Famous Builder (17 page)

I walk inside the laundry room to pee inside an emptied coffee can. When I come back to the living room, Bobby’s already at it, slamming the plasterboard with a crowbar. Powder settles on our lips and lashes. Powder settles on the gray-beige carpet, the sofa from our old house in Woodcrest, the dried palm tray from the Florida Keys that my mother allegedly hurled at my father during a fight a dozen years ago—an incident which they periodically refer to with quiet, gleeful affection. I reach for the nearest hammer. Bobby and I know that we could have covered everything with tarps from the boat (it’s up on sawhorses in the driveway), but the operation must be achieved efficiently, swiftly, so that it’s too late to turn back. Our father hasn’t quite said yes to Bobby’s plan to switch my bedroom and the kitchen around. Maybe he doesn’t quite believe we’re going through with it. Or else he’s too wrapped up in his To Do list to take our plans seriously. But we’re trying to get as much messy work out of the way first, to prove to him how beautiful the house will be before he has the chance to resist.

Which he inevitably will.

Bobby’s sixteen; I’m seventeen. This is how the two of us plan to spend our weekends for the next four months.

The wall between the living room and bedroom is already half down before I strike it with my own hammer. My wrist hurts. We whoop, holler. I strike again, and then again. We laugh. Take that, I say, to the outrageous nervousness inside my gut. Take that, I say, to cheapness, control, the cold deep whirlpool that wants to take everything down inside it—what Mrs. Fox knew too well. Take that. We work through a storm of grit, a fierce white blizzard that’s transforming us into snowmen, but we’re entirely involved, committed to our project, even though Bobby hasn’t finished drawing up his plans, and doesn’t know how to manage the wiring, or how on earth he’ll get a sink to run water where my bed once stood. He yanks nails from the wood, the exposed studs sighing (how human, vulnerable they sound), as if he’s pulling out the house’s back teeth. Take that, death. We’re already fighting weariness, the inevitable second thoughts, but the truth is we haven’t felt this energized since that Mischief Night many years ago. Forbidden to paper trees with the Lennoxes and the Perozzis, we offered to guard our house, only to pull out bars of soap and write FUCK THE LISICKYS, THE LISICKYS SUCK DICK at the foot of our driveway, before we summoned our parents to witness the crime. “Who could have done such a thing?” we said, exasperated, speechless.

Then the storm door creaks in its frame. Bobby and I fix our eyes on each other—no, absolutely not. But I know the weight of those footsteps down the hall. I see a vision of myself dropping to my knees, picking up crumbled plaster from the carpet, though I know it’s too late. I stand perfectly straight and hide my hammer behind my back.

“I thought you were staying in Cherry Hill,” I say.

My father’s eyes go pure, blank, as if he’s come upon a murder. “My house.”

“We’re making it better,” Bobby says.

“My house,” my father says, more quietly now. “What are you doing to my house?” And then he’s down on his knees himself, pinching plaster in his fingers.

“Trust us,” I say, trembling inside.

“We’re making it better,” Bobby says. And with a steady pressure of the crowbar, something else gives way.

We’re grouped around the battered piano in the dorm lounge. Although outwardly we’re working out the harmonies of Ann and Nancy Wilson’s “Dog and Butterfly,” we each perform something else on our private interior stages: Bernardine picks her 12-string Gibson to Pure Prairie League’s “Amy”; Kevin perfects his monotonic nasal stupor to “One More Cup of Coffee for the Road”; Grace’s vibrato comes from a deeper, more womanly place (she has to stop listening to
Streisand Superman
). And I’m doing my own music, a romantic, violent mishmash that borrows fiercely from Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell. In our best moments, the four of us are capable of bringing a rowdy crowd of undergrads to reverent, bewildered silence (see them rest their beer bottles on their tables, their eyes filling, blinking), though when we’re off, we’re really off. No wonder the two fratboys—our audience—wince every time Grace raises a splayed palm toward an imaginary spotlight, suggesting in no uncertain terms that her feelings are the most important ones in the room.

