A Good and Happy Child (10 page)

r r r

“How are you?” Richard asked, once we settled.

I shrugged, smirked, cringed all at once. “Look at me.” I shrugged. I had not slept. Fear of descending into that dream well—that hole—

kept me awake, and jittery, whenever I lay on my bed. I had started fighting to stay awake. For two nights running now, I had seen the sun rise. Now I felt like the walking dead. My glasses were greasy, askew on my nose. My eyes drooped, my feet dragged.

“What’s the problem?”

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“Tired,” I answered.

“Have you been eating okay? Did you eat lunch?”

I had.

“What about sleep?”

“What about it?”

“Have you been sleeping all right?”

Have I been sleeping all right

The words seemed to drop into a chasm.

Have I been sleeping all right

I could almost feel them float and echo down the cold hole. Mud and sand and cold water below.

Have I been sleeping all right

I stood on the riverbank in moonlight—the spot where I had seen Tom Harris, down behind Revolution Hall, down among the intertwining paths and the pines overlooking the James River. Across the black water I saw a tree. Its monstrous silver branches stretched toward me.

Have I been sleeping all right

“George,” he was saying.

“Yes.”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes, why?”

“George, where did you go just now?”

“Nowhere.”

“You went away for a minute.”

The office was the same as it was. Quiet, clean, plant in corner. But I had an announcement. “I don’t like to sleep anymore.”

“Don’t like to sleep?” Richard said, surprised. “Why is that?”

“I have dreams.”

“Tell me about them.” I hesitated. “Are they bad dreams?”

Richard suggested.

“Kind of.”

“They scare you?”

“Uh-huh.”

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69

“You said they were ‘kind of’ bad. What makes them only
kind
of
bad?”

“Not
kind of
bad.
Kind of
dreams.”

Richard watched me carefully, processing this. “Okay,” he said. What’s a . . .
kind of
dream?”

“It’s a dream where you hear real voices,” I said.

“Your mom?” he prompted. “Neighbors?”

“No,” I said.

“Then who?”

“I can hear my Friend.”

Richard blinked a long, therapeutic blink.

“Your friend,” he repeated, in a tone so soft his voice nearly vanished into the folds of his cardigan. “Really. And who is this friend?”

Outside the clinic, an unfamiliar car waited. A door opened, and my mother stood beside it.

“George,” she said. She was like a stranger standing next to anything but the old Toyota. This was a sloping, amber Saab. “We’re getting a ride today,” she said. “This is Kurt.”

A man climbed out of the driver’s side. His blond hair twisted behind his ears and fell over his eyes in a shaggy, overgrown preppie haircut. He wore a standard, pale blue Brooks Brothers button-down, frayed at the collar and hems. His belly, arms, and—when he shook my hand, I discovered—even his fingers, bulged with a muscle-fat combination that created a uniquely masculine
solidity.
In combination with skin the tint of sand (from work under the sun? from good ol’-fashioned dirt?), Kurt carried the air of a WASP gone country. His lips were thick, but not sensual; his skull, large and blocky, like those bronze sculptures you see of Hercules where the figure’s own strength seems to burden him. Kurt was a man who never needed to move quickly or talk loudly to make his point.

“George.”

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I decided he looked too intelligent to be a grown-up Early College bum: the kind who graduated and, addicted to reefer and the memories of undergraduate pleasures—inner tubing, bused-in Central girls, endless beer drinking—stuck around, maybe opened a store, or wrote a column for the
News Gazette.
Preston Lotus Eaters. No, there was another type that gravitated to Preston. Unlike their sensualist brethren, these were professionals, often out-of-towners, who quietly fell in love with Stoneland County’s creeks and mountains and honeysuckle—and out of love with their white-collar jobs. They moved through Preston society with a gentle, almost monastic air, like they’d found something so special they didn’t want to move too fast, or speak too loud, for fear of breaking it. Kurt, I reckoned quickly, was one of these.

“Hope you don’t mind me picking you up,” Kurt continued.

“I’m working on a translation project for Kurt,” Mom interjected.

“You remember.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Rogaine.”

Kurt glanced at my mother. She shrugged.

“Those are corporate secrets,” he said frowning. “But if you shake on it, I’ll know you can be trusted.”

I took his hand.

