Things Unsaid: A Novel (8 page)

His father was relenting. As usual.

“Come on, Dad. Where are the keys?” Andrew asked, all hulked up
like a quarterback in his dark quilted ski jacket. “We want to get out of here.” It was a done deal, he knew it. The T-bird was his for the night. Free at last.

His father reached into his pocket and threw the keys hard.
Nice, Dad
. Andrew just shrugged without blinking, catching the keys square and solid in his fist. His dad always seemed angry at him—at everyone in the family, actually, and he didn’t know why. Outsiders thought his dad was mild mannered. Andrew knew better. Still, he wanted to be more like his dad. Guys had a special way of bonding.

He ran out of the kitchen and Jules, grabbing her jacket, ran after him.
She better not hang on after we get there
, he thought. Just at the flashpoint of changing his mind and leaving her behind, he decided he needed to escape fast before their father changed his mind. So he didn’t stop her from getting in the passenger seat. But he wanted to.

As soon as they were well out of sight of the house, Andrew accelerated with a vengeance. Skidding block after block downhill towards Forest Lodge, swerving from one side to the other on Crestview Avenue, the T-bird spun around and around down the street, almost doing 360s. Andrew kept on flooring the engine. It was like flying. There wasn’t another car or person in sight—he was so lucky sometimes! He imagined he was a driver in the Indy 500, feeling the freedom of life and all the fun he would have once he left Akron for college. He was counting the days to high school graduation. Two more years. Only two more years.

Black ice. He panicked and froze. Before he realized it, his sister had grabbed the wheel. As they struggled, fighting over the steering wheel, the car started skating out of control towards the lodge, towards the housing development surrounding the rink. After jumping the curb and plunging into a snow bank, a huge, twisted oak brought the T-bird to an abrupt halt.

The porthole was covered. Andrew couldn’t see out of the front window either. Shakily, his heart feeling like it was pulsating through every vein in his body, he muscled the door as far open as he could, squeezed out, and trudged through snow to the front of the house. The owner was already standing there, front porch lights on, startled to see the cockeyed T-bird. Andrew didn’t look back to see if his sister was
okay. The homeowner waved him inside without a word and gestured to the hallway phone. Andrew called home.

“Hi, Dad?” Andrew cleared his throat. “You have to come get us.”

Silence. Andrew could hear a deep, threatening sigh on the other end. “What have you done now?” Their father’s voice was hard.

“We had a little accident,” Andrew gulped. He looked up; Jules was standing near the front door, waiting.

His father hung up without another word. Andrew and Jules waited there in the house, fidgeting. Ten minutes later, their father arrived in his silver Buick Riviera, his second most favorite car, and said something, probably an apology of sorts, to the homeowner. Andrew saw him write his telephone number on a sheet from his prescription notepad. Then he grabbed Andrew’s elbow and twisted him out the front door. Jules followed. Andrew wished he could be anywhere else.

Chesterfield dangling from her lip, his mother stood up from the kitchen table as they walked through the kitchen door. She spit out something—he didn’t know what—but the cigarette didn’t eject. Then she laid into him. “Goddamn it. Driving crazy in this weather. Now that fucking car’s going to cost a fortune to fix. You think money just grows on trees around here.” Their mother looked so full of rage that she could bite a chunk out of her own arm. He recalled her saying she had actually done that once so she wouldn’t hit Jules.

Andrew looked down at the melting snow still on his shoes, the blood-red linoleum all wet and slippery like the afterbirth from a newborn baby.

“It wasn’t my fault, all right?” Trying to head off the inevitable. “I hit an ice chunk. Could’ve happened to anyone.”

“Well, but it didn’t, did it?” His mother’s voice was whiskey hoarse. “It’s a privilege to drive his new car. Now your father’s afraid of the damage to that guy’s yard. Maybe even a lawsuit. More money wasted on you.”

Andrew nervously fingered his black-and-blue ski jacket while their father stood quietly in the kitchen behind Jules, waiting for his mother to finish. He was
too
quiet. Then his father moved towards Andrew, dangerously close, and Andrew’s back petrified. He looked over his shoulder, then down at his boots. He knew what was coming.

He felt a crack as his arm was torqued, wrenched into an ugly angle. His father dragged him upstairs. Shoulders hunched, head down, he lost his breath. Then numbness. As the belt slap-slapped against his back and head, he curled like a fetus, trying to avoid the hook of the belt hitting his eyes. All he remembered after that: the toilet flushing, over and over again. And blood washing down the drain, swirling in the toilet bowl.

A couple of hours later, in his boxers, bare legs showing, Andrew limped towards the couch in the solarium. His mother and sisters seemed to have ignored what had been going on upstairs. His little sister, Joanne, he could understand. She was too young, and she was busy watching TV. But Jules knew. She knew, all right.

His mother came to his side and kissed his cheek. “Does that make your owwie better?” she asked, looking down at his legs: red welts with little white dashes where the stitching on the sides of his father’s belt were embossed. He raised his right leg so she could have a closer look. She bent down and kissed him on the leg, too. Andrew let her do it, but she made him uncomfortable: too much contact. He was the sun that rose and set for their mother. She often told him so, even in front of his friends.

His very first childhood memory: his mother’s kisses. The ones in the wrong places.

His father had ordered a rubberized, electrically charged sheet as a deterrent to bed-wetting. To make him a man. He was getting ready to enter kindergarten, and bed wetters weren’t allowed. The school principal had said that naptime would be ruined for the other children if anyone peed. So right before kindergarten started, he remembered waking up in the middle of the night, zapped with electrical current, his pajamas soaked through. Smelling like pee.