Once we’ve gravelled our vocal chords, Bernardine asks to hear “Long Train Comin’,” the song I finished while I was home at my parents’ last weekend. I slide onto the piano bench, shoulders falling forward, feigning indifference, though my brain’s screwed so tight I might as well be running a fever. I start the first verse, my eyes squeezing shut as my throat strains for the high notes. My fingertips stick. No focus. What’s that outside? Dog? Church bell? I think of the big, ponderous bell swinging left, right, left, right, pushing back the air on either side as if it’s massive, heavy as water. By the time the rhythm shifts, though, and the key changes to B minor, E, then back to B minor, I’m entirely inside the music, throwing my head back, stunned by the lights above until my eyeballs ache. When did I become this person? I’m still trying to get the hang of it—the authority others give up to me, this unnerving privilege and power. Life was never like this when I wrote and sang Catholic folk songs or performed at nursing homes with my high-school madrigal group in those foolish black tights. What would people think if they knew my history, the hidden me? It all feels cagey on my part. Surely, one of these days I’ll be found out. Someone will come across one of my psalm settings in the college chapel missalette (I’ve published a dozen since tenth grade, and more, to my embarrassment, are on the way), and I’ll be tossed overboard.

But should I care? Let whoever finds out spray me with a cold hose, wash off the mud, the seaweed. I don’t see any real point to being in this group, or any group for that matter. I don’t listen to bands; I don’t even like bands. There isn’t even a single band that I can think of—not the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Clash—that can match Joni Mitchell’s harmonic structures or Laura Nyro’s beautiful, murderous intensity. Bands are too damn casual, bands are too damn fun. All that collectivity, all that willingness to merge, submerge, give up the self. Isn’t it all about group love? Don’t you wish you were us? Don’t we fuck more than you do? Posing, posturing: white people tossing about their fried hair, throwing out words like “ain’t,” or “don’t” for “doesn’t.” Perhaps it has something to do with my father (his work ethic, his distrust of anything lazy or lax), but to my mind certain kinds of collaboration come too close to cheating. Performing should scare the shit out of you, turn you inside out, hang you upside down from your toes, take you within a hair’s breath of your death. “The lights go down/ and it’s just you up there/ getting them to feel like that,” sings Joni, and that’s exactly what I want. I tremble inside a splash of light, trying to stay on pitch. There’s a burnt, electrical taste in my back fillings, and somewhere, deep in the darkness, a match flares; someone with a starved heart is calling out my name.

Then one voice, two, three—Kevin, Grace, Bernardine. What’s going on? The three of them are harmonizing, working their way through the last verse, mulching, fertilizing the melody until it pops, bursts into a layered garden: irises, tulips staining each other with color, light. A breeze blows. The air scents. We’re moving, alive, a wholeness. Throats are dusted with pollen. Tiny hairs tremble on the backs of our necks. And what would a single flower mean?

***

“So what kind of recorder do you need?”

My father’s bent over the open hood of the sedan, loosening a nut on—is that the carburetor?—with a wrench. I’m home from school for the weekend. Beyond the open garage door, rain pours down into the driveway drain, wetting the birch clumps, the veined leaves of the silver maple, the spreading junipers leeching across the licorice root.

“Daddy,” I say. (How I hate to say “Daddy,” but what else to call him? “Dad” sounds like someone you’d throw a football to, and “Father” sounds like it’s from the last century.) “We don’t have to do this today, really.” And I absolutely mean it. While I leapt at his offer to buy me a four-track recorder last week, I feel differently today. Don’t I already hear him in the kitchen yelling to my mother late one night about the checks written to Clover, the local supermarket; the small iced cake we had for dessert last night?

He turns his head to the left. “Hand me those pliers.”

I pick out a wrench before delicately putting it back. I wish I had the aptitude for car repair (wouldn’t my help mitigate this boredom, this dizziness?), but my father and I mutually gave up on my mechanical abilities when I started playing piano at age six. Not that he expects me, or my brothers, for that matter, to be him. If anything, he wants us to live lives that are bright, extraordinary, that spin off and away, and laugh at how simple his own was: the way he took backroads to bypass toll bridges, or wiped doorknobs with a pink T-shirt each time he locked the house to help catch the burglar who never seemed to arrive, but who would certainly take every last thing we had when he crashed an ax through our front window. Still, that doesn’t stop my father from marshaling us to his side when he puts on roof shingles or digs trenches in our enormous front lawn to lay pipes for sprinklers. If we can’t truly be helpers, then we can be witnesses, provide company. And a little suffering can be good for the soul, can toughen it, can’t it? Too much pleasure, too much of the easy life, and before you know it, you lose your brain cells, slouching on the couch before the TV, eating, well—cake.

