Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (3 page)

Two thin girls braced themselves before crossing the busy road, hopping from foot to foot on the scalding pavement. “The Tar Heel,” Lisa called out. “No, The Wait ’n’ Sea. Get it? S-E-A.”

A car trailing a motorboat pulled up to a gas pump. “The Shell Station!” Gretchen shouted.

Everything we saw was offered as a possible name, and the resulting list of nominees confirmed that once you left the shoreline, Emerald Isle was sorely lacking in natural beauty. “The TV Antenna,” my sister Tiffany said. “The Telephone Pole.” “The Toothless Black Man Selling Shrimp from the Back of His Van.”

“The Cement Mixer.” “The Overturned Grocery Cart.” “Gulls on a Garbage Can.” My mother inspired “The Cigarette Butt Thrown Out the Window” and suggested we look for ideas on the beach rather than on the highway. “I mean, my God, how depressing can you get?” She acted annoyed, but we could tell she was really enjoying it. “Give me something that suits us,” she said. “Give me something that will last.”

What would ultimately last were these fifteen minutes on the coastal highway, but we didn’t know that then. When older, even the crankiest of us would accept them as proof that we were once a happy family: our mother young and healthy, our father the man who could snap his fingers and give us everything we wanted, the whole lot of us competing to name our good fortune.

The house was, as our parents had promised, perfect. This was an older cottage with pine-paneled walls that gave each room the thoughtful quality of a den. Light fell in strips from the louvered shutters, and the furniture, which was included in the sale, reflected the taste of a distinguished sea captain. Once we’d claimed bedrooms and lain awake all night, mentally rearranging the furniture, it would be our father who’d say, “Now hold on a minute, it’s not ours yet.” By the next afternoon he had decided that the golf course wasn’t so great after all. Then it rained for two straight days, and he announced that it might be wiser to buy some land, wait a few years, and think about building a place of our own. “I mean, let’s be practical.” Our mother put on her raincoat. She tied a plastic bag over her head and stood at the water’s edge, and for the first time in our lives we knew exactly what she was thinking.

By our final day of vacation our father had decided that instead of building a place on Emerald Isle, we should improve the home we already had. “Maybe add a pool,” he said. “What do you kids think about that?” Nobody answered.

By the time he’d finished wheedling it down, the house at the beach had become a bar in the basement. It looked just like a real bar, with tall stools and nooks for wine. There was a sink for washing glasses and an assortment of cartoon napkins illustrating the lighter side of alcoholism. For a week or two my sisters and I tottered at the counter, pretending to be drunks, but then the novelty wore off and we forgot all about it.

On subsequent vacations, both with and without our parents, we would drive by the cottage we had once thought of as our own. Each of us referred to it by a different name, and over time qualifiers became necessary. (“You know, our house.”) The summer after we didn’t buy it, the new owners — or “those people,” as we liked to call them — painted The Ship Shape yellow. In the late seventies Amy noted that The Nut Hut had extended the carport and paved the driveway. Lisa was relieved when the Wait ’n’ Sea returned to its original color, and Tiffany was incensed when The Toothless Black Man Selling Shrimp from the Back of His Van sported a sign endorsing Jesse Helms in the 1984 senatorial campaign. Four years later my mother called to report that The Sandpiper had been badly damaged by Hurricane Hugo. “It’s still there,” she said. “But barely.” Shortly thereafter, according to Gretchen, The Shell Station was torn down and sold as a vacant lot.

I know that such a story does not quite work to inspire sympathy. (“My home — well, one of my homes — fell through.”) We had no legitimate claim to self-pity, were ineligible even to hold a grudge, but that didn’t stop us from complaining.

In the coming years our father would continue to promise what he couldn’t deliver, and in time we grew to think of him as an actor auditioning for the role of a benevolent millionaire. He’d never get the part but liked the way that the words felt in his mouth. “What do you say to a new car?” he’d ask. “Who’s up for a cruise to the Greek Isles?” He expected us to respond by playing the part of an enthusiastic family, but we were unwilling to resume our old roles. As if carried by a tide, our mother drifted farther and farther away, first to twin beds and then down the hall to a room decorated with seascapes and baskets of sun-bleached sand dollars. It would have been nice, a place at the beach, but we already had a home. A home with a bar. Besides, had things worked out, you wouldn’t have been happy for us. We’re not that kind of people.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Full House

M Y PARENTS WERE NOT THE TYPE of people who went to bed at a regular hour. Sleep overtook them, but neither the time nor the idea of a mattress seemed very important. My father favored a chair in the basement, but my mother was apt to lie down anywhere, waking with carpet burns on her face or the pattern of the sofa embossed into the soft flesh of her upper arms. It was sort of embarrassing. She might sleep for eight hours a day, but they were never consecutive hours and they involved no separate outfit. For Christmas we would give her nightgowns, hoping she might take the hint. “They’re for bedtime,” we’d say, and she’d look at us strangely, as if, like the moment of one’s death, the occasion of sleep was too incalculable to involve any real preparation.

