Labor Day

by Joyce Maynard

  Why he even pursued this next was a mystery. It wasn’t something he needed to know, or anything that made a difference, concerning how he felt about his son. But something made him ask her if the baby was his.

  She had laughed. If she hadn’t been drinking heavily already, she might not have answered as she did, but she had thrown her head back and laughed so hard it took her a moment before she gave him the answer.

  That’s when he pushed her. No doubt he wanted to hurt her, but he didn’t expect her to fall. Her head had hit the granite of their front step, going down. A single trickle of blood coming from her ear, nothing more. Only her neck was broken.

  Not right away—because at first he had just knelt there, with her head in his hands—but after a few minutes, he realized the water was still running upstairs. The tub must be overflowing, because there was water coming through the ceiling now, through the plaster. So much water now, you would have thought a pipe had burst. Like the kind of downpours they had in the jungle sometimes, only in his house.

  He took the steps two at a time. He threw open the door to the bathroom. Inside, another woman crumpled on the ground, this time his grandmother. Her heart had simply stopped beating.

  And in the water, red hair plastered against pale skin, his thin legs limp and still, arms by his sides, and his face staring up with a look of wonder in his eyes—a look as if nothing less than an aurora borealis were shining down on him—lay the body of Frank Junior.

  When they first brought him in, the lawyer assigned to his case had called it a clear case of manslaughter.

  Frank was responsible for Mandy’s death, he told them. He never meant to kill his wife but he had. That was the fact of it, and he would take his punishment.

  The part they didn’t expect was the next. Her sister had come forward to say the baby wasn’t his, and that when Frank found out, he’d murdered his own son.

  What about my grandmother? he said. The doctor ruled she had a heart attack. It was an accident.

  She had a heart attack all right, the D.A. said. What old woman with a weak heart would not, when she came upon the sight of her great-grandson, murdered by her flesh and blood?

  The D.A. charged him with murder. Frank’s lawyer, sensing things were going badly, had called in an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder, right at the end of the trial. They went for a temporary insanity defense. By that time, Frank barely cared. What difference did any of it make anymore?

  They gave him twenty years before parole eligibility. He served the first eight of them at the state hospital. When he was ruled competent, they moved him to the penitentiary. At the time he had jumped out the window, he had two years to go.

  But I knew I had to get out of that place, he said. I knew there was some reason to jump. I wasn’t wrong about that.

  The reason was her. My mother. He didn’t know it at the time, but he had jumped out that window to come save her.

  CHAPTER 13

  MY MOTHER ASKED ME TO GO to the library for her. She and Frank wanted a book about Canada, the Maritime Provinces. Rather than all three of us going out, she figured the safest thing was just me, on my bike.

  You understand, Henry, Frank said, I’ve got your mother here. You remember how I tied her up before. This is what is known as a hostage situation.

  The way he said the words reminded me of my mother, the time a year or two after the divorce when my father had filed some kind of paper and some woman called a guardian ad litem came over to our house and asked my mother questions about her attitudes concerning parenthood.

  Do you feel bitterness and resentment toward your ex-husband? the woman had said. Do you express your anger concerning this bitterness toward your son?

  I am not bitter or angry toward my son’s father, my mother told the woman. (Flat voice. Her mouth arranged in something resembling a smile.) I think he is doing a good job.

  And how would you describe your attitude toward your exhusband’s wife? Your son’s stepmother? Would you say you have ever impacted in a negative fashion on their relationship?

  Marjorie is a nice person, my mother said. I am sure we will all be able to work together fine.

  This guardian ad litem didn’t see the part that happened after. She was gone when my mother had opened up our refrigerator and taken out the gallon milk jug from the top shelf. (Real milk. She still went grocery shopping in those days.) She didn’t see my mother opening the jug and standing there in the middle of the kitchen, slowly pouring the contents on our floor, as if she were watering a pot of flowers.

  Now, too, though in a different way, I had no doubt that Frank’s words—this is a hostage situation—were what he knew he had to say at that time. Whatever else I thought about what was going on between my mother and Frank—that they were going to run away together to some fishing village in Canada, and leave me behind to live with my father and Marjorie—one thing I never believed was that Frank had any intention of hurting my mother. Whatever he said about that, it was to make sure we’d never get in trouble, if someone ever found him at our house.

  I won’t tell, I said, playing my role of the frightened son, as well as Frank had played his, of the heartless convict, on the loose.

  Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend was not a big time at the Holton Mills library. The only reason the library was even open that day was because they were having a book sale, all proceeds going toward the purchase of new curtains or something along those lines. Out front on the lawn, a group of women were selling lemonade and oatmeal cookies, and there was a clown making balloon sculptures, with boxes of old books for sale like some recipe collection of great meals to make in a Crock-Pot and the autobiography of Donny Osmond. There was a nice, cheerful mood to the whole thing, with people milling around talking about how hot it was, mostly, and comparing notes on what they were doing to keep cool. Not comparing notes with me, of course. It was like I gave off a set of sound waves too high pitched for the human ear that transmitted the message—Stay away. All these happy, cheerful people munching cookies and browsing through the stacks of old Information Please almanacs and Jane Fonda Workout books (three copies, that I spotted) couldn’t have known what was going on back at my house, of course, but I guess I gave off the impression of someone that wasn’t interested in balloon sculptures or beach reading, which was true.

