Lawnboy (28 page)

“Where are you staying tonight?” he said. “You’re always welcome here.”

“I have to be somewhere at six. I promised Ursula I’d meet her at Dadeland.”

“I’m glad you’re talking. That seems like a start at least.”

“Well, I want to get to know her again. I don’t have huge expectations, but you never know.” I made a silly, stranded face. I didn’t know where my words were coming from, but I tried to invest myself in them, if only for the moment.

We were stalling for time, fearful of our awkwardness, fearful of departure. Then, looking out the window, I thought about the dream I’d had on our fifth night together. We were standing by a riverside amusement park: PLAYLAND. Somewhere north. Maryland? An empty roller coaster surged down the track. The river surface shimmered in a pewter haze. Before I knew it I’d taken William’s hand and walked into the water with him, feeling not a second of trepidation. Trust, hope, absolute confidence, and delight. The river splashed warmly against the backs of my legs, rising higher around us. Side by side, we started swimming across the river. The roller coaster struggled up the rusty track, cranking and ticking, as if for the very last time.

Was it the mere absence of our life together—and not so much William himself—that had pained me?

Would our time together always have such significance for me?

“So—” I gazed downward at my shoes, empty and full at once. I wanted to run as much as I wanted to stay, to move into the old den with its stacks of mildewing magazines.

“Take good care of yourself. Stay in touch, okay? Are you around for a while?”

I shrugged, smiled weakly. “We’ll see.”

“Just let me know how you’re doing.”

“I will.”

I kissed him right on the mouth then, with all the tenderness I could muster, without understanding it, wildly alive, before leaving through the door.

Ursula was already seated at the front table of the ice-cream parlor, her legs resting up on a chair, when I arrived.

How odd that we were in Dadeland, in the space once occupied by Farrell’s, a short-lived chain for which our entire family—Sid, Ursula, Peter, and me—once managed to have affection. It had nothing to do with the menu (which challenged one to take on the “Zoo,” an ice-cream project comprised of twenty flavors), or the atmosphere (hokey Victoriana with lots of screaming and hooting at birthdays), only that its presence coincided with an especially poignant time in our family life, when there was a period of relative peace in the house, when we knew that our outings as a complete family unit were numbered. We were already too old for this. Still, these excursions were the single activity on which we could all agree, and once they were mentioned as even a remote possibility, the four of us, sadly enough, would hurl ourselves in the car, forgetting our differences for an hour, convincing ourselves we weren’t nearly as fucked up as we were.

“Look at you. What happened to all your hair? You look like something off a chain gang.”

“Mom.”

She rubbed the bristles of my scalp, then stared at the blue Icarus on my bicep. “What’s this?”

“Tattoo,” I mumbled.

“Tattoo? Where on earth did you get a tattoo?”

“Prison.”

“
Prison?
Oh my God. Since when have you been in prison?”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “Hel-
lo
—”

“Well, don’t do that to me. Don’t get me all worked up like that.”

We smiled wanly. In spite of our mutual cautiousness and fear of each other, I was relieved to see her. She appeared to be in good spirits—playful, even proud of me, and she’d spruced herself up for the occasion with a purple-pink scarf tied jauntily around her throat. Her hair was a complex of darks and lights, the color of nutmeg. She smelled of teaberry, weeds.

In no time at all she gathered herself. I glimpsed at her hands—veined, brown, dry, with their fragile superstructure of bones—remembering how she’d once been so proud of them.

“You could have met me at home, you know.”

I shrugged. Could I have told her that just being inside the house would have shaken something loose? Already I saw it all in my head: the oak door between the garage and the house—split, dented—which I’d kicked repeatedly after being locked out in my tenth year; the backyard toolshed, chewed to a soft pulp by termites; the hole in the laundry-room ceiling, still unrepaired after ten years, the tufts of pink insulation revealing the guts of the house.

“You look different,” was what I said. “Something’s changed. What is it?”

She tilted her head, inhaled, not without delicacy. Then she turned to the side, offering me her profile.

“Nose job,” she said finally. “I just had a nose job.”

I examined the new nose, the softer bridge, the flaring, dilated nostrils. A bungled approximation of a WASP nose. “You’re kidding me.”

