The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  “You’ll always do great.”

  “I wish we’d never met. I wish I’d never met you.”

  The baby’s crying stopped. I imagined the bottle stuck in her little mouth.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said, tuning his baritone toward patience.

  “I’m ashamed of every single thing that ever happened between us. I’m ashamed. That’s what I wanted to say.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m not that way.”

  We sat in silence for a minute or two more, both of us staring into the black space, into the fire that wasn’t there. And then, as if upon orders from above, we both stood. I put my head down, my hands into my front pockets, and without a word, he led the way out of the living room and straight to the kitchen door. I glimpsed the child perched on the counter, sucking at the bottle Karen held. Clueless blob of pink. Karen never looked my way. I never learned the child’s name, only that it was a she. Bob stuck out his hand. I looked at it. God—the size of it, the chalky blisters. We shook. His grasp was firm and kind and in an instant I heard my feet on the gravel. The car door slammed and the engine was running and I worked the clutch as he had taught me, smooth and swift out onto the canyon road. I pointed Daisy downhill and tumbled past the antique shop and the silent homes, slid past the walls of rock that had been carved by this creek for a million patient years. I moved east, leaving him behind, and I waited.

  I waited for a sense to rise within that I’d done it. Just the right thing. I’d said it and now it was over. For good. I’d never see him again. I was clean and forever different. I’d said my piece and I could go on and be a man now. I waited until the cliffs of the canyon fell away and the lights of the city came into view. I waited for tears of relief or a wave of peace. I’d earned it. I’d come all this way. I waited as I drove through Boulder back to Denver, as I coasted silently into the driveway and placed the keys back on their hook. I waited but nothing came, not one thing. Numb. Not tears nor peace. No sense that I was better for having faced it down, figured it out, or received absolution. Not then and not by the time I woke the next morning and smeared Clearasil on my livid chin. Not by the time, some months later, I heard word he was to be sent to the state prison.

  19

  I STARTED A collection of orange and yellow capsules. Shiny little pills. I’d begun stealing them around Christmas, one or two at a time, from bottles in the medicine cabinet in our main john. One color had to do, I think, with my sister’s acne and the other, I believe, my mother’s sleep. I wasn’t terribly scientific in choosing my poison. I figured enough of anything swallowed with a tall glass of milk would do the trick.

  I placed them in a sandwich baggie that I kept hidden at the back of my sock drawer, next to The Last of the Mohicans. As it grew, my secret stash looked like a collection of sweets, a bunch of little jelly beans I might have given up for Lent and was squirreling away until I could gobble them all on Easter morning. But I wasn’t waiting for the Resurrection. I was waiting for the courage.

  As I gathered the capsules, I tried to gather my will. If there’s one damn thing I could be brave about, manly about, let it be this. That I can take the fucking pills. That I can take the step that will get me out. Out of this body. Out of this place.

  Mornings before school as I reached for socks and a pair of Hanes, I’d glance into the way back of the drawer near the book, next to the stupid spare jock (the one I needed as backup for McPhee) and check on the pills. The candy-colored sight of them was a comfort. Secret exit, private plan.

  Soon, I’d think, eyeing the little baggie. Soon.

  20

  ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON after I got off the bus from Regis I came around the corner of our street and was surprised to see Daisy in the driveway. Mom must have got off work early, I figured. I opened the front door and headed to the kitchen for a snack. Mom was alone at the kitchen table, filing her nails. She didn’t look up when I walked in. Her chin was on her chest; her eyes focused on her fingers. What I could read of her face said stony. Something was up. Mom could go from sunshine to frost in an instant, especially since she’d gone back to work. It was a matter of gauging and adjusting.

  “You’re home early,” I said.

  “The judge had a meeting.”

  Her consonants were clipped.

  “T.G.I.F.,” I said.

  The sound of her nail file filled the air, a rhythmic cha-cha-cha.

  Her focus was fierce, her filing almost savage, like something you might catch on Wild Kingdom. “Grooming Habits of Suburban Mammals.” For a moment I watched the curls of her frosted hair jiggle with the motion of her task.

