Brewster (2 page)

T
HE STORY IS
that my parents moved to Brewster in 1956, when I was three, because my father wanted to open a shoe store and the rent was cheaper than in White Plains. It made sense. Brewster wasn’t much: small wooden houses with dark yards, a train station, a river—no more or less than most places—but it was cheap. It had some things. A bank. Basic services. Folks from the city stopped in Brewster on the way to nicer places in the Berkshires. There were big reservoirs in the woods that the city had put in for its water supply, and out on Route 22, past the Elk’s Club, there was an A&P with a conveyer belt that took your groceries in a metal cart with your number out to the curb. When I was a kid I’d spin the metal rollers with my hand.

Sam’s Shoes was on Main across from Bob’s Diner. Everybody knew Sam. He and Vera had come from Germany where it seemed they’d had a hard time of it during the war. Sam was Jewish but he knew shoes.

They were there for sixteen years. They’d meant to move on—to a bigger town with a park and a library, maybe even to the city—but when I was four my brother Aaron, who had blond hair after my mother’s father, plugged in a lamp he’d found on the street and died. It happens. I was playing in the living room when I heard my father screaming and a few seconds later, my mother. I’d passed Aaron on the stairs a few minutes before, carrying something up. “Shhh,” he said. I never saw him again.

I could have said something. I didn’t. And anything I said after that didn’t really matter much. The things you don’t say you can’t take back.

And that was that. We didn’t talk about him. I remember walking by his room and seeing his bed, his shelf, the punching-bag dinosaur in the corner, the toys on his desk—all quiet like in an aquarium—and thinking he’d be coming home from school.

I think now they just broke. People break, just like anything else. They’d lost everything once, now they’d lost it again. And they broke. No more to it.

I’m not making any claim to anything. You read worse stories in the paper every day.

N
OTHING CHANGED
—and everything did. My father went back to work because the store was there—because somebody had to go. We ate at the same table, I watched the same shows. Every morning for fourteen years my mother went into my brother’s room and pulled the curtains, then closed them at night. Once a week she dusted and vacuumed. She didn’t talk to me much. It was like something inside her had frozen. When I was little and couldn’t sleep I’d come downstairs to find my father in the leather chair looking over the top of some book by Stifter or Büchner or Musil as if he was confused by something he’d read. My mother would be sitting at the kitchen table in front of a closed magazine, and she’d push herself up with her arms and make me some warm milk.

I was four when he died, so I don’t remember much. I remember going into his room and taking a toy and my mother grabbing the hair on the back of my head and slapping my face three times, not back and forth but the same side, then bursting into tears. And I remember standing in our yard watching Mr. Perillo reaching down into the gutters and throwing big flapping handfuls of wet leaves off our roof and my father pleading in that accent like Colonel Klink’s in
Hogan’s Heroes
, “Really, Tony, you do not haff to do zat,” and Mr. Perillo not even looking at him, saying, “Forget about it, Sam, almost done.”

When I was five or six the neighbors had a block party on the Fourth like every year. The cops blocked off the street and there were hanging paper lanterns and kids running everywhere and people laughing from the porches or standing around in groups in the shadows so all you could see was their light-colored shirts or pants. It was hot and sticky and if you looked into the backyards you could see the fireflies sparking up in the weeds. The air smelled like smoke and grass and burning meat. I found my father sitting on the top step of the Montourris’ porch in his dress shirt and slacks and I sat down next to him between the paper plates and the half-filled Dixie cups and even though it was dark, I remember watching yellow jackets moving in the beer like something trying to wake up.

“The wood is still warm,” he said, putting his hand on the boards next to him, and then he didn’t say anything more until I heard a kind of hissing sound and realized he was crying. He’d taken his glasses off and he was holding his nose with his right hand like he wanted to hide it and his shoulders were jerking up and down. I didn’t know what to do. His left hand was just lying next to him on the porch, palm up, so I put my hand in it but nothing happened—it was like it had fallen asleep—and after a while I took my hand back.