The upside to being raised by what were essentially a pair of house cats was that we never had any enforced bedtime. At two A.M. on a school night, my mother would not say, “Go to sleep,” but rather, “Shouldn’t you be tired?” It wasn’t a command but a sincere question, the answer provoking little more than a shrug. “Suit yourself,” she’d say, pouring what was likely to be her thirtieth or forty-second cup of coffee. “I’m not sleepy, either. Don’t know why, but I’m not.”

We were the family that never shut down, the family whose TV was so hot we needed an oven mitt in order to change the channel. Every night was basically a slumber party, so when the real thing came along, my sisters and I failed to show much of an interest.

“But we get to stay up as late as we want,” the hosts would say.

“And . . . ?”

The first one I attended was held by a neighbor named Walt Winters. Like me, Walt was in the sixth grade. Unlike me, he was gregarious and athletic, which meant, basically, that we had absolutely nothing in common. “But why would he include me?” I asked my mother. “I hardly know the guy.”

She did not say that Walt’s mother had made him invite me, but I knew that this was the only likely explanation. “Oh, go,” she said. “It’ll be fun.”

I tried my best to back out, but then my father got wind of it, and that option was closed. He often passed Walt playing football in the street and saw in the boy a younger version of himself. “He’s maybe not the best player in the world, but he and his friends, they’re a good group.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then you go sleep with them.”

I could not tell my father that boys made me anxious, and so I invented individual reasons to dislike them. The hope was that I might seem discerning rather than frightened, but instead I came off sounding like a prude.

“You’re expecting me to spend the night with someone who curses? Someone who actually throws rocks at cats?”

“You’re damned right I am,” my father said. “Now get the hell over there.”

Aside from myself, there were three other guests at Walt’s slumber party. None of them were particularly popular — they weren’t good-looking enough for that — but each could hold his own on a playing field or in a discussion about cars. The talk started the moment I walked through the door, and while pretending to listen, I wished that I could have been more honest. “What is the actual point of football?” I wanted to ask. “Is a V-8 engine related in any way to the juice?” I would have sounded like a foreign-exchange student, but the answers might have given me some sort of a foundation. As it was, they may as well have been talking backward.

There were four styles of houses on our street, and while Walt’s was different from my own, I was familiar with the layout. The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called a family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood’s only Jews had turned into a combination darkroom and fallout shelter. Walt’s family was Methodist, and so the room’s focal point was a large black-and-white television. Family photos hung on the wall alongside pictures of the various athletes Mr. Winters had successfully pestered for autographs. I admired them to the best of my ability but was more interested in the wedding portrait displayed above the sofa. Arm in arm with her uniformed husband, Walt’s mother looked deliriously, almost frighteningly happy. The bulging eyes and fierce, gummy smile: it was an expression bordering on hysteria, and the intervening years had done nothing to dampen it.

“What is she on?” my mother would whisper whenever we passed Mrs. Winters waving gaily from her front yard. I thought she was being too hard on her, but after ten minutes in the woman’s home I understood exactly what my mother was talking about.

“Pizza’s here!!!” she chimed when the deliveryman came to the door. “Oh, boys, how about some piping hot pizza!!!” I thought it was funny that anyone would use the words piping hot, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I felt I could actually laugh at. Neither could I laugh at Mr. Winters’s pathetic imitation of an Italian waiter. “Mamma mia. Who want anudda slice a dipizza!”

I had the idea that adults were supposed to make themselves scarce at slumber parties, but Walt’s parents were all over the place: initiating games, offering snacks and refills. When the midnight horror movie came on, Walt’s mother crept into the bathroom, leaving a ketchup-spattered knife beside the sink. An hour passed, and when none of us had yet discovered it, she started dropping little hints. “Doesn’t anyone want to wash their hands?” she asked. “Will whoever’s closest to the door go check to see if I left fresh towels in the bathroom?”

You just wanted to cry for people like her.

As corny as they were, I was sorry when the movie ended and Mr. and Mrs. Winters stood to leave. It was only two A.M. , but clearly they were done in. “I just don’t know how you boys can do it,” Walt’s mother said, yawning into the sleeve of her bathrobe. “I haven’t been up this late since Lauren came into the world.” Lauren was Walt’s sister, who was born prematurely and lived for less than two days. This had happened before the Winterses moved onto our street, but it wasn’t any kind of secret, and you weren’t supposed to flinch upon hearing the girl’s name. The baby had died too soon to pose for photographs, but still she was regarded as a full-fledged member of the family. She had a Christmas stocking the size of a mitten, and they even threw her an annual birthday party, a fact that my mother found especially creepy. “Let’s hope they don’t invite us,” she said. “I mean, Jesus, how do you shop for a dead baby?”

I guessed it was the fear of another premature birth that kept Mrs. Winters from trying again, which was sad, as you got the sense she really wanted a lively household. You got the sense that she had an idea of a lively household and that the slumber party and the ketchup-covered knife were all a part of that idea. While in her presence, we had played along, but once she said good night, I understood that all bets were off.