  I opened the fridge and grabbed Wonderbread and ketchup to make a blood sandwich, then took a seat two away from Mom. I noticed her scuffed high heels on the floor near the chair where her feet were delicately crossed. There were holes worn in her hose at each reddened heel. Her pink polishes and bottles of cuticle strengthener were lined up in front of her, along the edge of the Formica table, like a battalion of toy soldiers.

  A vague smell of the sea swam through our landlocked air. I glanced at the stove, where a cookie sheet was lined with thawing fish sticks. I squirted some ketchup on my bread and tried for conversation.

  “Mrs. Lachada was out in her yard. Almost every time she sees me she calls out a spelling word. Today it was rhododendron. I wonder if she has any idea whether I’m spelling them correctly.”

  Scrape, scrape. Cha-cha-cha.

  The house was quiet. I knew my older sister was working at the pizza place, and I figured my two younger siblings were out playing. I took a few more bites of bread, stole quick glances toward Mom. Something was definitely on her mind. I wondered what. Maybe she was just exhausted. My eyes landed on her blouse. It was pale green and had ruffles up the middle, ending at a tight collar around her throat. It looked like a secular version of what a nun or a priest might wear, something Roman that’s meant to cancel everything from the neck down, now and forever amen.

  She’d pieced together these work outfits from hand-me-downs she’d received from a close friend. Her feminist friend, my dad had once said. Gloria Steinem. He whispered feminist as if it were the curse of the modern world. As if, I gathered, it was the cause of divorce.

  The news of my parents’ separation came as a surprise to us kids. They weren’t fighters, not that we knew of, anyway. I don’t remember ever hearing my dad raise his voice but for one time, when a car sped down the street near where we kids were walking and he howled with anger. There had been a recent afternoon, before Dad moved out, before they sprang the news on us, when I’d overheard part of a conversation and got an inkling that all was not well. I’d come in from riding my bike and was on my way to the bathroom when I heard my mother say, “But I just don’t know how to live . . .”

  The sound was awful, stopped me cold. There was a terrible silence. “It’s just something I have to do,” she whispered.

  Then my father said, not unkindly, “That’s just nonsense.”

  They noticed me then, and abruptly stopped their conversation. I nodded and walked to the john. It was just a few weeks later that they gathered us in the den. Mom was very put together, sitting up straight. “It’s the way it has to be for now,” she said to us. “I don’t know how else to put it.” Dad sat alone in the big chair, not saying a word. His hand, now and again, passing over his anguished face.

  “Oh, damn,” Mom muttered.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Broke one.”

  We caught eyes for an instant. Icy blue. “Some sandwich?” I asked.

  “No thanks.”

  Cha-cha-cha.

  There was a broach jiggling on her chest, stuck there like some badge. It was a gold turtle with its head barely peeking out of the shell. It looked as if it had crawled to her right breast where it could rest for a time before moving on or until it found the courage to roar—like Helen Reddy. I couldn’t say exactly why but the lonely turtle depressed m
e. I guess I thought of it as Mom—a determined creature, barely hanging on, sticking her neck out after eighteen years of marriage. There were very few relatives in either branch of the family who were warm to her at present. Not now, not after she dared to come out of her shell, break the rules. Some, like my paternal grandmother, made it pretty clear she’d never speak to her again.

  Mom looked up at me a moment. “How’s school?”

  I shrugged. She knew I wasn’t happy at Regis.

  She nodded and tried, it seemed, but failed to flash a smile. The crow’s-feet around her eyes (which had been known to light up a dazzling smile) looked cracked under the cake of her makeup, old tributaries fanning out from a dry lake. Her red lipstick was lusterless too, after a long day, a long week at city hall playing clerk to a judge. Forty-three had landed hard on Mom. She’d defied the tribe and the arrows were flying from every direction.

