The Opposite of Music (10 page)

My only chance now is to find a way of getting there without taking the train. Someone will have to drive us all the way to Boston, all the way to Berklee Performance Center. It can't be Gordy's father, he already has something to do. It can't be Mom—she'll be at work. It can't be Marty—he'll be here. It can't be Dad, either. Whoever it is, we would have to leave the house at exactly seven thirty, no later. The driver will speed. We will fly down Route 1 to the auditorium, assuming there is no traffic. We will not look for parking spaces. We will be ejected, thrown, rolled, whatever, out of the car right at the entrance, and the driver will take off. We will run, panting, into the building with our tickets out, past the ushers, into a darkened auditorium, the last people to take their seats, provided the show hasn't already started, in which case we might be asked to wait, during the opening number, right inside the door. Who can I find? Who will help me?

What, you kids are planning on taking the train? Nobody should take a train on a night like this. Here, take the limo.

Who can I find?

I can't find anyone.

Okay. I can do this. I can call Gordy and tell him I can't make it to the concert tomorrow. He can invite someone else. I can call Gordy and tell him to take Mitchell or Andy, although Andy will laugh at the wrong times. Andy will also sing along loudly with any song he's heard before, drowning out Buddy Guy's one-time interpretation, unrecorded and unique to this Berklee College concert, ruining it for those immediately around him.

I can do this. I'm lifting the phone. I'm dialing.

It's funny what's happening right now. I had meant to call Gordy yesterday and tell him I couldn't go. I dialed and everything with the best of intentions. But instead I called Marty and told him to come at seven thirty. It's not that I feel angry or rebellious or anything. I'm just sort of watching myself from the outside—watching myself settle Dad in front of the TV and tell him to sit tight for a few minutes until Marty arrives, watching the car pull up, and watching myself go.

I go.

On the train, knowing I'm where I shouldn't be sharpens my senses. The world is shouting at me:
SCHRAFFT'S
in pink neon from a clock tower like a cathedral,
H. P. HOOD
on the big dairy office building. The graffiti on the empty freight cars are strangers shouting “I was here.” On the Boston Sand and Gravel plant, a big sign cautions
ACCIDENTS HAVE NO HOLIDAYS.

With no cell phone, I can't get pulled back. No one knows my location for sure, though they could hazard a guess. Watching father-son dyads board in matching Bruins jackets, I try not to think about Dad alone. Looking to the right as the train crosses the Charles River, I try not to think about Dad's dream of sinking in the metal box. When we see the suspension bridge topped with two Washington Monuments and lit in blue lights, the father-son dyads are already standing, so we elbow around them, through the station, and between the ticket scalpers outside. This is Boston. Streetlamps shining through maple trees with polluted-looking branches. Double-parked cars, brick buildings with garbage bags growing like mushrooms at the foot.

We take the Green Line to the Hynes/ICA stop. Crossing Boylston, we do a curb dance as an unmarked car and two cruisers careen around the corner, sirens barking. Drunks ask us croakily for a cigarette, and a woman asks for money to buy formula for her grandbaby. See? None of this would be happening in Hawthorne.

The theater is big, a thousand seats, though not anywhere near as big as the arena at North Station. It feels right to be here instead of home. The theater is already dark and Buddy's band is already performing when we scuttle to our seats in the front row.

• a. This should be fun.
  
• b. This is going to be fun.
  
• c. This should really be a lot of fun.
  
• d. Obviously, there's been a serious lack of music in my life lately. Unless you count the school assembly that featured a performance by the Hawtones, our high school a cappella group. They are known in a cappella circles for their unique medley of classic songs about New England (“Massachusetts,” “Old Cape Cod,” “Charlie on the MTA”). I'm sure it plays better on the road than it does back home in Hawthorne, in the heart of the region they are singing about.
  
• e. I met someone my age once who had a subscription to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and sat in the same seat every year, at the edge of the right balcony, overhanging the musicians. He impressed me as quite the egghead until he said the main reason he liked going was to feel the vibrations against his skin. That's something you miss when you listen to music on headphones.
  
• f. Gordy just gave me the quick-glance-nod-and-smile-with-eyebrows-raised. He's obviously having fun. Good for him.
  
• g. I wonder what we're going to eat later.
  