Sometimes it felt like there’d been some kind of mistake, like I was the one who’d died and nobody wanted to admit it. Mostly I didn’t know what to do.

I
HAVE ONLY ONE MEMORY
from before. I remember walking around the ball field, the grass like a carpet under the water, and seeing small, dark fish, probably perch, shooting through the backstop fence. The East Branch had flooded. My father was there, and so was Aaron. There were clouds all around us and the bleachers had water up to the first seat and we walked around the bases with our pants rolled up looking for the white squares under the water and the fish running away from us looked like somebody pushing his finger up against the surface. My father threw me on his shoulders; he seemed big then.

I have a memory of my brother, I think, eating snow. And peeing on a worm. That’s it.

I
N BREWSTER
there was no other side of the tracks; if there was, Ray would have lived there.

Ray lived with his dad and his baby brother, Gene, who was fifteen years younger than him, in a small, dark brown house with a big American flag nailed vertically to the wall under the porch. Ray’s mom had left when he was nine—his stepmom, right after Gene was born. I could walk to his house in about ten minutes, and did, many times. The shingles had faded out in some places more than others and the stain had run in long drips you’d want to wipe off with your thumb but couldn’t because they were hard as rock. Where the railing sagged you could see the screws being yanked out of the floor boards and the roof had nails like teeth coming through because somebody had had a size too big and didn’t care. Inside, the ceiling always seemed lower than it should. That first year we’d sit around and little Gene, who we’d pick up after school from a woman named Carol, would crawl around and put things in his mouth and Ray would take them out.

“Hey little guy, you want a beer stein?” he’d say when Gene crawled up to the cabinet where Mr. Cappicciano kept his collection. “Whaddya say? Want a beer?” And Gene, who’d somehow pulled himself up on his rashy little legs by grabbing onto a kind of step on the front of the cabinet, would fall on his diaper with a soft, crinkly
poof
and Ray would say “Nope, not ready. Gotta be able to stand up before you can fall down.” And he’d scoop him up and smell his ass, then hold him out in front of him like a heavy doll and scrunch up his face and Gene would smile like a senile old man.

I asked Ray about his mother once. His real one. He showed me a postcard of a yellow motel under a blue sky with two cars parked out front. “The Silver Dollar Lodge” was written in white script across the top. I flipped it over. The postmark was from Reno, Nevada. “Thinking of you,” it said.

He took the card back. “Just not that much, right?” He shrugged. “I had a picture but my old man threw it out.”

“You ever miss her?” I said.

“What’s to miss?” he said. “She left.”

T
HERE’S NO REASON
we should have been friends. I didn’t talk much. I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t good-looking or funny or tough. I was just tall enough that I didn’t get into fights; when I did, I generally lost. The cool kids just ignored me. I didn’t care. I read books. I wrote pissed-off poetry that I thought about showing to Mr. Wentzel who was teaching to avoid the draft and who walked around like he was demonstrating the effects of gravity on Jupiter—like the pull of the planet was just too much, man—but I never did. I did all right in school. I wasn’t stupid, just fucked up.

For a while I thought that high school might change things for me; that I’d make friends, that the girls I tried not to look at who all seemed to be ripening at the same time wouldn’t see the fear in my heart. By sophomore year, I knew better. The girls would look at me, then whisper to each other and laugh. I’d have nothing to say. Calling attendance, the teachers would pause when they came to my name. Mosher?

And they’d look at me over their green ledgers with their columns and squares, their pencil points waiting next to my name, and they might as well have been saying it out loud: “Silent?” Here. “Stubborn?” Here. “Difficult, troubled?” Here. I hated them all, hated them for their pinched-off little souls, their disgust with everything beautiful, and spent half my time trying to be what they wanted me to be—smiling at their stupid jokes, not correcting them when they said something wrong, working to be “normal,” to be noticed—then hating them all the more. God knows what they would have called it twenty years later. Anger Surplus Syndrome. The abbreviation would have fit.