  As I chewed my last bites, I fingered the mail on the table in front of me. It was piled next to dad’s old ashtray. The one with the Moran family coat of arms shellacked to the bottom. Lucent in Tenebris, “To shine in darkness.” There were the usual bills—Mountain Bell and Con Ed, and the colorful coupons for savings at King Soopers. Next to the pile nearer to Mom was the new copy of Time. A familiar sight with its red borders and shiny paper. It was Dad’s favorite magazine. “Their journalism is solid, the way it should be: tight, bright, light, and right,” he’d always said. In black ink in the upper corner it said: 75¢ and the mailing label was glued there with Dad’s name on it. That is, my name with a Sr. attached, almost like my own derivation, I used to think, from the Irish. I liked seeing Dad’s name in typeface. It reminded me of his bylines in the News. Made me think of Dad the journalist who, despite the tense atmosphere and the harsh critics, was writing reasoned and objective articles about the explosive situation concerning the recent court-ordered busing. It was strange seeing his name with our address, which was no longer his address. “Look after the lawn, will ya? Soak the burnt spots.” Those were his final words to me on the day we stuck his suit-rack and some shirts into the trunk of the Chevy and he left for his one-room bachelor pad. A little studio with no yard. No mowing or clipping or watering. Or children. None of the things that seemed to sustain him.

  I ran my fingers across Dad’s name, thinking how I’d make a stack of his mail again and bring it to him on Sunday. My fingers came to rest on the grave face of the serviceman who’d made the cover of Time. His chest was full of medals—a Vietnam hero of some sort, I guessed. He had a black mustache and the strangest look, I thought, as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. His eyes peered directly out from the photo, straight at you—a pained but stoic soldier. His nametag said: Sergeant Matlovich. He had a blue cap on, exactly like the one I wore my first year in Scouts. He looked worried, somehow. Then I saw the unbelievable words written there below his somber face.

  “I Am a Homosexual.”

  Right on our kitchen table, in front of Mom, in front of me, that ten-letter, five-syllable, Greek word.

  Cha-cha-cha.

  She must have seen it, too, when she got home. That’s it. She must have.

  Was she looking at me looking at it?

  “I Am a Homosexual.” The Gay Drive for Acceptance.

  I had actually picked it up. I was holding the magazine.

  I flung it back down on the table and covered the sergeant’s face and that word with the phone bill, then went to the sink to rinse my dish, wash my hands. I held on to the edge of the sink for a moment, then turned on the hot water. My face burned. What a horrible lapse. How could they put such a thing on the cover, knowing that it would arrive on kitchen tables all across America? The walls and the floor seemed to vibrate, move inward. There was too much pressure, the kitchen way too small for a mother and a son and that magazine. I stuck my bloody plate under the faucet. The reddened water smelled sweet as it swirled around the drain. Why, I wondered, did I feel so humiliated? Implicated? It’s a magazine; it’s not you.

  I’m not that way, I’d told him. I’d gone all the way up there and told him. I’d put it away, vowed: Never again. And there’d be girls in my head from now on.

  As I scrubbed the dish clean, a crazy notion came into my head, sent waves of shame through my chest: There are pictures, lists, inside that magazine and mine is there among them, next to Bob’s. Soldier Bob. It was absurd, it was impossible, but it felt like Time was a bomb ticking on the table and if it went off everything would blow into the open. All I’d done with him. All I am.

  I rinsed out a glass and drank some water.

  Out the window I caught sight of my little brother in his wide-ribbed corduroys and plaid shirt. He was with my little sister, who was still in her CK uniform. They zoomed past the front yard on their bikes. My head felt as if it was shrinking. Shrinking like the room, the walls closing in. I picked up the cloth to dry my dish.

  An orange sun was sinking toward the Rockies. It blazed through the shutters, throwing vertical shafts of shadow and light across the turquoise-colored walls. Dusk would descend soon but it was still broad daylight in California and Hawaii and on the other side of the globe. They’d be receiving Time in those places too. Reading all about it. People everywhere would be talking about the sergeant and the fags. What made Matlovich do such a thing? I caught a ghostly reflection of my face in the window. I could see the whites of my eyes, the pimples on my chin lit up by the sun.