  Making my way up the steps and inside the building, I was thinking I must be the only person in the whole town who wasn’t off at some cookout that day, playing Frisbee or chopping up the potatoes for potato salad or splashing around in a pool. It was one thing to swing by this place for a bunch of Agatha Christies and a lemonade. But what kind of a loser would be at the library, researching Prince Edward Island on the last weekend of summer before school started?

  Only there was one other person. She was sitting in the reading room, where I had come with my notebook to copy facts down from the encyclopedia—these being the days when we still used encyclopedias to find out about things. She was sitting in one of the leather chairs I often sat in myself when I hung out here, only she sat in the lotus position, as if she was meditating, but with a book in front of her. She wore glasses and she had her hair in a braid, and she was wearing shorts that left a lot of her legs showing, which made it particularly obvious how skinny she was.

  She looked my age, but I didn’t recognize her. Normally I’d have been too shy to say anything, but maybe it was having Frank around that last couple of days—the picture of him jumping out that window, and all the other crazy stuff he’d done since, and the feeling it gave me that the world was such a crazy place you might as well just go for it—I asked the girl if she went to school around here.

  I didn’t before, but I just moved here, she said. I’m supposed to try out living with my dad this year. The official reason is I have an eating disorder and they’re hoping a new school environment will help, but really I think my mom just wanted to get rid of me so she can fool around with her boyfriend without me getting i
n the way.

  I know what you mean, I said. I would not have imagined I’d discuss with anyone how I’d been feeling about my mother and Frank getting together, but this girl appeared to understand, and she didn’t know anybody around here, and I liked the way she looked. You couldn’t call her pretty, but she gave the appearance of being a person who might care about things a lot of girls didn’t, who were only interested in clothes or getting a boyfriend.

  I asked her what she was reading. I’m investigating my legal rights, she said. Also child psychology.

  She was doing a study of certain kinds of adolescent trauma to support her case to her parents that she was currently experiencing it.

  Her name was Eleanor. Normally she lived in Chicago. Until now, she only came here for school vacations sometimes. She was going into eighth grade. She had gotten into this really great private school where they focused mainly on drama and none of the kids cared about sports and you could wear any kind of clothes you wanted or a nose ring even and the teachers didn’t get on your case. But at the last minute she couldn’t go.

  My stupid parents said we didn’t have the money, she said. So, hello Holton Mills Junior High.

  I’m going into seventh grade, I said. I’m Henry.

  I’d gotten a stack of books about the Maritime Provinces—the Maritimes, it turns out they were called. I had set them down on the floor next to the other leather chair, across from Eleanor’s.

  Are you writing a report or something? she asked.

  Kind of. It’s for my mother. She wants to know if Canada might be a good place to move.

  Something about Eleanor made me not want to lie to her. My mother and her boyfriend, I said. I was trying out this word that I’d never used before. Not in connection to my mother anyway. There seemed to be no harm in saying it. Just because a person’s mother has a boyfriend doesn’t mean he’s an escaped convict.

  How do you feel about that? she said. Leaving your friends. I’m asking because that’s what I had to do when I came here, and frankly, I consider it child abuse. Not that I’m a child, but from a legal standpoint, not to mention the psychological effects. All the experts could tell you that particularly during puberty, it is highly inadvisable for a person to have to form new bonds with new people who might or might not have anything in common with her. Especially if, no offense, she is used to living in a cosmopolitan city with things like jazz clubs and an art institute and all of a sudden the main attraction is bowling and horseshoes. When I tell my friends back home about this town, nobody can believe it. I’m not saying this applies to you, just a general impression.

  I didn’t feel like telling her that in my case, I didn’t have any friends. Not anyone it would be hard to leave at least—just a few fellow outcasts at school, who shared the table in the cafeteria where all the losers sat, when nobody else wanted them to sit at their table. Siberia.

  In my case, I said, the problem wasn’t actually going away. It was getting left behind. Maybe there’s some kind of trend going on in the mother community, I said. Because it seemed like my mother was also trying to get rid of me. It looked like she and her boyfriend were planning to park me with my father and his wife, Marjorie, and her son who was my age who was probably my father’s favorite and their baby, who spit up on me every time they made me hold her.

  I wouldn’t have thought my mother would do something like this, I said.

  It’s sex, Eleanor said. When people have sex with each other, it affects their brain. They can’t see things normally.

  I might have said here that the way my mother saw things even before she started having sex with Frank was not what most people would consider normal. I was wondering if Eleanor knew about the effects of sex because she’d had sex herself, or if she’d also read this in a book. She didn’t seem like someone who would have had sex yet, but she had an air of knowing a lot more than I did. If she spoke from personal experience, I didn’t want to let on that I had none myself, beyond what went on in my own bed at night. Though it did support her theory when I considered how recent activities seemed to be affecting my own brain. I thought about sex almost all the time now, except when I was thinking about what was happening with my mother and Frank, but that also involved sex.

