The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  Mike was knocked off his feet and rolled back. He tried to scramble back off when number two went off, then number three.

  Then he found his feet and ran back over to me, exuberant, laughing tears down his face. “I can take that.”

  “Mike, did I tell you the truth?”

  “Yes, you did! Yes, you did!” he yelled.

  Moonlight in Vermont. Sunday night and we were sweeping through the small, palely lit towns along State Route 12, almost ready to make the sharp turn east, down the mountain on Route 4, to Rutland.

  I could still hear the drums and bugles. See Henry with the strut of a senior, see Frank lithe and professional, dressed in the open white shirt and gray trousers of the summer undress uniform, on assignment with the school paper, photographing; dragging us from the soccer game to rugby to football to the Marine Corps Eighth and I drill team. We had dinner in Montpelier, walked the “hill,” took a couple dozen pictures of ourselves. Mike got lost in the football stadium. He followed a man with a dog, played on a tank, and then lay down in the grass, watching the ceremonial Civil War battery of brass Napoleon cannon, hoping for a Norwich touchdown so they would go off. Frantic, we found him there, still waiting long after Norwich had lost.

  Now he was asleep in the backseat of the car, bundled into an army ranger sweatshirt and nested down into a blanket.

  “Well,” I continued an argument from the day before, “all the rest of the weekend he didn’t tell us we were lying about anything.”

  “You could have ruptured his eardrums”

  “He was well rear of the muzzle blast,” I grumbled, “and anyway, they were saluting charges, not a big deal. It wasn’t like he was standing atop a one-five-five.”

  Sue put her seat back and stretched. “Whatever the heck a one-five-five is. Next time, let’s discuss it before you stampede off and make a decision on your own.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said with a smile, thinking about Mike’s medication.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  i don’t do work

  I quickly sat and smiled across the dinner table, but then was forced into a long look back. Mikes death’s-head mask had vanished! No medication, round-the-clock food, and running with the dogs in the crisp air had finally worked their way onto his face. The thin, sallow-white elf of three months ago was now sprouting round, red apple-frosted cheeks, and his eyes rested much more comfortably in his face—they weren’t glittery, angrily pasted on any longer.

  There were other changes, too. He had started drifting off with the dogs, away from us, away from the grounds for short periods, and had begun using the possessive our when speaking of the place. He was even relaxing around me to the point where we could read together at night, the Hardy Boys and Stevenson’s Kidnapped, and I enjoyed both his marvelous diction and the way he easily accepted direction in pronunciation and usage, often repeating a word or a phrase over and over again, trying to get it right.

  Yet over the past few weeks the jagged edges of Mike’s personality were also beginning to emerge, like the outline of a strange fish being pulled closer and closer to shore. Mike, we had now begun to understand” was a darkling. First of all, he was relentlessly moody His attitude and, in our imagination, almost the set of his body or the color of his hair could change, flickering from sunny and smiling into a grainy, angry little gray presence in an instant. When he did that, his language was filthy and unbelievably antagonistic. He also seemed determined to keep wetting his bed and was still absolutely, even morbidly, terrified of the dark.

  Although we could live with issues like bed-wetting for the time being and put aside his fear of the dark in the reasonable hope it could be addressed in the future, his thought processes continued to jangle our nerves. Mike was extremely difficult to reason with, often insisting he knew things he didn’t, and when he was contradicted, his voice got loud again.

  But all that aside, I was really pleased with how he looked now, and so I grinned back over the table. “You look good, you little rodent.”

  He didn’t laugh.

  I shrugged, “Ah, be grumpy,” then winked at Sue.

  It was sunset, the barroom hushed and quiet, and all the guests were away visiting or working. There was nobody else in the place except Sue, Mike, and me. On the table was roast chicken, rice, and peas, of course (Sue has it cast in bronze: if you have rice, you must serve peas).

  Then the phone in the kitchen rang, and I got up to answer it. A few minutes later I came back inside and saw that Sue was absorbed in a tax publication open on the table next to her, while Mike was almost finished.

  “I want more rice and peas.”

  “Sure, honey,” Sue said without even looking up.

  Clatter, clatter, scrape, scrape, as more peas and rice hit his plate and then, before I had even taken two mouthfuls myself, they were gone, too, and Mike had pushed back his chair.

  “Mike,” Sue smiled at him.

  “What?”

  “If you’re leaving the table, please take your plate, silverware, and glass into the kitchen on the way out.”

  He sulked. “I have to watch my TV program. You said I could.”

  “Sure, Mike, but you can take half a minute and clean up your place. And I asked you to bring your sheets down to the laundry room this morning—I don’t think you ever did that.”

  “That was this morning. That’s over,” Mike pouted.

  “Mike, please do what I asked.”

  Later, I looked up from the National Geographic I was reading to listen to Sue express concern about Mike’s “regression”—his morning routine had started getting worse, and he got surly when asked to do the slightest thing.

  “Rich, think about it,” Sue said as she patted the table. “What are we really teaching him about a family? You see how he thinks that issues like his sheets just disappear by themselves. He believes any problem at all is magically solved after thirty minutes have passed, just like a TV sitcom. So we’ve got to bust up this image and let him put one back together from the real world. Real families work, earn, learn, do together. People have to work for their place in a family, and we have to give him some sense of that.”