Crying and screaming “Mommy, Mommy,” he would run to his mother, who would be waiting in the bathroom. Stripping him naked, she would hug him and stand him on the toilet seat, kneeling in front of him, washing his body with a cool washcloth. Andrew remembered
her saying, “Now, now, Andrew. You’re a big boy. Your daddy wants you to go to kindergarten, so we bought that special bedsheet just for you. It’s to wake you up in the middle of the night when you do pee-pee. You can’t go to school if you wet your bed, you know. Big boys don’t do that kind of thing. And Daddy and Mommy want you to understand that. We love you very much and want you to make us proud of you.” And then she kissed his penis.

It surprised him. Who kisses where your pee-pee comes from? He remembered understanding that much, even at five years old. But before he could say anything, he saw his father peeking through the cracked-open bathroom door. He still remembered that one dark eye tilted at him.

He was the only son, and it came with a price.

“You know, I never liked chicken when I was growing up,” his father would start off. “The slaughter of chickens would turn and churn in my stomach when I was a kid. Those bloodied chickens squawking with their heads cut off—gushing blood from open wounds, running in circles. They’d stink so badly. My father shoved it down my throat. Shouted that we had to eat whatever was in front of us. We couldn’t afford anything else. One of those chickens had been my pet. Used to sleep with it. I never ate chicken after I left home.”

Andrew ended up hating chicken just like his father.

But when he was maybe about ten years old, he’d tried an experiment. He’d chopped chicken into squares, skewered them, and slathered them with loads of spicy jerk sauce. The taste of smoky barbecue and the crispiness ringing the meat had been irresistible to his dad. After his father had eaten at least four kebabs, Andrew couldn’t control himself any longer. Smirking, he said, “Hmm, Dad, how’d you like those kebabs? They were really good now, weren’t they? They didn’t have any nasty smell or dirty taste, now did they—did they?”

His father stared at him, the beginnings of suspicion in his eyes.

Andrew couldn’t keep it to himself any longer. “You ate chicken,” he blurted out, gloating. “You ate chicken!”

His father stood up immediately and said something in an unnaturally low, soft voice that Andrew couldn’t quite make out. And then it happened. He retched on top of the platter with the remaining kebabs.
And he retched some more, throwing up everything, as everyone else jumped away from the table. Until there was nothing but piss-colored water with little pimple-size lumps. But even then he kept retching. And he never forgot—or entirely forgave Andrew for what he’d done.

As the only son of a doctor, Andrew had exalted status. Some medical field would have to be his career “choice.” The arguments for this were constant and repetitive.

“You know, your sisters will marry well, to a good provider, and raise a family,” his father always said. “That’s all they have to do. Like your mother. But you—I expect lots more from you.”

And Andrew didn’t want to disappoint.

“Well, you just remember—there are expectations you have to live up to. Your father is an important man in this city. Everyone knows me. Now, if my father had been more than a farmer, I probably would have followed in his footsteps. But I had other dreams … to be much more. A success. To have the life that only money can buy. And, of course”—this part seemed like an afterthought to Andrew—“a good wife and mother, and three wonderful kids.”

That wasn’t quite believable to Andrew’s ears. He wanted to believe it. But his father just looked sad.

How Andrew envied his sisters. They didn’t have to worry about what their father thought of them. They wouldn’t need to work. Their husbands would do all the heavy lifting. He wished sometimes that he had been born a girl—with a pink bow in his hair. He knew Jules wanted to have a profession. It wasn’t typically female, but she had been like that since kindergarten. Studying famous women in history, winning academic awards, even the National Latin Society, whatever that was. She should just relax. She would have it easy. Like their mother. But Andrew—he had to prove he was worthy.

“No son of mine is going into something so worthless, to say nothing of mindless,” his father would say of race car driving and motorcycle competitions. “Racing cars and driving motorcycles are for ne’er-do-wells. Do you want to make me proud or not?”

He
would
make his father proud of him. And, much to his surprise, he had begun to love studying the intricacies of the cardiovascular system. For the first time, he’d started to feel respected, aglow with
medical jargon about this or that ventricular cavity and arterial defect. That was the way to his father’s heart. Dissecting animals helped reinforce learning about anatomy, too. He always aced biology exams. He had a collection in their attic: translucent, pinkish fetal forms with veiny, glossy legs splayed, strapped, and nailed to a board. Cats, dogs, birds, even a squirrel. He liked the squirrel tailbones best. Fine, delicate, easily broken.

After the car accident, Andrew had spent the summer lifeguarding at the country club pool, wanting to save money just like his dad. That was the summer before he was sent away to George Washington Military Academy. His parents had talked to the board members, promising that he would follow the rules. No big deal, until Woolworth’s.

“Can’t Buy Me Love.” The song was number one on the charts, and his friends wanted to get the single. Andrew had had his name on the waiting list for weeks but still hadn’t gotten his copy. He volunteered to go buy the record for them.

He walked into Woolworth’s and nonchalantly wandered over to the right side of the store, where the Top Ten Hits section was located, and started flipping alphabetically through the singles in their paper sleeves, looking over his shoulder. Rows and rows of records, and yet only one of the singles he was looking for was left. On the envelope, clear and bold, was the warning: “Display Copy Only. Do Not Remove.”