I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t go easy. About anything. Injustice burned in me like an ulcer and everything fed it: the sour little men and women who’d squirreled away just enough power to stick it to somebody else, who’d never been young, never laughed, whose every breath was a sneer—enthusiasm was a threat and they’d strangle it in its crib and hand you the body and smile, and the sooner you learned to bow your head and kiss their ass, the easier it would go for you. Only I couldn’t do it. Fool that I was, I thought the abuse of power went against the order of things.

“To be or not to be?” It must have seemed like an interesting question. What to be. How to be who you had to be. I was sixteen, and I felt like someone had opened a door in my head—I
understood
this. I could hardly sit still. And so, forgetting I wasn’t actually supposed to be
interested
in
Hamlet
, I blurted out a question. Who knows what it was? Probably something inane about identity and truth and having to be who you were or not be at all. Farber was writing something on the board.

“Just shut up, Mosher, you’re not here to ask questions,” he said, not turning around.

“I just—”

“Shut up.”

It came out of nowhere, a quick slap to the face. A moment before we’d all been laughing.

I just sat there, the blood pounding in my head. It was the tone—the actual anger in it. I’d seen Farber walking a Puerto Rican kid to the principal’s office, his hand like a meaty claw clamped on the back of the kid’s neck.

“What’s the matter, you don’t know the answer?” It was out before I knew it.

He turned around. The room was suddenly very quiet. “What did you say?”

I could feel a small trickle of pee escape into my underwear. “I thought this was a school.” I’d started to shake.

“I hear anybody ask for your opinion, smartass?”

“I thought—”

“Anybody ask for your opinion, smartass?”

“I just—”

“Anybody ask your opinion, smartass?”

“No.”

“No,” he mimicked in a mincing British accent. A few of the kids laughed. I wanted to drive the leg of my chair through his teeth.

“Don’t you
ever
talk to me that way.”

“I didn’t—”

“Ever.” He shifted his weight, letting me dangle. “You know what you are?”

“I—”

“A troublemaker, that’s what you are,” he said, his face swollen with rage and disgust. “One of those people always digging things up, turning everything around.” He paused. “What’s the matter, you gonna write to your congressman? You think this is some big injustice?” He leaned forward, whispered it like a secret: “Guess what—nobody cares what you think.”

I
UNDERSTAND
why being hated can make you angry; I never figured out why it should make you feel ashamed.

I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t know anybody, really, and I knew better than to mention it at home. My mother wouldn’t say anything, just sit there looking at her food with her head slightly to the side like it had insulted her, methodically impaling small pieces of potato. I’d listen to myself going on—in German, of course, which made everything even more ridiculous—all the time watching some other conversation passing over her face like small clouds on a windy day—a quick flinch in the cheek, the eyebrows slowly raised in a suffocated shrug, a smile like a spasm.

“Obviously you did something to provoke this man,” she’d snap, talking to her plate, sick of it all, of me, which would be my father’s cue to jump in and say, “And even if you didn’t, what would you have us do—you think they’re not going to stand up for each other?”

I started taking my tests in pen, so Farber couldn’t change my answers. It didn’t matter. He got me on the essays. He didn’t call on me the rest of the term, just looked right through me as I sat there with my hand up like I was invisible, then gave me a D in participation. I got an F in citizenship. I didn’t care. Fuck him.

That fall I started writing down things I read in a blue spiral notebook I carried in my back pocket. On the inside cover I copied out a quote from Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.”

I’d whisper it to myself walking down the hallway, sitting in class: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win. It was like a chant, a prayer. Christ, I was pathetic. I clung to it like a sapling in a cliff. I was no Gandhi, I had no idea what to make of myself: Half of me wanted to apologize to the world—the other half wanted to drive a stake through its heart. It didn’t matter: I loved the march of it, the promise of it: first this, then that. I was nobody—a sixteen-year-old at Brewster High School. What was I going to do, organize a Salt March to the five-and-ten? It didn’t matter. Nothing they said mattered. It could be done, it was inevitable. I’d
make
the world notice. My biggest fear was that I’d never make it past the first stage, that I’d suffocate inside my own skin, invisible, before the laughter had a chance to start.