by Gordon Lish
You want to know what he said?
You want to hear what Steven Adinoff actually said?
He said, “You don’t have to kill me.”
He said, “You didn’t have to kill me.”
Outside of the things which he said about his Johnny Mize card, those were all of the things which Steven Adinoff actually said to me without a single sole exception— “You don’t have to kill me,” and “You didn’t have to kill me,” and then of all these other things when he got up and was walking around and checking his pockets and stepping in and out of the sandbox—I mean, all of these other things about a baseball card, about his baseball card, about the baseball card he had when we were still waiting for the nanny to make up her mind and give us her decision.
Oh, but there were lots of different things for you to hear if you are talking about not things like talk and so on but what you would have heard if you were listening to just him—sounds like squishy ones, that’s the best word I can make up to describe them—squishy sounds, squishinesses. But this is leaving out the sounds of when, for instance, the handle of his rake banged into the handle of my hoe or of when somebody hit the side of the sandbox or even hit the sand itself—or hit the grass actually, hit the Lieblichs’ lawn actually—because, if the truth be known, even in their backyard the Lieblichs had a lawn.
Here are some other thoughts that come to mind—or then let’s just say just words which do.
Sluggishness and exhaustion and a kind of dragging-down feeling. I mean the feeling of everything weighing too much and of sinking, the sound of sogginess and the feeling of sogginess and of a tremendous quiet stopping and plunging, everything too heavy to move but also too heavy to stand still and stay put in one spot—all that and words, or just the sounds of the words like drogue, dredge, carborundum, torque. Do you hear what I mean? It’s incredible how those ones are just the right ones as far as words are concerned. Not that it hasn’t taken me forever to come across just the right ones—dredge, drogue, carborundum, torque. And also inside of me, especially when I first felt the feeling of the hoe in my hands when it first actually connected so that you felt you had really connected with something really solid, this is when I really felt what I have to call a buzzy feeling—up deep inside of way up inside of my backside—a small buzziness, small but very tingly, or tingling—this small buzzing or buzziness.
Here is something I am certain about—I had the same sound inside of me when I was looking up at Iris Lieblich looking down at me.
Ask yourself something—ask yourself if you can remember ever having a feeling like this—namely, one where you are so tired that you have to lie right down, but then the instant that you do it, then you feel that you are so tired that you have to get up again that very instant, jump up instantly that very instant, because you are even too tired to bear it to even keep lying down anymore for one more instant. So you do or do not remember this?
But I think the weather had something to do with it.
It was August.
Do you know what I mean when I say August?
As such, were they having meat patties for lunch, is that what they were having for lunch? On the other hand, there is no question of the fact that the nanny said that in weather like this it was poison for someone not to eat light—that it could kill you if you weren’t careful and did not watch out and eat light.
But maybe eating something broiled was always okay. Maybe no matter what the weather was like, a nice fresh broiled meat pattie was always theoretically okay—whereas when I saw the Buick coming down past the Woodmere Academy, it wasn’t bologna but was leftover meat loaf, the sandwich I had, the sandwich I was sitting there eating, it was positively a sandwich of leftover meat loaf.
I’ll bet none of these things were ever questions which came up in Steven Adinoff’s mind—the difference, for instance, between getting things broiled or getting them fried, or having to eat a boiled frankfurter when you knew that Andy Lieblich was eating a soft-boiled egg in an eggcup—or was having himself, or was himself eating a shirred or coddled or poached one.
Not that I am saying that I think that Steven Adinoff did not know things. Far from it, in fact. Thinking back on it, reviewing the whole thing of it in the light of what I saw the night before Henry finally took off for camp, I would have to say that Steven Adinoff knew the deepest thing of all, just like we all would probably prove we do if we suddenly ended up in the same setup as he did with me—plus as those men did with each other in Peru on the roof.
IT WASN’T THAT I EVER EXPECTED to go in and eat inside of there, it wasn’t that I ever expected this. It wasn’t that I ever even thought that I would get invited in to eat or to play inside of the Lieblichs’ house, or even to just look around for a little while and see how it all was, what it all looked like, like even just the things they had downstairs, even just the things downstairs inside. If there were boys who did go inside of there, boys who actually did get invited in, or who had permission to sometimes go in, then I myself do not know who they were, aside, of course, setting aside, of course, the one exception of Steven Adinoff, of course—or also why they themselves did and I myself didn’t. Unless it was a question, unless the whole thing was really just a question of who went to the Woodmere Academy and who didn’t, if this in itself was the whole thing of the reason. But even if this is really the case, I for one don’t think I can believe that Steven Adinoff did. I mean, it’s just a sense I have, or a sense which I had at the time when I killed him, which is that to look at Steven Adinoff, you could just see for yourself the boy was not Woodmere Academy material.