She and her husband lumbered up the stairs, and when Walt felt certain that they were asleep, he pounced on Dale Gummerson, shouting, “Titty twister!!!” Brad Clancy joined in, and when they had finished, Dale raised his shirt, revealing nipples as crimped and ruddy as the pepperoni slices littering the forsaken pizza box.

“Oh my God,” I said, realizing too late that this made me sound like a girl. The appropriate response was to laugh at Dale’s misfortune, not to flutter your hands in front of your face, screeching, “What have they done to your poor nipples! Shouldn’t we put some ice on them?”

Walt picked up on this immediately. “Did you just say you wanted to put ice on Dale’s nipples?”

“Well, not me . . . personally,” I said. “I meant, you know, generally. As a group. Or Dale could do it himself if he felt like it.”

Walt’s eyes wandered from my face to my chest, and then the entire slumber party was upon me. Dale had not yet regained the full use of his arms, and so he sat on my legs while Brad and Scott Marlboro pinned me to the carpet. My shirt was raised, a hand was clamped over my mouth, and Walt latched onto my nipples, twisting them back and forth as if they were a set of particularly stubborn toggle bolts. “Now who needs ice!” he said. “Now who thinks he’s the goddam school nurse.” I’d once felt sorry for Walt, but now, my eyes watering in pain, I understood that little Lauren was smart to have cut out early.

When finally I was freed, I went upstairs and stood at the kitchen window, my arms folded lightly against my chest. My family’s house was located in a ravine. You couldn’t see it from the street, but still I could make out the glow of lights spilling from the top of our driveway. It was tempting, but were I to leave now, I’d never hear the end of it. The baby cried. The baby had to go home. Life at school would be unbearable, so I left the window and returned to the basement, where Walt was shuffling cards against the coffee table. “Just in time,” he said. “Have a seat.”

I lowered myself to the floor and reached for a magazine, trying my best to act casual. “I’m not really much for games, so if it’s okay with you, I think I’ll just watch.”

“Watch, hell,” Walt said. “This is strip poker. What kind of a homo wants to sit around and watch four guys get naked?”

The logic of this was lost on me. “Well, won’t we all sort of be watching?”

“Looking maybe, but not watching,” Walt said. “There’s a big difference.”

I asked what the difference was, but nobody answered. Then Walt made a twisting motion with his fingers, and I took my place at the table, praying for a gas leak or an electrical fire — anything to save me from the catastrophe of strip poker. To the rest of the group, a naked boy was like a lamp or a bath mat, something so familiar and uninteresting that it faded into the background, but for me it was different. A naked boy was what I desired more than anything on earth, and when you were both watching and desiring, things came up, one thing in particular that was bound to stand out and ruin your life forever. “I hate to tell you,” I said, “but it’s against my religion to play poker.”

“Yeah, right,” Walt said. “What are you, Baptist?”

“Greek Orthodox.”

“Well, that’s a load of crap because the Greeks invented cards,” Walt said.

“Actually, I think it was the Egyptians.” This from Scott, who was quickly identifying himself as the smart one.

“Greeks, Egyptians, they’re all the same thing,” Walt said. “Anyway, what your pooh-bah doesn’t know won’t hurt him, so shut the hell up and play.”

He dealt the cards, and I looked from face to face, exaggerating flaws and reminding myself that these boys did not like me. The hope was that I might crush any surviving atom of attraction, but as has been the case for my entire life, the more someone dislikes me the more attractive he becomes. The key was to stall, to argue every hand until the sun came up and Mrs. Winters saved me with whatever cheerful monstrosity she’d planned for breakfast.

On the off chance that stalling would not work, I stepped into the bathroom and checked to make sure I was wearing clean underwear. A boner would be horrible beyond belief, but a boner combined with a skid mark meant that I should take the ketchup-smeared knife and just kill myself before it was too late.

“What are you, launching a sub in there?” Walt shouted. “Come on, we’re waiting.”

Usually when I was forced to compete, it was my tactic to simply give up. To try in any way was to announce your ambition, which only made you more vulnerable. The person who wanted to win but failed was a loser, while the person who didn’t really care was just a weirdo — a title I had learned to live with. Here, though, surrender was not an option. I had to win at a game I knew nothing about, and that seemed hopeless until I realized we were all on an equal footing. Not even Scott had the slightest idea what he was doing, and by feigning an air of expertise, I found I could manipulate things in my favor.

“A joker and a queen is much better than the four and five of spades,” I said, defending my hand against Brad Clancy’s.

“But you have a joker and a three of diamonds.”

“Yes, but the joker makes it a queen.”

“I thought you said that poker was against your religion,” Walt said.

“Well, that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. Greeks invented cards, remember. They’re in my blood.”

At the start of the game, the starburst clock had read three-thirty. An hour later I was missing one shoe, Scott and Brad had lost their shirts, and both Walt and Dale were down to their underwear. If this was what winning felt like, I wondered why I hadn’t tried it before. Confidently in the lead, I invented little reasons for the undressed to get up and move about the room.