“Attaboy.” His eyes crinkled into crow’s-feet.

I settled in the backseat. Kurt walked my mother around to the passenger side. Their bodies pressed together; she pulled away and jumped in the front seat with a ringing laugh. She bounced around and turned to me and smiled with slightly smeared makeup and shining eyes. They had been kissing. My mother was unrecognizable. She wore the beaming countenance of a young, happy woman. Which I suppose, in that moment, she was. r r r

The phone was ringing when we arrived. My mother rushed us into the house, throwing her keys down and scrambling to reach the phone in the kitchen.

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71

“I’m fine, Richard, how are you?”

After a moment came a surprised yelp.
“Voices?”
my mother said. She shut the kitchen door for privacy. If I strained, I could hear her—muffled but intelligible.

“But what do we do?”
she said.
“Surely that’s not necessary? Sending
him to Charlottesville?”

“So,” Kurt drawled cheerfully, looking around, “this is a big old house. When did you move here?”

“Never,” I said, only half-listening.

He blinked at me. “Never?”

Why couldn’t he be quiet? “This is the only house I ever lived in.”

“Never. I like that.” He smiled easily.

My mind raced for ideas to keep Kurt occupied—and quiet.

“Do you want to see some pictures?” I asked. “Of my dad?”

Kurt blinked. “Sure.”

I laid three large family albums on the floor. Kurt crawled down on the rug with me, while I flipped page after page, straining after the mutters I heard from behind the kitchen door. We were halfway through the 1970s—my phase of putting buckets on my head—when I asked him, just conversationally, “What’s in Charlottesville?”

“Charlottesville? I guess UVa is the big attraction there. Why?”

“What’s UVa?”

“University of Virginia. Great school.” He smiled. “Already picking out colleges?”

“Somebody from my school is being sent away—to Charlottesville. I was just wondering what he meant.”

“Sent away? I dunno . . . Maybe they mean the UVa hospital. Not good news for your friend, though. He having problems?”

My heartbeat in my ears, I flipped the plastic sleeves of the snapshots.

“Oh, no. He’s kind of a faker.”

My mother found us cross-legged on the living room floor with the drawers to the highboy flung open and photo albums and loose snapshots spread around us.

“George is showing me pictures of his father,” said Kurt, deadpan.
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“Oh, dear,” she said. “I think it’s time for Kurt to go home.”

Tightness in her mouth told me other matters were on her mind. But she cooked my dinner, watched the evening news, helped me with my homework, as if it were an ordinary night.
Sweetie,
she said at bedtime,
how about you sleep with Snoopy tonight, like the old days? Crack the
door?
But I told her, No, no, I wasn’t a baby anymore, I wasn’t afraid of the dark, so she tucked me in, lingering there awhile until I closed my eyes. Then I waited until she had gone, and rose, stripping my pajama top off and standing in the center of my room, fists clenched at my sides, to keep my body cool, tense, alert—to keep from falling asleep, to keep from falling in the hole.

n o t e b o o k 6

Sick

Ionly got worse after that.

In fact, you could say I was getting sick. Not by the definition of any school nurse. In school, there were two things you went home for: fever and vomiting. Every student passed with envy that door by the principal’s office where classmates could be seen in the nurse’s chair, a thermometer poking from their mouths, minutes away from release. Less jealousy-inspiring were the astonishing acts of projectile vomiting I recall from grades K–5, especially the remarkable performance of one Tameka Jackson, a chubby girl with multicolored barrettes who one morning turned her head back and forth like a carnival game, alternately filling two industrial-sized garbage cans with a high-velocity fountain of brown vomit. The teacher’s aides—babysitters, really; an underclass of school disciplinarians—protected us, or so they thought, by coining coy, redneck euphemisms for any biological function. To go to the bathroom was to “take care of your needs”; to vomit was to “upchuck” (ironically, a word that was pure onomatopoeic nausea).

I had not upchucked. I had no fever. But anyone looking at me could tell there was something wrong.

“You’re yellow,” said Dirk Hunsicker.

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We were in the bathroom. I turned to the mirrors.

“Holy cow, look at him!” he exclaimed. Dirk was a military kid, son of a Fort Virginia colonel, with a shaved head and—standing next to me—peachy white skin. “Check this out!”

Earl Clemmer came over.