• h. For a while Dad was getting me to sing his favorite tenor/baritone opera duets with him, with the volume of the CD turned way up. Especially a duet from
  The Pearl Fishers
  , in which a pair of best friends are in love with the same woman. “It's her! It's that goddess!” he would sing in French. “She threads her way through the crowd.” And if Mom walked into the room at that moment, he would really play it up. Toward the conclusion of the song, some falsely tense music signals the strife in the friends' relationship. It always reminded me of the soundtrack to an action movie with planes colliding or planets exploding. It's like someone went in with a Roto-Rooter and churned up the orchestra, and you could tell the story would come to a bad end. But the two friends sing, “Nothing must separate us! Let's pledge to always remain friends!” Slashes from the strings, and a big crescendo: “Let's stay united
  UNTI-I-I-IL
  death!” And the orchestra does a bunch of big chords, like the words
  THE END
  rolling across a movie screen not once but four times.
  He asked me to sing that with him a few weeks before the Gordy incident, but I was just leaving for Mitchell's to watch a movie. I see now that that happened right when Dad was first getting sick. Maybe I wish I had gone along with it?
  
• i. Now Buddy Guy has stepped off the stage and is traveling up the aisle with his guitar. (One of the sound men follows him with an extension cord coiled around his shoulder.) I don't think the restaurant-networking thing is going to happen, but I do think he just nodded at me.
  

Although there was no one to see what was happening during the half hour that Dad was left alone, it seems to have been pretty bad. Dad didn't know what had happened to me, he invented all kinds of things in his mind, and he ended up calling the police. Marty sent the police away as soon as he got here.

“I didn't want to rat you out to your mother, Billy,” he told me in the kitchen when I got home. “Believe me, it totally killed me, and I completely remember what it was like to be a kid. But I was so concerned for your dad that I had to say something. You forgive me, don't you, buddy?”

Mom had stayed at the Brooksbie until ten thirty with the Pennsylvanians, so she had only been home for an hour when I got back. Marty had everything under control by then. After Marty spoke to me Mom took me to the utility room, where Dad, Marty, and even Linda couldn't see or hear us.

“We worked so hard to set up a complete, elaborate, minute-by-minute plan for caring for your father,” she said, “and you have selfishly bungled it.

“Did you see how your father looked tonight?” she continued, whispering. “How white and shaky? What do you think he looked like at seven thirty when Marty got here? He doesn't even know if he can trust us anymore. He doesn't even know if at any minute he'll be left by himself to do who knows what.”

Mom was so upset that she didn't even say the one thing I was counting on: “I hope you enjoyed yourself,” after which I had planned to say, “I sure did!” Then I would tell her that I really had wanted to go to the concert and I didn't think she had lifted a finger to make it happen. But instead I started saying, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you. I promise.” Something about Dad looking so white and weird, and the house being so quiet when I came in, and all four of them looking at me with an accusation (except Dad, really, because he doesn't have that much expression).

Around midnight Mom came to my room. I was lying there watching my Escher drawing shift in a square of street light, foreground, background, foreground, background, anything but solid ground. Mom said she understood a little bit of what I was going through, and maybe she should have tried harder to let me go to the concert. Then she said that in fairness to me, Linda was going to have to come home right after school too.

And that was today's change to the treatment plan.

Some nights my mind is a night watchman. It leaves my body and roams the house checking on everyone. My mental bedroom slippers are becoming as worn as the carpet Dad makes his circuit on. I don't think this is a bad thing. If I can be sure everyone is sleeping, then I can sleep too.

Here is the front door with both a doorbell and a knocker. Here are some shoes and boots, once wet or sandy, on a hard plastic mat inside the door. Here is the plate-glass window with floor-length draperies. Here is the conversation area, littered with schoolbooks, Brooksbie papers, and old
Newsweek
s. Here are throw pillows with sayings on them: “I Don't Do Perky,” “Welcome to Our Piece of Paradise,” “Mothers Nurture the Flowers in the Garden of Life,” “Your Point Is?” One pillow has fallen under the big square coffee table. I'll pull it out and put it on the couch. There.

I mustn't trip over the boxes on the floor. Fragile items are contained in them. Linda got exasperated and started taking the decorations off the Christmas tree. I know what I'll do. I won't walk anymore. I'll float.

Here is the dining room. The curtains are open and the backyard is dark. Bars of light appear between the slats of the back fence when a car passes on the highway, like the moving pattern on the top of a jukebox. Here is the kitchen. An oil painting of a chicken, done by one of Mom's friends at Brooksbie, looks friendly in the daytime but evil now. Its hard chicken eyes are the brightest spot in the room. They're the kind of eyes that follow you. Bad chicken! Why does it have to look so real?

