Heft (18 page)

Mrs. Cohen pours herself another glass of wine but this time she offers me one too. I look at her. I can’t tell what the right answer is.

No thank you, I say, and she looks disappointed. She reaches up and puts her brown straight hair into a pile on her head and holds it there, then lets it drop around her shoulders.

I turn back to the sink and the dishes.

You’re a good kid, she says. Trevor’s lucky to have a good friend like you.

Thank you, I say.

April’s a good kid too. I worry— says Mrs. Cohen, but then changes her mind and stops.

She hums to herself and I can’t tell what she’s humming. I close my eyes for a moment because she can’t see my face and imagine that she is my mother. That my mother is drinking behind me, yes she’s drinking but she can take it—she can be loving and kind and she can do normal things from day to day. She can handle it. I miss her. I never even tried to help her.

When I’m done I go to leave and Mrs. Cohen says to me Handsome boy. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking into her glass.

A moment passes. Then another. I walk to the refrigerator and open and shut it.

Well, I say. I guess I.

And then, right then, my phone buzzes. I take it out of my pocket gratefully. It’s a text from Dee Marshall.
Party at jims,
it says.
Come.

• • •

I
am quiet as I walk upstairs. Suddenly there is nothing I want
more than to leave this house, to walk outside into the fall night and breathe in deeply and sharply, to change out of the clothes I am wearing and into something sloppy and old.

In the bedroom I sit on the bed and think that if I were a good son I would drive to the hospital and sit instead on my mother’s bed, at her side, and put a cool hand on her forehead, as she used to do for me when I was a boy, and I would sing her a song of my choosing. And even if she couldn’t hear me this would be the right thing to do. I also think that if I were a good boyfriend, or whatever I am, a good person, I would call Lindsay Harper and tell her I’m sorry for not coming to her house today, which I really am. Sorry. I’m sorry for letting her believe I had it in me to be good to her and normal. For letting her think I’d do right by her.

Anyway I’m not a good son or a good boyfriend or a good person so instead of doing these things I take off my too-small shirt and my cheap Dockers and I leave them rumpled on the floor out of this same badness. Then I quietly pull open every drawer in the dresser, looking for the worst and most terrible outfit I brought with me, and finally I find a pair of huge jeans I haven’t put on since before I got to Pells. Now that I am bigger they fit me a little better but they are still baggier than what is fashionable and therefore they are right. I find a huge gray sweatshirt with a hood and I put the hood up. Then I find my tomato sneakers, the ones Pottsy made fun of, and I stick my feet into them with no socks. I look at myself in the mirror above the dresser and I see with satisfaction that I look awful, like the Grim Reaper under my gray hood: green under the eyes, a few days’ worth of weak stubble on my chin and cheeks. Skinnier than I should be because I have not eaten right. I’m too tall for the mirror and I have to duck to see myself.

I walk quietly as I can into the hallway and try to sneak past Trevor’s room but Trevor’s door is open so I have to stop. He looks at me calmly from his bed.

What are you doing, he says.

He’s caught me off-guard.

—Going to Yonkers.

He looks at me. Dude, he says, as if he can’t believe my stupidity and traitorousness. Kel. We just fucking
lost
to Yonkers.

Yeah, well, I say, scratching the back of my hooded head. Friend’s having a party.

I don’t tell him who invited me.

Trevor shrugs. Whatever, he says.

—You wanna come?

—Nope.

OK, I say, and walk down the hall relieved.

But then Trevor emerges from his room and I know it’s because he can’t stand to be left out of anything. He has nothing to do tonight. I turn around.

I am aching to leave. I am standing there on the tips of my toes.

Trevor says fine he’ll go. But only if we can roll in there with, like, a crew of four big guys, he says.

I want to laugh at him loudly. I want to tell him he’s the most ridiculous person I’ve ever met and I can’t believe I never realized it before this week. I want to tell him he deserves to lose at everything he ever does. Instead I tell him to invite whoever he wants.

Trevor drives. He puts on something boring and guitarish. He’s on his phone calling his boys. I have realized that I cannot call them mine. Cossy can’t come, his family says. Kurt says he’ll meet us there and asks for the address. Peters is coming and Kramer is coming and Matt Barnaby, who I don’t particularly want to see but Trevor likes him, so. We pick them up one after another at their homes, which are lit up inside and lined with little white lights outside and in general look like institutions more than houses. Museums. Some of the driveways are still filled with cars. To get to Matt’s house we drive right past Lindsay’s and I strain to look without moving my head so Trevor does not make fun of me. Someone’s standing in the driveway but I can’t make out who it is.