The time he got me a good one in the head, on the other hand, this was interesting. I mean, in the sense in which we both of us worked together to get the rake unstuck—it was almost like a question of being well-mannered, of having good manners, of him pulling up while I myself was pulling down—until it finally, the rake, with the both of us doing this, came loose and came out.
Maybe I was just totally but totally all off about the thing of Steven Adinoff versus the Woodmere Academy—maybe the whole thing he came from was actually better than I think—except I do not think his mother would have talked like she talked about her bust being all bound up if the fact is, if the fact was that Steven Adinoff s position was anything on a par with Andy Lieblich’s.
It wasn’t really stuck in me that long, I don’t think. But the general time span of all of this, of from when he first got the rake picked up to when I either got my shoes and socks and went home with them or already had them on and did, plus the time of certain parts of it in particular, as to these questions, there is no way in the world where I could ever come anywhere close to stating exact figures to you in relation to this or that particular—to how long, for instance, the rake was still stuck in my forehead until Steven Adinoff and I actually got together in the sense of teamwork and got it worked out, or worked it back out.
I think one thing which we all have to bear in mind is I was six—we all were six—all three of us—Steven Adinoff and Andy Lieblich and me. I mean, it’s nothing like taking a boy like Henry—who’s thirteen—and saying to myself, or actually asking myself, various questions about Henry when he himself was six. In all candor, I frankly think I wouldn’t have the answers to them, whereas I am almost positive that I have almost all of them in connection with my own particular case. Still and all, six is—when you stop to really think about it—all told, six is really an unbelievably long time ago for a person of any age to think about—so that maybe with a lot of these things I am more or less just fooling myself—but who’s to say, who?
All I can do is do my best.
I am trying to talk to you and make totally but totally perfect sense to you as one human being to another.
Listen to me—it was years and years. It was when we lived in Woodmere. We rented the house we lived in, we were just the renters of the house we lived in, and there was a much better house next door, and Andy Lieblich was the boy of that
house, and we were friends with each other.
I was friends with him.
The rest goes like this—there was his sister and there was the dog which they had and there was the nanny and the colored man and the Lieblichs’ maid and Mr. and Mrs. Lieblich themselves and the men who came because of the Blue Coal and the ones who once came because of the cesspool and the ladies who always came over for mah-jongg, and when I went to school, there was her, there was her—but it was still mostly just me—still and all, it was just me in the whole wide world, there was hardly anything in it but me in it. I was almost—even just the sound of my corduroys when I walked—I was almost everything, if not all, there was.
And yet you know what?
The most amazing thing about this is this.
I felt so small.
My father—to me my father was just my mother shouting out hello to him when he came home. To me he was just what she said—I mean, just the actual words themselves, or maybe what I mean is just the sound of her shouting them—like this—“Phil? Is that you, Phil?”
I did not know what kind of work my father did, or where my father went to do it, except that it was in New York, that what he did was in New York, and that it sometimes meant a lot of walking for him, and that he went to the railroad station to get there in the morning, and that he had to, with his funny-looking shoe, walk to the railroad station to get there and didn’t get a ride to it along with Mr. Lieblich when Mrs. Lieblich drove Mr. Lieblich to the railroad station in the Buick in the morning—and then that my father had to do the same thing back the other way around again when he came back home from whatever he did to make the money for us to pay the landlord the rent.
You know what else I knew about him?
Because it’s fantastic, but I still remember it, I still remember his number—the number my father had for me to call him at if no one was home and something happened, if she wasn’t home and something happened, if there was an emergency at home and if I had to hurry up and call him and tell him what had happened.
Imagine.
It comforts me, it comforts me.
My father’s business number, just imagine.
Except I don’t get it—what he actually could have done about it if I myself was in Woodmere and he was in New York—but not that this was something which I would have stopped to have given any thought to when I was six, yet there you go, there you go, it just made me feel good all over right this very minute, even now it does, this very instant all of these years and years afterwards, just knowing his business number, it still makes me feel good even now that I actually know it wouldn’t have done me any good then anyway and that neither does it to me any now, either.
YOU COULD TELL THAT THIS TIME when he was on his back that he was out flat his back for good. But I don’t really think that you could have said that he was actually as a practical matter dead yet. Even when I went home, even when I was on my way back home, my feeling is that he still had a ways to go yet even then, but even by then I still did not hear anybody say anything to me or scream about any of it, unless it is actually possible that people were screaming and I didn’t hear them.
But I have to reject this, I have to reject it—you hear water crackling and rubber bands snapping, you can certainly hear people if they’re screaming, make no mistake of it.
Nobody even called for the colored man to put down his things, to put his things down and come. I mean, Steven Adinoff, he was just as quiet about it as everybody else was. That’s the thing which you could probably say about the thing if you went ahead and characterized it as an overall total experience—the quietness of it, the muffledness of it, no crispness to it in any way, shape, manner, or form. But then I have to say to myself this—that this was probably specifically in keeping with the particular weather conditions of the moment, since it was August and maybe probably more than likely one of those dog days which August is famous for, muggy and hazy and steamy and so forth.