  “Okay, but is there some rush?”

  “In a few weeks all the boys will be home for Thanksgiving vacation, and you know how they are. Up till now he’s had a nice quiet time of it, with just us and the guests coming and going. But after they arrive, his world’s going to turn upside down. The place will be packed and noisy, and he’s going to get pushed out of the way”

  “It should be good for him.”

  Sue bobbed her head. “Yes, but he’s going to have to compete for our attention, and we’re not going to have time to keep following up on him. I’m not sure he can handle all that at once the way he is now, and if he lashes out with some of his institutional language, the boys are going to bounce him off a wall before you can raise a hand.”

  “They wouldn’t do that.”

  Sue just looked at me out of the corner of her right eye and then continued: “Before he gets threatened by their arrival, I want him to have some sense of the fact that he’s earned a secure place here. It’s time to get in his face and show him how a real family operates. And besides, I’m getting sick of this little guy not demonstrating any responsibility at all.”

  “Uh, you lost me.”

  “Chores.”

  Mike resists a shower, his underpants are as often as not soiled badly, and he makes an indescribable mess in the bathroom.

  “You have to go in there with him when he’s doing his business,” Sue pointed out. “Treat him like he’s two years old.”

  I tried to dodge. “Uh, you spend most of the time with him. You have the better relationship. I think it would come better from you—and besides, isn’t this part of your chore thing?”

  “He’s male, and he’s way, way too old.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Rich, you have to go in there and keep going in there until he acts much be
tter. In a couple of weeks we’ll have a crowd here, and I will not be embarrassed by this.”

  That afternoon I followed Mike into the bathroom. How to begin the discussion?

  “Mike.”

  “Yes?”

  “This white stuff over here is toilet paper …”

  “I don’t do work.”

  “Mike,” Sue was explaining, “part of being a family is pitching in on what has to be done. You see Rich cleaning and you see me picking up. Now, go carry the garbage up to the Dumpster, please.”

  Mike’s mouth was clenched, and there were stones rubbing together behind his eyes. He stood defiantly still in the middle of the kitchen floor. “I don’t do work.”

  “Mike, here, give me your hand. Carry this bag up to the Dumpster.”

  “I don’t do work.”

  “Mike. All my boys did chores!”

  “I hate those boys. I hate this fucking family. I want to go to a good family”

  “Go to your room and think about your language.”

  Slam, slam, bang, bang, as he kicked his way through all the doors, into his room.

  A wet, cold wind was snooping through the orchard blocks, and leaves that had been a sea of gold and orange across the hay meadow two weeks ago were now dun and faded, dropping off to stir into long, brown windrows pointing south.

  Deer season and Thanksgiving.

  Except for Richard, who was still strafing the West Coast, all the boys were packing up and putting their schedules in order: Frank and Henry would drive down together from Norwich, Brendan alone up from George Mason, Liam and my son-in-law David would block out their time, and just before Thanksgiving holiday my niece Kathryn and her husband Matt would come up. Six of them—seven, counting me, in the days I got moving. They’d be out together every daylight hour, high up on Shawangunk, that miles-long, wild, ancient ridge knuckling up south-southeast out of Ulster County.

  Shawangunk in late autumn has a nostalgic and magical attraction for the boys. It is, after all, where they were raised. Morgan Valley, Turkey Valley, Bonticue Crag, the Bear Cave, abandoned farmsteads high up with tumbledown stone walls snaking through clusters of ancient hemlock walking up out of the hollows, landmarks like the telephone right-of-way, the logging roads, Margaret’s Rock, the Hidden Oak. Along the twisting game trails are old deer stands that have names like the Camp, the Tepee, Bill Carroll’s Stand, Frank’s, the Ambush Ledge, the Owl Rock.

  But all of that meant nothing to Mike, and I was afraid Sue was right about how the boys might react if he started one of his scenes.

  I mentioned our concern to Joanne.

  “Hey,” she smiled, “I’ve met your boys; they’re all gentlemen.”

  “Uhhh,” I weaseled, “the way they talk to a lady and the way they can treat each other are two very, very different things.”

  But she dismissed it. “Brothers are brothers,” she said.

  In any event, we were stocking the bar, laying in food, and cleaning the rooms. And although in odd moments I was beginning to hear Sue recite her litany of complaints about our sons and their hunting over this holiday—“They better get off that mountain on time for dinner this year or I’ll never cook a turkey again,” or “God forbid they ever sit down and talk to their mother, always hanging around at night in muddy boots, laughing like idiots,” or “If Henry comes in here this year and leans a gun up against my table while he’s eating, I’m going to learn to shoot a rifle myself”—she was baking pies, and when she wasn’t needling Mike into picking up a broom, she’d turn to me and smile. “My boys are coming home.”

  A day or two later, just after dinnertime, Sue called me.

  “Rich, find Mike. I have something for him to do, and now he’s disappeared. In fact, he’s been doing that a lot in the last couple of days.”

  He was not in the house, so I walked out back.