When Matt Barnaby gets into the car he says We’re going to Yonkers why?

And I’m happy when no one laughs or even replies to him.

When Kramer gets into the car he pulls out a liter-sized bottle of Coke that he has filled so it’s mostly rum. He swigs from it and passes it around and when it gets to me I take several gulps in a row and wince and relax as the burn lowers into me.

When Peters gets into the car he asks me how my mother is and I tell him she’s great, she’s getting better and they think she’ll be out by next week. It is the loneliest lie I ever told.

By the time we get off the Saw Mill I am glowing with rum warmth. I am smiling. When Matt Barnaby says something stupid I start calling him Junior and for some reason everyone thinks this is very funny, so I keep doing it.
What’s that, Junior?

I can tell he’s getting mad but I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.

My cell phone goes off in the middle of one of his stories and I say Hang on, Junior, just gotta take this real quick.

It’s Dee Marshall.

Where you at? he says.

Five minutes, I say.

Who you with? he says.

Just some of my boys from school, I say.

Dee laughs in his low voice. Long as they’re not jealous, he says, and I realize suddenly that it was Dee, five years ago, who first went around going
Jealous? Jealous?
That it’s Dee I stole this from.

Who was that, asks Trevor, when I’ve hung up the phone.

This kid Jim having the party, I lie.

I’m not sure what will happen when we walk in and there is Dee Marshall and there are several other boys from the Yonkers football team, but I don’t care. In some ways I am glad.

We’re driving down McLean, which was a street that I spent a lot of time running up and down when I was a kid. My mother’s favorite store is here: an Irish imports store. She had an Irish grandmother she used to tell me about. Tonight it looks sad and run-down. Empty because everything’s closed for Thanksgiving.

Where . . . are . . . we . . . ?
whispers Peters in a jokey spooky voice.

Turn here, I tell Trevor, and Trevor makes a careening right down Jim’s street, which isn’t the nicest street in Yonkers but I don’t care, and neither is mine.

There are cars lining both sides of the road. So many that we have to drive to the end and then turn onto a different street to park.

I haven’t been to Jim’s since I was twelve or thirteen and because he doesn’t play sports I haven’t really seen him much since then either. Maybe once or twice. He grew up in a house full of brothers with a single father who was never around. I smoked my first cigarette with Jim and his older brother Pat when we were ten. I kissed Kelly Haslow in his junky backyard. Jim’s was the house we went to when we wished to be bad.

Suddenly I wish that I could leave my Pells friends behind. Run up the stairs and fall into the warm embrace of Yonkers, of my real true friends from Yonkers. Instead, as we get out of Trevor’s Audi, I turn around and say, Kramer, you still got that Coke bottle? and I take a very deep swig of it so that when I walk up the stairs at the front of the pack it is still blistering in my throat.

The outside of Jim’s house looks as if it hasn’t been painted in fifty years. There are rusted cans in front of the garage door, which is hanging askew on its hinges. Sad dead shrubs run in a line around the side of the house.

I try the door but it’s locked so I ring the doorbell. I can hear the party inside, already going loud. Nobody answers for a while. A girl’s loud voice makes its way out the window saying
No YOU no YOU no YOU!

What’s going on? Peters asks.

I turn to answer—my voice is stopped by the sight of them, my four friends, all earnest and tense, all dressed alike in bright bold-colored shirts and jeans that fit them very well. Boat shoes. All with the rich perfect haircuts their mothers buy them.

Before I can say anything the door flies open.

Jim is standing on the other side of it. He looks older than I thought he would. He’s gotten fatter and he has the start of a beard. Kel Keller, he says, and he throws an arm over my shoulders and I am grateful to him and at the same time I wonder if Dee Marshall has told him about my mother.

Jim rotates me toward the crowded room and says my name again, louder, to the crowd. There is no hush but there are scattered glances my way, and then I hear my name repeated lowly around the room.

Jim’s house on the inside is exactly as I remember it. Messy and empty of furniture and bare of carpet. A man’s house but for the wall art of the floral or religious variety. When I came here as a little kid I used to wonder who had put it up.