I don’t know if I am saying this anywhere close to right—what I mean, what I meant, when I said that my father was what my mother shouted, that there was a sense in which my father was the words she shouted when she heard him at the door—what I mean is this, that to me, in my way, as a child, what my mother shouted at him was more actually of what my father was than anything which he in and of himself as such was—that he was her, that my father was my mother yelling “Phil! Is that you, Phil?” just the way she herself was what my father always yelled when my father yelled back at her “Reg!”
My father yelled, “Reg!”
Like that, just once—“Reg!”—from downstairs, from the front door, from right after you heard my father’s shoe, from right after you heard the funny-sounding one which you heard on the linoleum, there on the linoleum floor.
The rest of it, it’s just glimmerings, the rest of the things about them—the way they both smelled, for one thing—this was one thing, the way they both smelled, and then her having over the ladies to play mah-jongg with her and him always having to walk to the railroad station to get into the city to get to his work and giving me a number to call him up at his business in case of an emergency.
And baths and showers, her giving me baths in the bathtub until he made me have to start taking showers.
I’ll bet that all of these things probably made a very big difference to me back then, the different smells of him and her, for one thing, and these other things I’ve been talking about, especially her keeling over, especially the way my mother just keeled right over on me when I came home the day of the big event, especially the funny way my mother just went over in a way which looked to me like as if she was a thing made out of sticks, like this wasn’t my mother falling down but was the falling down of somebody made out of sticks, the way she just sort of clattered down like that, my mother, right after she’d got back down the stairs and handed over the washcloth and sort of patted it down in my lap like as if she was making sure it was not going to make a mess and go falling out of my lap and wet the floor—and then, ready or not, she just went out like a light like that, whereas him, whereas my father, I don’t remember him at all from then. He probably stayed in the city all day until I myself was asleep. I don’t remember him from the day of Mrs. Adinoff coming over either, which I think was the day after. As for special things, as for remembering anything which you might call a special thing about him, there was having to have showers with him and always hearing his shoe on the floor when he came home, there was always hearing it like for the first time all over again, always hearing it there by the front door on the linoleum, that and of never forgetting that I had to keep on reminding myself never to forget and make the mistake of looking anywhere in my father’s direction whenever he had it off of what was underneath—the shoe.
What the nanny always said was, “Now give me your solemn promise, now give me your word, now give me your undivided attention and swear to me on your mother’s grave that it will never be said, and said to your shame, that all was beauty here before you came. Say you swear it, say you swear it on your mother’s grave. Give me your solemn promise that I will not have to send you home for not knowing how to play like a nice little fellow who knows how to play with nice things like a nice and decent boy.”
I always did it. I loved doing it. I loved promising her things. I loved the idea that anybody would want for me to give my word about anything. I loved showing everybody I could be counted on to do something I had said I would.
You want to know what was one of the greatest things in the world to me?
It was whenever the nanny gave me a chance to prove to her that I was worthy of the sandbox, that I deserved to be allowed to come play there all of the time in the sandbox, that she should always feel free to give me her permission for the specific reason that I could be depended on to always do what she said and to keep my word as to the sandbox.
Listen to me.
I was not the boy who broke the rule.
I was the boy wh
o kept the rule, and every one of the other rules, too—I kept them better than any boy could—even a boy who was a Christian boy could not have done any better at keeping the rules than I myself did.
We had a washtub and a wringer in the garage—we didn’t have a car in there like the Lieblichs did. We didn’t have a car in there of any kind, let alone the kind of a car which Andy Lieblich’s mother and father did.
I tell you, this is what the colored man knew. You know what he knew? I want you to hear what the colored man knew—which was that we both, that the colored man and I had to be people on other people’s property.
Who could wash and wax their Buick any better in the world than the colored man could?
Or play any of the games better than I could?
Or be any better at obeying the rules?
Because, for one thing, didn’t I know where the best sand in the sandbox was?
I was never in the sandbox after that, I was never in the sandbox after that, and I never saw Andy Lieblich after that, and I didn’t even ever see the colored man again after that—and it was all because of the fact that we had to move to somewhere else in Woodmere.
Never saw the backs of his hands again, the back of his neck back behind his ears again, his back itself again—because everything changed after that—the colored man and absolutely everything else.
He could even nick some of the skin off of a knuckle, he could even chip a piece of his skin off—on the bumper, for instance, or on a fender, for instance, on where there was a burr in it, or a snag in it, something in it which was unexpected—and it actually would not bleed, the place where he had caught himself. It looked to me like the colored man could just clench it up and keep it from bleeding, a cut, even if his hand was cut off.