“I’m actually relieved. Julie Spivak thinks it’s very, very natural. Some of the best work she’s ever seen.”

“But you had a nice, voluptuous, Eastern-European nose. It had character.”

“Character, shmaracter. What do I care about character?”

“But—”

“Do you know what it was like to have been made fun of as a child?”

My tongue felt fuzzy and thick, a wad of cotton in my mouth. I had to remind myself it wasn’t anything new, this will to remake herself. How could I forget the complete line of diet products, many of which were even then out of date, she’d stashed in the kitchen cabinet when I was young—Metrecal, Figurines, Carnation Slender, Instant Breakfast. Even something called Ayds, of all things.

“What’s Dad think of this?”

She shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them. She looked hurt yet detached from that hurt. “Don’t ask.”

“What?”

“That son-of-a-bitch—”

“Mom—”

“That fucker—”

Her voice was rising. I glanced around at the other tables.

“Don’t talk to me about that snake in the grass.”

The waitress, a slip of a thing with a crest of hair like some rare tropical bird, pretended to be oblivious to my mother’s mouth. She scribbled our order on her hand with a lavender-tipped ballpoint. All the while my mother frowned, her face pinking, staring down at her sunfreckled arms crossed tightly over her chest. She waited for the waitress to depart.

“Airhead,” she mumbled.

“Shhh—”

“Bimbo.”

“She’ll hear you.”

“I don’t care,” she said miserably. “If she doesn’t have enough decorum to know that you’re supposed to write on a sheet of paper and not on your hand, then what do I care?”

I shook my head, exasperated. My neck felt hot in my collar. “But what about Dad? I’m waiting to hear about Dad.”

She eased forward in her chair. She looked pained again. “You sure you’re up for this?”

“What’s the matter now?”

He’d been gone for some time now, almost three months. He was living in Huntington Beach, California, with a forty-three-year-old woman named Anita Burnell who had ironed, bottle-blonde hair all the way down to her ass—“right out of 1969,” according to my mom. He’d met her six years ago at an academic conference at UC Irvine. Like my father, she was an assistant professor with a specialization in nuclear fission, and she and Sid had corresponded by letter, phone, and fax for years, so openly and casually, in an approximation of professional comradeship, that my mother hadn’t once suspected there was anything between them. If anything, she’d convinced herself that Sid was put off by Anita’s chumminess, that he quietly dreaded running into her year after year at conferences, that he imagined her pushy and coarse, always sniffing around for the next job opening (or “corpse-to-be”) until she—my mother—found out otherwise. It happened on a quiet Thursday evening, moments after she’d finished up a
New York Times
crossword puzzle with the word “glossolalia.” Sid walked up behind her in the kitchen, wrapped his arms around her waist—her “love handles,” she said—then told her, not without tenderness, that he didn’t love her anymore, that she’d be better off by herself, that he was leaving for Huntington Beach in the morning.

“I just never thought he had it in him. I mean, I never thought he’d leave. He never seemed particularly, I don’t know—passionate? Is that the correct word?”

“Did you two still have sex?”

God knows what possessed me to ask such a thing.

“If you could call it that,” she answered thoughtfully.

“What do you mean?”

“When a man—when a man can’t—” She stared at me, startled, and rubbed at her arms. “Why in God’s name am I talking about this with you? I don’t want to talk about this with you.”

In the mall two teenagers, a boy and a girl, ambled in and out through the fountains, the figs, the ficus, grasping hands. Unlike us, they were the very picture of safe. It seemed incredible to imagine that they had any complexities swirling in their midst. When I looked back at my mother, she was staring at her new nose in her compact. Already she’d rolled on a fresh coat of coral lipstick.

“So next I’m going to get an Adrian Arpel makeover, then I’m going to get eyeliner tattooed around my eyes.”

“No way,” I said. “No tattoos around the eyes.”

“What about you? You have tattoos.”

“We’re talking about your
eyes,
Mom.”

She nodded. “You’ve convinced me. It’s all because of you. I’m going to get my eyes done, and then I’m going to get myself a new boyfriend, and I’ll show that”—she wrenched her head—”
ass
-hole he’s made the most foolish mistake in his life.”

