Making Nice (2 page)

“No,” I said. “You’ve been a great mom. I couldn’t ask for anything more. I had a great childhood.”

She nodded and squeezed my hand. “OK then,” she said. “Well, I have something I’d like to say to you.”

“All right,” I said. “What is it?”

“One time you threw a book at me. You were home from college, and you were really angry with me about something, and you threw a book at my head.”

I had no recollection of this at all. I wondered if it was the painkillers talking again.

“Did it hit you?” I asked.

“No. I ducked and it hit the wall.”

“Wow,” I said. “I really don’t remember that.” We blinked at each other. “Honestly,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t.”

“Well I do,” she said. “And I’m telling you because I don’t want you to ever,
ever
, be abusive with a woman again. You can’t abuse women, Alby. I need you to promise me that.”

“OK,” I said. “I promise.”

“You promise what?”

“I promise I won’t abuse ladies.”

“Ever,” she said.

“Ever,” I said. “I won’t abuse ladies
ever
.”

“OK,” she said, rubbing my hand a little, giving it a pat and a squeeze. Then she said she was tired and asked me to leave. I stood up and kissed her on the forehead and walked to the door.

“I really don’t remember that.”

“I believe you,” she said. “Now shut off the lights, please.”

“OK,” I said, and flipped the switch.

Immediately after closing the door I rushed over to my brother and sister and told them everything, then asked if they remembered hearing about it. My sister said no, but that it sounded like something I’d do, and I told her to shut the fuck up.

My brother said he kinda did remember something like that, that he thinks maybe he remembers her telling him about it over the phone one day. I pressed him for details, then and on numerous occasions since, but the only other thing he’s said about it—years later over beers and a bottle of bourbon, after I got real pushy—was that it made sense because I was at the peak of my asshole stage back then. Then he paused and looked off and added, “The first peak.”

She died not long after, and after years of racking my brain over it I eventually came to some vague remembrance of the incident. Nothing concrete, just sitting at the kitchen table, a book in front of me, her standing there, the both of us yelling. That’s all. Of course that could be from any number of times we yelled at each other in the kitchen, or it could be complete invention, something I dreamed up in response to all this. Either way, though, I believe it. I believe I threw that book. I must have.

And now here my sister was using it against me, because she thought, correctly, that it would hurt. The best I could think to come back at her with was “Learn about dishwashers, retard.” She smirked and shook her head. “Also,” I added, “stop cutting the split ends off your dykey hairdo and leaving them on the sink ’cause it’s fuckin’ disgusting, and so is your dandruff. You should try T/Gel ’cause apple cider vinegar isn’t doing the job, you fuckin’ hippie asshole. And stop throwing your bloody toilet paper from your gross shaved legs in the bathroom garbage cause fuckin’ Sparkles fuckin’ smells the blood and then fuckin’ knocks over the garbage can and fuckin’ eats it. OK? And nobody wants to go to the bathroom and see bloody fuckin’ toilet paper in the fuckin’ garbage. So fuck you.”

She name-called me some more, so I mocked her in my mocking voice. I went: “This is you:
I’m too busy doing important artwork to be considerate of other people and clean up after myself so instead I’m gonna cover every flat surface with my shit so other people can’t eat at the table without moving my shit around. Also, I’m a dumb cunt.
That’s you, you dumb cunt.”

With that she began shoving me through the doorway yelling, “Get out! Get out! Get the fuck out!” And I’m not kidding when I say she’s super strong and almost had me out, and I wasn’t putting up much of a fight at all, was almost willingly going, and then I just thought: No,
you
get out. As she shoved me again I grabbed her shirt, and honestly it was a case of being stronger than I think I am, because she kinda went flying through the air and landed on the ground on her back. We were both shocked, me probably more so. She got up quick though and charged, dealing punches left and right (add that to the list: #8—she hit me first), which didn’t accomplish much except to back me up a few feet into the kitchen. Eventually she stopped to survey the damage, and I grinned at her. She charged again, swinging wildly, and I blocked what I could, then shoved her off. When she came at me a third time I threw one medium-powered punch at the middle of her chest that kinda skimmed over the right tit and landed solidly on the left, sending her backward over the dishwasher door, which was still open with plenty of space available for pots and pans. There were, however, a few utensils in the utensil holder thing, including a knife with I think cream cheese on it that she grabbed on the way up. I turned and ran. I’d just made it outside when I heard it bang off the back of the back door.