Everyone’s standing. In the hallway and living room it is so dark that I have to wait for my eyes to adjust before I can move forward. Jim and I walk down the hall to the kitchen and my friends from Pells follow in a tight little line. When we walk past the people I used to know they do one of two things: if they’re drunk they hug me or clutch my hand, and if they’re not they frown at me.

When I went to school here these were all my friends. These are all people like me. Toughish boys who grew up poor or with one parent. Girls I dated or sisterly girls. I fit in here. I can feel my accent changing to greet theirs. We walk to the kitchen which is entirely linoleum with a sticky green floor and fluorescent lights. I see him first: Dee Marshall, massive and relaxed, leaning against a counter on the far side of the room. He’s high off his ass, thank God, I can see it. There is no moment of tension, no face-off. He stands with two girls on each side of him. I only recognize one. All of them are different than Pells girls: harder, tanner, older-seeming. Dark makeup circling their eyes. Tight clothes and bodies and faces. Less smiling.

Dee points to me. I feel the trail of boys behind me shift and tense.

Then Dee’s face lights up into a smile. Kel! he says, genuinely happy.

I walk over to him and we clasp hands and touch our shoulders together and then he asks the girls if they know me and all four of them nod. I was wrong I guess.

I turn and beckon to the boys from Pells and they sort of shuffle over, except Trevor, who stays back sullenly.

Peters, Kramer, Matt, I say, pointing them out. And that’s Trevor back there.

Every single one of them knows Dee’s name so I don’t say it. Every single one of them got his ass handed to him by Dee Marshall eight hours ago.

They all nod to him coolly, and then Dee snaps four Buds from a six-pack on the counter behind him and tosses one to each of them. Underhand, not overhand, which is how I know there won’t be any trouble.

Dee tells the girls to hang on a minute and walks me back into the other room. I glance over my shoulder and see my friends from Pells huddle together uncertainly, but suddenly I don’t care. Suddenly I could care less. Let them get drunk and talk about me and then let them leave me here. Let them leave.

In the living room Dee and I sit in two chairs in the middle of everything and talk.

How’s Rhonda? I ask him.

She found Jesus, he says, and kind of laughs and shrugs, because his mother was crazy when we were growing up, and he knows that I know that this is true.

She’s better, he says, and then furrows his brow as if he isn’t sure why he told me this.

After a while people come over to us and say hello to me and some of them tell me they’re sorry to hear about my mother. It feels like family saying it and I nod slowly and gratefully each time. I’m drinking too fast. When Dee rolls a blunt I know I should decline but I want it in my system. Dee was the first person who ever got me high. And the first to sell me weed. I take a long slow hit and cough uncontrollably and embarrassingly. It’s the tobacco. I am out of practice with blunts. Pells kids put little nubs of pot in cheap glass bowls that they buy from head shops in Times Square. I cough until I’m red in the face and tears are pooling in my eyes, but no one cares, no one notices. The mood in the room is slowing down and speeding up at once. In one corner Dan Ligiano is falling asleep with a beer in his hand and in another corner two people I don’t know are making out.

A bunch of girls come over and sit on the floor in front of us. Most of them I recognize. Some of them I hooked up with in middle school or at the start of high school, when I still used to hang out in Yonkers on the weekends. Girls from Yonkers let you get away with more. The girls I hooked up with in Pells before Lindsay came along were more sure of themselves, more confident in their own goodness and worth. I could feel it the first time I kissed a girl from Pells. That she thought of herself as special. I look around now at the girls in this room and have sudden visions of some of them unclothed. I’ve lain on the grass in a park with some of them. I’ve been in a bed with some of them. I’ve put my hands all over them, all over their rib cages and breasts and legs and necks and, rarely, when I was feeling tender, their faces. I’ve taken off their clothing and they’ve taken off mine and we’ve acted out whatever rage or anxiety or lust we felt toward each other and then we got up off the bed—laughing sometimes, ashamed sometimes—and rejoined the party, subtly or unsubtly, depending. The weed is sinking into me and the rum and the beer and it’s bringing out something in me that I thought might have been lost. I feel powerful and bold. I’m trying to catch their eyes, now, the girls I’ve known in this way. I’m trying to will them toward me.