A thousand thoughts were leaping concurrently in my head. I saw them luminous—dark and oily, like colored fish in an aquarium. The tips of my ears felt hot. I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. “Mom,” I said, “I hate to bring this up, but there was an actual purpose to my visit.”

Her face dulled as if she’d been taken aback. I hadn’t meant to sound cold or insensitive.

“Could I ask you a question?”

“Of course, dear.”

“If I ever die, could you do a favor for me?”

She grinned darkly, addressing me as if I were eight years old again. “You’re not going to die.”

“Oh yes I will.”

“You’re not.”

“
Yes.
We’re all going to die.”

Her mouth parted.

“It’s not like when you were a girl. It’s dangerous out there. Young people die all the time. Tons of young people that I know.”

She blinked once. She looked at me as if I were telling her that the world, as she knew it, was about to implode.

“I want you to give my CDs, the Joni Mitchells, to Jane. Take all my books to Herridges and keep the money for yourself. And pack up all my clothes and send them off to the Salvation Army.”

Her face blanched with worry, hands twisting. “I’m not sending anything to the Salvation fucking Army. You’re not going to die, okay?” Her voice carried, just loud enough for the women two tables away to hear. They halted their conversation, pretending not to listen. Quietly, she said, “You’re not going to die.”

“Mom—”

She smiled slightly. “I’m not going to listen to this. How dare you make me listen to this. There are a full range of beautiful topics in the world. What about your brother, for instance. Why haven’t you said one word about your brother? What was it like?”

I didn’t want to talk about him. I’d already made the decision not to go back. “Have you heard anything from him?”

“No, he’s just like you. Both of you have deserted me. I don’t even know what you look like anymore. I’ll be lucky if I even get a Christmas card from him, sometime next June.”

Something snagged into my stomach.

I watched her wiping her hands on her napkin. I knew she’d pictured her future differently. She’d lived her entire adult life as if its choices had been guided by a map, a paradigm:
Do these things right and you’ll get your just reward.
Once she’d pictured both Peter and me living nearby, in Cocoplum or Coconut Grove, with decent jobs, dropping in on her every Tuesday night, bringing our pretty wives with whom she’d have coffee and talk about furniture. She’d have grandchildren, four of them. She’d have stayed married to my father, and though their lives would have been marked by silence and periods of retreat from each other, she would have had a vision to present to the world:
I am fine, I am not marked by grief, I am just like you.

“I’m so lonely,” she said. “I never thought I’d be so lonely.”

“You have to be tough, Mom.”

“What if I don’t want to be?”

The breath left my lungs.

“Listen,” she said, glancing at her wristwatch. “I have to go. I have to be somewhere at eight.”

I faintly smiled. We both knew she was lying, but I understood: all this was more than she could bear at once. At home she’d fumble for her Halcion, or Valium—whatever was closest to her grasp—then go straight to bed, and for the next two days ponder over and over what we’d said to each other, weighing my words for their various meanings.

We stood. She stepped forward toward me, then held me close, if tentatively. I smelled the soap in her hair. “Mom?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Watch out of yourself.”

She nodded. “I’m not as helpless as you’d think.”

“I know.”

“And no more tattoos,” she said, smiling slightly. “Be
care
-ful. Deal?”

“I’ll try.”

“Stay in touch now. Bye, dear. Bye-bye.” And with a quick peck of a kiss, she left the table, stumbling for a second, then righting herself, hurrying out past the kiosks of the mall.

***

The free clinic was in a pagoda-like structure with glass-block walls, so close to the beach that I heard the waves, the lifeguard whistle, the joyous shrieks of tourists in the distance. Inside, I slouched in the waiting room with three other boys and a girl—all of us with sullen, vaguely bored faces—waiting for our names to be called. A TV monitor droned a message: “A positive result is not a death sentence.” I didn’t flinch as the health care worker pressed the needle into my vein and drew back a syringe-full of blood. I stared fully at my blood, its thickness, its rusty red potency. I wasn’t as debilitated as I’d expected. I’d already prepared myself. There was no reason to assume the results would be anything but positive, anyway.