We avoided each other for the rest of the night and most of the following day, until our father came home from work jacked up on Ritalin, acting like a dick, the specifics of which I don’t recall and which don’t matter. What does matter is that shared suffering can lead to a sense of solidarity—false maybe, temporary for sure—so we ganged up on him till he fled up the stairs to his room to play Sudoku or some shit on his computer. My sister and I spent the next few hours at the kitchen table guzzling whatever alcohol was left in the house, pledging allegiance to each other, promising it wouldn’t happen again, that we’re sorry, we’re sorry. We’re so sorry.

L
ITTLE
T
HINGS

I folded my arms. They felt big, capable of anything. Lifting, carrying, digging, feeding cows PCP so they revolt with unexpected and tremendous violence—anything. Wrapping gifts in tissue paper and busting teeth out of Christian heads, painting things pink and planting weeds because they’re treated unfairly. Pumping bicycle tires, pumping gas, pumping iron, bagging my own groceries and skipping boulders across the Long Island Sound all the way to Connecticut. Cracking eggs with one hand and folding laundry. Pushing my Mexican neighbor’s broke-down car across the street Thursday mornings to avoid street sweeping tickets and tossing my cell phone to a friend who needs to make an important call to his mom. Opening every jar for every lady. Helping. I felt like helping. I felt like I could help.

*   *   *

The first thing I did was clean the microwave. I went from there. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes there were other times. I’ve witnessed people break, cry, collapse, kill themselves, get killed, or get old. I’ve seen people lose their hair, their minds, their driver’s licenses. My father lost his gallbladder after dieting with Nutri-system. What could I do? I mopped the kitchen floor, took a walk, saw a dead baby rabbit with a bicycle tire tread through its middle. It reminded me of a friend of mine named Nicky who had hairy legs and liked fireworks. One summer he caught his girlfriend cheating, sprinted from her doorstep toward Vanderbilt Boulevard and dove in front of a station wagon with a couple of kids in the backseat.

I saw an old lady in 7-Eleven wearing a nightgown, with red mittens on her feet and blue veins in her ankles. I bought potato chips. People got married. They got houses and they got furniture and they trusted the government and they got fat. There was a homeless man with long hair, a black leather jacket, green cutoff shorts, and a mental problem that he tried to walk off like a Little League baseball injury. Walking, walking, always walking. He was very tan. The locals called him “the man with a million miles on his feet.” The police shot him in the back when he didn’t stop to answer their questions.

I remember sitting in the passenger seat of my father’s diesel after a Roy Rogers dinner. My brother was in the back. A car a couple of cars in front of us swerved left, then the next car swerved, then the next, until the car directly in front us didn’t swerve. We watched in the headlights as three puppies rolled out from underneath it, leaned closer to them as my father braked, steered around and past and pulled over. On the side of the road two of them looked just fine except they were dead. The third was bleeding, it was hard to tell from where exactly, there was a lot of blood, but it kept breathing for a few minutes before it stopped and died in the on-and-off orange of my father’s hazards.

People ate veal. I dated a chubby Catholic girl who told me her parents never touched her, that as a kid she wanted to be touched so badly she looked forward to the lice and scoliosis tests at school. I knew a guy in junior high who told everyone he owned a baby elephant; years later he murdered his stepmother by beating her head in with a can of Chicken & Stars soup. I saw cats, dogs, possums, raccoons and squirrels, a fox, a kangaroo, a bear, deer, rabbits and birds, toads, rats and mice and snakes with their guts smashed out, their insides outside, their heads crushed and dead on sunny roadsides. My mother had cancer.

I came home, held her hand, pushed her pain button, did her nails and fluffed her pillows, brushed her teeth and emptied her piss bag. I bought her stuffed animals and licorice and long straws so she could drink her juice in bed. She mostly just slept and vomited. Her hospital room was noisy. There was lots of moaning, beds creaking, PCA pumps beeping, nurses coming and going and laughing and asking, How are you on a scale of zero to ten, zero being no pain and ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt? Twelve.