  It was late afternoon, the shadows long and lengthening when I saw him moving—stumbling, really—through the sedge far out across the back of the field. The first feeling I had was about how alone and lonely he looked way out there, just him and the dogs. No friends, no brothers around, suddenly fighting with Sue for some reason perhaps beyond his comprehension.

  My next thought was that Mike had injured himself, because he was tripping over his feet with his back stiff, his arms down straight at his sides, as the two dogs broke around him in the brush.

  When I looked closer yet, I saw that Mike was purposefully walking with his face pointed straight up into the air to watch a red-tailed hawk circling far above the three of them.

  I chuckled. Whatever other confusing, sad baggage he carried, right now his thoughts were somewhere far different. I had often asked myself the same question he was perplexed with now. “How does a hawk keep flying without once flapping its wings?” This hawk was slipping through the air in a vast, smooth ellipse and then every so often giving a lazy flip of a wingtip to reverse direction and sail higher into the light.

  As I stood there, Mike stumbled across the entire field and into the higher brush around the beaver pond. The two dogs stopped outside the pond area, took a long look at me standing there, hundreds of yards away, and then, when I didn’t move, woofed in after him.

  Sue called me from the back door. “Rich, did you find him?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I don’t do work.”

  Sue and Mike were in the living room as I walked by.

  “Mike, you live here, so get the vacuum cleaner going.”

  “I don’t do work.”

  I walked in, and Mike looked at me as if I could explain this one simple point to Sue. “Rich,” he said, “I don’t do work.” Then he picked up the remote control and turned the TV back on.

  Sue reached down to the set and turned it off.

  “Damn.” Mike slammed the remote down on the coffee table. “I don’t do work.”

  “You’re part of this family; you’ll lend a hand. No TV until you get the living room and the hallways vacuumed.”

  Mike kicked the vacuum cleaner. “I don’t do work.”

  Sue raised her voice. “You kick my vacuum cleaner again and it’ll be the whole week without TV”

  “I don’t do work. I hate this fucking family. I wish they’d put me in a real family.”

  Sue still had her voice up. “What you see on TV are not real families. Real families have to do something together about keeping the place clean.”

  “Damn,” Mike shouted again, but he picked up the vacuum cleaner hose and turned the machine on.

  Later on in our room, I made a crack about how much fun she seemed to be having with Mike’s chore program, but she wasn’t amused. Instead, she just lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Scattered around her on the covers were Harbour’s log sheets and forms to be completed. Things were piling up on her. She was still getting ready for Thanksgiving, her office was a disaster as she prepared to upgrade her computer system for the coming tax season, and the conflict with Mike was eroding whatever bounce there was left. She looked too whipped to sleep. Tomorrow would be Joanne’s weekly visit, which meant Sue would have to stop work for an hour or so, and I knew that with her office still torn apart, that would drive her nuts, too.

  Sue is a complex person, inclined to burn the candle at both ends, half believing that if she wasn’t getting everything done right now she was failing somehow. “I don’t have enough time” is a constant complaint, but then she is forever adding something else to her pile, and while she somehow gets it all accomplished, she often exudes tension when we are alone together. But there is another side to her as well, and you see it whenever a client walks into her office. Here is a close friend of mine who needs my help, you can see her thinking, and whatever stress she’s under vanishes in an instant as she focuses her entire attention on that one person. And it isn’t an act. Sue is genuinely interested in people, in the details of their lives, in what their children are doing, in how their parents are or what they have planned f
or the upcoming year, but most particularly, in what she can do for them.

  I was troubled that Mike would be seeing less and less of this right side of her; that instead he was calling up the brusque, dispassionate “get it done now” persona by mindlessly fighting each step of her program. It looked like this saw-toothed half-pint would never understand that he could get anything he wanted, do virtually anything he wanted, if he would just say yes and give her a hug once in a great while; if he would just once walk into her office and say, “I have a problem, can you help me?”

  I started picking the sheets of paper up off the bed.

  “What are you doing, Rich?”

  “I’ll do the logs from now on, Sue.”

  “You have to keep up with them every day, or else it gets away from you.”

  “I know.”

  Mike never had any friends to the house until the day he announced that Greg in his class had asked to come over.

  “Great,” Sue said. “It’ll be a nice break for both of us. Give me his phone number, and I’ll talk to his mother. Maybe he can come over and play with you on Saturday?”

  Mike shook his head. “I’ve already talked to him.”

  Sue sat down and took his hand. “Mike, before someone comes over for the day, parents should talk. Who is driving who when, is he eating dinner here, what time does he have to be back, things like that.”

  “His father is bringing him over.”

  Sue shook her head. “No, Mike, I’m sorry. I have to talk to his parents first, and I’m sure his parents would want to talk to us first, too.”

  “No,” Mike said, answering Sue’s last statement.

  “Believe me, Mike, Greg’s parents will want to talk to us.”

  “No, Greg always visits friends. His parents never talk to people.”

  Sue stood and put her hands up. “That’s not the way it’s done, Mike. I’m sorry, but before he can come over I’ll have to talk to his parents.”

  “Damn, I hate this fucking family.” Then slam, slam, bang, bang, as he headed off toward his room.