the water cooler in the corner. A few of the neighbors came. They introduced themselves, as well; I had never met a single one of them in my life. They’d all come to the block after I moved out. They had the decency not to ask what we planned to do with the house. Two of Julia’s friends from school arrived, a tall, willowy brunette and a short, stumpy redhead.
Mr. Fontana waddled in, his wife by his side. I was happy to see him. His wife, a surprisingly attractive woman with long silver hair, wept copiously and nearly squeezed the breath out of me. She would cook for us tomorrow, we’d be home? I told her we would. I knew we’d eat for days. She couldn’t keep her hands off Julia, hugging her, grabbing her hands. Julia seemed to love it. While they chatted, Fontana merely hugged me quick, kissing me on both cheeks. He suggested we duck outside for a smoke. I loved the idea, I told him. I offered him my arm and walked him outside.
After we lit up in the courtyard, I thought, this is the moment I’d been dreading. Now the stories would come, about my father, about what a great man he was, about how much he’d be missed. And I’d have to hold my breath and my tongue. Just clench my teeth and bear it. But Fontana said nothing at all. He just stood there and smoked, content, his eyes roving over the plan
ts in the courtyard. Whatever he was thinking, he didn’t seem inclined to share it and that was fine with me.
Fresh Kills Page 29