  I rinsed the last bit of soap down the drain, turned off the water, and draped the dishtowel over the faucet. I went to pick up my pack and get to my room. That’s when the scraping stopped.

  “I can tell you one thing.” So, it was her voice she’d been sharpening all this time. I turned and watched as she unscrewed the lid of her pink polish. “I think I’d rather find out one of my children was dead than homosexual.”

  The words—dead, homosexual—hung in the air like unpinned grenades. And it was the second one, coming all the way from the Greek to the front of Time and out my mother’s tired, red lips, that crashed across our kitchen floor—a five-syllable blast, a crisp, clinical strike.

  I stood absolutely still in the silent aftermath. My brain could not produce a response as I watched Mom dip the tiny brush into the bottle. The acrid chemicals wafted through the air as if it was Revlon who’d manufactured the bomb, won the battle.

  Sick to my stomach, I moved to the stairs, past Mom’s bowed head. She was busy with the delicate painting of her digits. I glanced from her jiggling, frosted hair to the sergeant’s obscured face and felt revulsion. Hatred. For him. I hated what he was and that he’d done this in my kitchen; he’d done it in front of the whole world. He’d told.

  I went to the basement, down to my room, and shut the door.

  21

  IT WAS A particularly sunny day in March and Brother Tom was deep into the beatitudes. He loved them. He said they were, in fact, great “attitudes of being.” He held his well-worn Bible in his right hand and reached out over our heads with his left. “It’s always in Christ’s own words that we find the gems, the real guidance. The Prophet.” He pointed now to the page. “Listen:

  How blest are the poor in spirit: the reign of God is theirs,

  Blest too are the sorrowing; they shall be consoled,

  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

  We paused there for a good while for a lengthy discussion on the meek. “It’s our job, our calling, to be aware, to come to the aid of those less fortunate.” He paced in front of us, caressing the text—Gospel according to Matthew. “And it’s you, you young guys, who have to be the radicals now. Radical and brave enough to see through the lies of modern society and hang on to these Christian ideals. The real human ideals. The old farts get caught up and tired and forget sometimes what’s true and—”

  He was stopped by a knock. A small white note in the hand of a student on office duty was carried into the classroom. The boy passed the piece of paper to Brother Tom. T
his caused a stir. It happened rarely and usually meant death (as when John O’Neill’s grandpa died and a note came asking for him to go home) or, more often, punishment. A summons from Father Fitz.

  Brother Tom, I could see it, was trying to be casual as he looked up and over to me. He nodded and, oddly, used my Christian name. My heart did a flip-flop. I got up, my feet on automatic. What did they have on me? I’d been late to school twice but that was due to snow, a stuck bus. Fitz had caught me once with my shirttail out, reprimanded me, but I had no demerits so far as I knew. No points stacking up toward JUG.

  “Marty, head to the dean’s office.” He held out the paper. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  The room was silent as I took the note. I didn’t meet his or anyone’s eyes. I walked toward the door.

  “Mr. Moran, tell Father Fitzpatrick we want you back quick, cause we’re into the good stuff, Matthew: Chapter Five. Tell him: ‘Blest are they who show mercy, mercy shall be theirs.’ ”

  “I can’t say that.”

  “I know. Just trying to get a grin out of you. Haven’t seen your teeth for weeks.”

  He rubbed his little mustache and smiled.

  I walked down the empty hall past the battered lockers, the portrait of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the solemn photos of matriculated men. His office was the last door on the left, next to the west entrance. I approached and waited just outside the door. I could hear his labored breathing. He was seated at his desk, his big nose bent toward an open manila folder. Sitting on each of his black shoulders was a sprinkling of dandruff. He always had it, as though daily he’d walked here through his own private snowstorm. I glanced at the small chalkboard stuck on the wall above his head. J. U. G. was written in chalk at the top with five or six names scribbled below. Mine was not among them. Not yet, anyway. Dangling from a nail in the upper-right corner of the board, like fat, swollen hands, was a pair of brown boxing gloves.