“I don’t have the right tools. Ah, shit.” He rubs his face vigorously with both palms then holds them there for a second, breathing into the torn up skin. “Let’s go get your machine.”

“I think we should reconsider.”

“Listen,” he says solemnly. “You need a four-track recorder to make demo tapes. That’s what you told me, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“You want to be famous?” he asks more quietly now.

The question literally stops my breath. Famous? The way he says it is absolutely sincere, with only the slightest intimation of force; he doesn’t hear anything embarrassing above, beneath, or suffusing the word. He believes in my possibility with such steady, practically holy conviction that I’m moved and strengthened by it, though I’m reluctant to admit it to myself. Yes, I do want to be known and recognized for my work; I’d like to sing back to Laura and Joni, to enter the conversation. But admitting to a desire for fame sounds shameful— and as moral, frankly, as bulldozing acres of Arizona saguaros to sell lots.

“You have to earn a living,” he says.

“I know, but—” This doesn’t seem to be the moment to talk about claiming self, about creating something that resists the problem of death. Anyway, I don’t have the language for such thoughts. “If I was after money—” A delivery truck drives by, flings a wave of puddle water on the flooded lawn. “There are probably more efficient ways to earn a living.”

He faces me, shoulders relaxing backward, neck lengthening until it makes a tender crack. We sigh at once, together. It still startles us both that I’ve turned out to be six inches taller than he. We smile tentatively, then glance away. “I’m going to change these clothes,” he says.

A single yellow chrysanthemum blows across the floor of the garage and hits one wall, catching somewhere on the undercarriage of the car, absorbing the scent of the back tire. It occurs to me that if I’d stayed back at school, I’d have finished the new song I’ve been struggling with for weeks, not to mention those French conjugations. But, in spite of the agitated particles in the air, the sense of constant motion, the occasional blowup, the stifling routine of things, I love it here. (Where else can I sit and read the newspaper or work on my songs in silence and not feel the burden of presenting myself in an acceptable way? Where else but in their lamplit kitchen, with my parents attending to their tasks in other rooms, can I be absolutely alone but together with people at the same time?) Is something wrong with me? Sister Mary Jonathan, the school therapist I see on Tuesday afternoons, thinks so. She’s suggested more than once that I’m too attached to my family, that it’s time to separate, that I’m not giving the luminous Loyola College, a school I’ve come to loathe more than simple three-chord pop songs, a chance. The problem is that she’s so convinced of the school’s intrinsic value that she’d never let me go. Two months into my first semester I can’t figure out whatever possessed me to choose this small Catholic school with a heavy concentration of business majors and no established traditions in the creative arts. Was it only that they made a fuss over me when they found out about my work in music? Or was I so sick and tired of hearing my parents’ worries about my desire to put off college, their fears that such a decision might turn out to be “low-class” that it was easier to give in to the first school who’d said yes? (Didn’t my brother Bobby do that when he signed on to four years at L.S.U., prompting the whole lot of us to weep silently for hours after we left him off, as we drove back north through the swamps of southern Louisiana, devastated?) Whatever it is, I’ve gone wrong. And time is running out: I need the nerve and audacity to get myself the hell away from school, from home, to fly out to Los Angeles, to rent a little apartment, to perform at Doug Weston’s Troubadour, to pound the streets, to work myself ragged, to get my tapes into the right people’s hands.

“Ready?” My father’s changed his T-shirt, but he’s still wearing the same pants he wore while working on the car.

“You’re wearing that?”

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s a spot on your pants.”

He looks down at the hem, squints his left eye, and rubs it—protein? blood?—with the tip of his thumb. He shakes his head. “You worry too much.”