“Dag, boy,” he said. “You should see the nurse.”

“Stay away from me,” said Dirk, dramatically moving away.

“Yeah, I don’t want to get sick!” echoed Earl, and they left in a hurry.

I stared in the mirror. I
was
yellow. Sallow and waxy as a mummy, and my eyes were closing to slits, with a swelling around my eyes and throat. I wished I could crawl into a stall, wrap myself around a cool toilet seat and hibernate until I had changed back to normal. But a voice inside rebelled.
Oh no, no sleep for you.
And it was true; the nights had grown worse.

It began the same way every time. With my Friend. What had been a name transformed itself into a kind of mantra that overcame me when the lights were out and I lay on my pillow staring at the cool light from the streetlight. I spoke the name and thought it and played with it and repeated it a hundred times to see if it lost meaning, like saying

“umbrella” until you’re convinced it’s nonsense. Only for me, repeating it wove it more into my senses. My Friend was the answer to every question, and rose again at the end of that answer to pose yet another question; and so on, around and around, a question answering itself and asking itself. At first I listened to it like I did to the normal sound of a Preston night: a band playing a faraway fraternity party, the growl of a truck shifting gears on the street. Half interested. Somewhat curious. Then it was closer, louder, like hearing one-half of a telephone conversation, unwanted, yet irresistible, as the words
my Friend, my
Friend,
kept coming, and I watched—I could feel my eyes moving!—

the words go by as if they were on a ticker tape,
my Friend, my Friend,
my Friend, my Friend.
The words came closer, in my ears, nearly touching. And at last, they were physical. I felt fierce fingers pinching my sides.

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“Stop it!” I shouted. “Stop it! Stop it!”

I writhed on the bed. Everywhere I moved, hands gripped me and squeezed. I could not see them, but they came at me with terrific force, like birds plunging at me from a dozen directions. From their power I could almost sense the person they belonged to: a conniving, pinching child with sticky hands, gritting his teeth with the twinge of sadism. My mother rushed into the room. I had been crying out.

“George! George, what is it?”

“Can you see them?”

“What, honey?”

“The hands!”

What hands?
she kept repeating, as she searched under the bedclothes for the unseen intruder.
What hands, Georgie?
For an instant, as if the sadism was catching, her confusion, her useless groping in the dark, seemed almost amusing. With a horrible wrench, however—

stronger than the rest, a bully’s last shot—I felt a great hunk of my flesh, just below my ribs, twisted in a knot. I yelped in pain, then grasped my mother around the neck, sobbing. The pinching stopped.

“What was it, honey?” she demanded, frightened herself now. “Is it fleas? Is there something in the bed?”

I sobbed. “I don’t know.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think so.”

“Let me look at this.” She turned on the lamp. Then she pulled back my pajama top.

My mother’s expression of disgust and surprise at the sight of my middle frightened me again. I let her hold me for a long while. r r r

“Clarissa, thank you so much for coming,” said my mother.

“Oh, listen, Joan,” sang the queer, quavery voice of Clarissa Bing. Professors make for tough company, since in any gathering, every single one of them assumes they are the most intelligent person in the
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room. But my parents—who were as prickly and competitive as any—

held Clarissa Bing alone in unqualified esteem. Clarissa stood out from their tenured cronies. She was younger than my parents, in her midthirties. But Clarissa seemed an older soul than any of them. A dark-haired woman with a long, planar face, she wore in every weather the same clunky pilgrim shoes and knee-length sundresses that revealed her skinny, snow-white shins: oddball outfits typical of someone who had been isolated and brain-bound her whole life, who’d never noticed, or maybe never cared to observe, the habits of socialized folk. She drawled out her vowels, and fluttered her eyes as she spoke, in a kind of tic. She was pretty—a refined face, a rosy complexion—but somehow devoid of eroticism. She took no interest in classical music or literature (normally this disqualified anybody from friendship with my parents), but her burning interest in her own field, psychology, appealed to my mother’s gender-is-destiny politics; and her status as a reader at the Episcopal church won over my father. Her defining moment for him came at one of my parents’ cocktail parties, when she treated a room full of leftist humanities professors to a thirty-minute lecture about the clear indications in the Gospels, St. Paul, Acts, and Revelation, that the majority of people would, in fact, go to hell.