  It’s like they’re on drugs, I said. I was thinking about a commercial they had on television. It started with a frying pan on the stove. Then you see a pair of hands holding an egg.

  This is your brain, says the voice.

  The hands crack the egg. The egg lands on the pan. You watch the white and yolk as they sizzle and change color.

  This is your brain on drugs.

  It turned out Eleanor was researching the question of whether, as a minor (she was fourteen), she could sue her parents. She was thinking about contacting a lawyer, but she wanted to read up on the basics first.

  I wrote a letter to the boarding school I was going to go to, she said. To ask if they’d let me come anyway, and I could clean the bathrooms or something in exchange for the tuition. But I haven’t heard back.

  I told her that as soon as the bank opened on Wednesday, when I was due to start school, it looked like my mother and her boyfriend were going to withdraw all her money and drive north together. She was probably packing right now. Maybe that was the real reason they wanted me out of the house. That, or more sex.

  Is your mother always, like, dating a million guys? Eleanor asked. Barhopping and answering personals ads and stuff?

  Not my mom, I said. My mom is the type of person—I stopped. She was no type of person you could describe, in fact. She was like nobody on earth, just her. My mom is—I started again. I wasn’t expecting this, but my voice started to crack in the middle of the sentence. I tried to make it look like I just needed to clear my throat, but it was probably obvious to Eleanor that I was upset.

  You can’t even blame her, she said. It’s like he cast a spell on her or something. You might say he hypnotized her. These men just use their penis instead of some old watch on a chain.

  I tried to look casual when she said penis. I had never known a girl who said that word out loud. My mother of course. When I had gotten poison ivy a few summers back, all over my legs and thighs, she asked if my penis was also affected, and just the summer before, when I’d tried to execute a superhero leap over a granite hitching post—but failed to clear it—she had asked, as she knelt beside me on the ground, where I was groaning and holding my crotch, to show her my penis.

  I need to see if this warrants a visit to the emergency room, she said. I definitely don’t want anything to jeopardize the functioning of your penis down the line, or anything to do with your testicles.

  But I was used to my mother. Hearing Eleanor speak about this—a part of my own body that I’d never been able to speak of myself—seemed stranger, more intimate. Though from the moment she did, I had the sense that now we could talk about anything. We had crossed into the territory of the forbidden.

  Her room’s next to mine, I said. I can hear them in the night. Doing it. Her and…Fred.

  I figured I’d call him that. To protect his identity.

  So, he’s a sex addict, she said. Or a gigolo. Possibly both.

  Even now, I knew this wasn’t so. I liked Frank. That was the problem in fact, though I didn’t discuss this part. I liked him so much I had wanted to go away with him too. I liked him so much I had been picturing him becoming part of our family. These past few happy days he had been spending at our house, hanging out with my mother and me, I hadn’t understood that the place he would take was mine.

  You don’t have some kind of Oedipus complex or anything do you? she said. Where you want to marry your mom? That sometimes happens with boys, though generally they outgrow it by your age.

  I like regular girls, I told her. My age, or maybe a little older but not a lot.

  If she thought I was talking about her, that was OK.

  I like my mother in the mom way, I said.

  In that case, you might
consider an intervention, Eleanor said. That’s what my mother did with me, though in my opinion they had it backwards. The person that needed the intervention was her, and her sicko boyfriend. But from a psychological perspective, it’s a very effective method.

  If the situation is that this person’s put a kind of spell on your mom, you need to deprogram her. They did that with people who joined cults, back when that was really popular. There was a girl one time named Patty Hearst, from a rich family like the people on Dallas, who got kidnapped, and pretty soon the robbers, who were also political radicals and also extremely attractive, had her robbing banks.

  This was back before either of us were born, Eleanor said. My mother told me about it. The man who kidnapped her had this thing called charisma, which affected her to the point that Patty Hearst started wearing army clothes and carrying a machine gun. When her parents finally got her back home, they had to send her to all sorts of psychiatrists to help her get back to her old self. It can be confusing for people, figuring out who the bad people are and who are the good ones. Or maybe nobody’s really so good, which was probably why Patty Hearst got messed up with the bank robber people. She just had so many problems already, it made her vulnerable.

  This would be my mother all right.

  He brainwashed her with the power of sex.

  If that was really the case, how would anyone get her back again? I asked. (I wasn’t going to say normal. Just back to how she was before.)

  Sex is too powerful, Eleanor said. Nothing you could do now would neutralize it.

  In other words, the situation was hopeless. My mother was a goner. I looked at the stack of books at my feet. One was open to a photograph of a hillside on Prince Edward Island, rolling fields, ocean behind. Eleanor, when she saw the book, had pointed out that the girl in Anne of Green Gables lived there, but that was a whole different story. Once Frank took my mother there she’d never come back.