I float along the hallway with its wall-to-wall carpet. It was a good idea, putting carpet here, so if you were walking, and someone else were sleeping, you wouldn't wake them up. Linda's room. Linda is sleeping, of course. She sleeps under a Garfield comforter, holding a plush Garfield, and beneath a photo collage of all the mad times she's had with her shadow, Jodie. Garfield is her night watchman.

The big bathroom has a shower curtain with a graphic design of black-and-white blocks. No one has cleaned the tub for a while. Who can be bothered? Someone should step up for that. Not me. People always end up doing the things that are most important. If it were important, someone would surely do it. Ergo, it is not important. Here is the laundry hamper. It's full. We've gotten accustomed to seeing one another in a lot of the same clothes over and over again. I don't even remember what I have in there. It will be exciting to find out, when that day comes. It will be like getting new clothes.

Now I'm at the door to my parents' room. The door is open a bit, not latched. I won't make a sound. Should I go in, or leave them to their privacy? I'll go in, just to check. I push against the door with all the purchase I can get in my floating state. My back rubs against the ceiling. There is their bed, with piles of clothes on the floor on either side. There is their bathroom, the sink piled up with laxatives and other things I don't want to know about. And there they are: two parents, joined at the hand.

Their hands meet with the palms crossed, the elbows bent, so the two arms form one
W.
Mom's arm is bare—she's wearing a sleeveless nightgown. Dad's arm is in a pajama sleeve with a frayed cuff. Their faces are sixteen inches apart.

Dad's age has seemed to change while he's been sick. Sometimes he seems old. Other times he seems young. Right now he's young, listening to Mom. (It's so serious in here!) His profile doesn't look adult. His nose is short, and his upper lip rises in an expectant way. He reminds me of someone, but I don't know who. A light from the bedside table on the right, an old porcelain one of Grandma's with a rose painted on it, is reflected in Dad's forehead. Now I know who it is—
me
. He looks just like me when I had my silhouette done out of black paper when I was ten. When did he start to look like me, instead of me looking like him?

On the left is a clock radio. When each minute goes by, two flaps that make up the numerals break apart and recombine to make up a new number. Right now it says 12:21. Between 12:21 and 12:22, eight cars go by on the highway behind the house.

Mom and Dad stare into one another's eyes. Three times the minute changes. Twenty-six cars go by on the highway. Mom's lips move. At first, her having spoken is so unexpected that it's difficult to realize what she's said: “Magnolia.”

Dad moistens his lips. He swallows, and his forehead tightens for a second, which makes the shiny spot jump almost to his hairline, then back down again. A car door slams in a driveway a few houses down the hill. The lamp goes “tink” for no reason, in that way electrical appliances sometimes do.

“Marigold.” Where did that come from? From Dad. His lips are still moving. He squeezes Mom's hand, like a twitch, and then relaxes. He swallows again.

Mom stares. It seems to be a new stare, more forceful, lower and more insistent, even though she hasn't moved. Maybe the depth and hypnotic quality of her eyes changed.

“Narcissus,” Mom has said. Mom's voice is a city voice. She's having him name a flower for every letter of the alphabet. I didn't know they played this game. I didn't know Mom had games of her own, apart from the ones I play with Dad. I thought I knew everything about these people.

The numbers on the clock turn over again. Why hasn't Dad answered? Nasturtium would be a good answer. A pattern of lilies, in the sheets, surrounds their heads. Lines of dust gather in the creases of the folding closet door. I would definitely go with nasturtium.

A motorcycle spits by on the highway, and the corners of Dad's mouth jump. He can't help it. The clock says 12:32. Mom stares.

Why hasn't he said nasturtium? I want to get between them and shake things up.

“Narcissus,” he says.

Mom doesn't take her eyes from his. A tendon stands out on the side of her wrist.

“I already said narcissus,” she says.

Dad moistens his lips again. “Okay,” he says. He waits. Mom waits. Oh, no. I think I fell asleep for a fractosecond. I am literally falling down on the job here. Which one had Mom said, nasturtium or narcissus? Well, whichever one it was, why doesn't Dad say the other one?

Mom's hand slowly releases its grip on Dad's. Their hands make a sucking sound as they pull apart.

Mom rolls over. She's facing the ceiling. She's facing
me
. She closes her eyes, hiding the tiredness that Dad isn't meant to see.

I'm falling again. It's 12:47. For this minute at least, everyone in the house is asleep.