Three months into it my brother and I were watching the Dilaudid drip, listening to her mumble “ow ow ow” in her sleep, when her eyes opened wide, then wider, then came back together in a real slow drug-drunk blink. Then she threw her sheet on the floor, picked her hospital gown up over her head. “No more fucking water.”

I said, “Do you want me to go to the Coke machine?”

“Why are you trying to kill me?”

“We’re not.”

“Do you realize I’m laying here, full frontal?”

“Yes.”

“Are you happy to see your mother full frontal?”

“Not really.”

“Then get out.”

We sat there unsure of what to do or say, where to look. She yelled there was salt on her legs, something about conductors and the procedure and don’t touch my antique fork. She ripped the IVs out of her arms, the Hickman port out of her chest. Blood shot up in the air. I grabbed her as my brother went running down the hall toward the nurses’ station, screaming. I held her down by the wrists—it wasn’t difficult, she hadn’t been eating, maybe weighed eighty-five pounds at that point. When she was through struggling she just kinda collapsed in on herself and cried. I said, “Mom,” like it was a question.

Later, after they had strapped her to the bed, bandaged her up, shot her full of strong whatever until she passed out, redid her IVs in her feet so she couldn’t reach them, after we had called our father and lied that everything was fine and he should take the night off, called our sister and told her what happened, then regretted it, we smoked a couple of cigarettes out front with a transporter who had burned his hand with cinnamon-roll icing and decided we’d both spend the night. Back in the room, after we sat there watching the Dilaudid drip, not speaking for half an hour, just listening to our mother mumble “ow ow ow” in her sleep, I turned to my brother and said, “Yo, her vagina’s in a lot better shape than I thought it’d be.”

He considered it for a second, then nodded in agreement.

She came home to die. Hospice delivered a bed, equipment, boxes of meds, and a lady doctor who told us one to three days. We set her up in the den, under the ceiling fan my sister had tied little glass dragonflies to with string. My mother seemed to like watching them fly their circle around the room but I didn’t. I got good at spackling, got impressed with bubble gum’s resistance to decay, ate her Ativan like aspirin. I told her that I’d miss her, that I hated her body for getting sick, that I wanted to seize god or fate or the universe by the throat and make it leave her alone. She laughed at me. Her bedsores leaked an awful-smelling fluid. My brother, sister, and I took turns changing her bandages and sheets, drank her liquid Valium, and played UNO. We watched our father watch her dying, learned from the grief on his face every time he walked in the room. He never lasted more than ten minutes. A priest came to give her last rites and I gave him my meanest look. He asked me if I’d like to receive Communion and I gave him a different meanest look and walked out of the room. A week later the lady doctor came back, said one to three days again. My brother and I wrote each other cheerer-upper notes on brown napkins:

Do you worry that Mom will see your gay thoughts from heaven?

No. Do you worry she gets X-ray vision and sees the undescended testicles in your girlfriend’s abdomen?

That girlfriend, Tara, came over later that day and hung around like she was part of the family, then cooked us a chicken for dinner. Just as we sat down to eat it my brother said I should do the dishes. I said, “You’re kidding?” He said he wasn’t. I told him that I wasn’t gonna do any damn dishes until he cleaned his IBS shit shrapnel off the fuckin’ toilet. His face turned red. I said, “Looks like you might wanna hit me. If you do I’m going to stab you in the head with my fork.” Then I took a bite of the chicken—it was pretty good—and he punched it out of my mouth; cracked me right in the jaw. I was so shocked that I didn’t do anything for two whole seconds and neither did anyone else. Then I lunged at him, strangled him, smashed his head into the kitchen counter. He started bleeding from somewhere in his hair, his girlfriend started pulling mine, and my sister wedged herself in between us. I think she caught a stray or two before we all fell into the empty beer bottles on top of the radiator. My father came wobble-running in like a gorilla, yelling something I couldn’t quite understand because Tara was clawing at my ears.