Martin and John (3 page)

ON THE NIGHT my mother died, a hard dry wind was blowing in off the ocean. You’d think that a west-moving wind would carry moisture, but it didn’t: it was dry and gritty as sandpaper, the kind of wind that blows in Kansas. It bit my cheeks as I hailed a cab, and inside the car, hot dusty air filled my throat. The air gave the city a grainy impression, and I found myself looking for a hidden camera recording me, the only child on the way to retrieve his mother’s last effects. If someone asked about her, I used to say that she was dead, she died a long time ago, I don’t even remember what she looked like. But my mother’s face hides just behind mine; I need only glimpse myself and I see her, and every memory I have of her life before she went to the hospice. I know nothing of her life since then. This was my doing, not hers: just before she left I asked her not to mail any letters she might write. She couldn’t write actually, but the hospice had told us that someone would write for her. It was a month before her thirty-second birthday, I remember. My present to her was a ring she’d given me eight years earlier, when I was five. The ring was plain and silver and not very wide to start with, and over the years it had become thin as a wire as repeated trips to the jeweler to resize it sacrificed the band’s width for diameter. I remember sliding the band off my index finger and then, holding my mother’s hand carefully, I uncurled her middle finger and slipped it on her. When I was done, I set her hand back in her lap, and the finger with the ring remained extended even as her other fingers curled with illusory force into her palm. My mother’s
mouth twitched into a smile and her head fell over in her excitement. I pushed it up for her. By then communication was only an approximation for her; she couldn’t control her vocal cords, and it had become almost impossible for her to type, a letter at a time, with a long thin bar fastened to a band on her wrist. But if communication was hard for her, it seemed harder for my father and me: she knew what she wanted to say; we were the ones who had to struggle to figure out what she meant. This was why she was going away—to “finish dying” in a place where my father and I wouldn’t constantly be saying, What is it, Bea? what do you want, Mom? what do you mean? I gave her the ring early because, by the time her birthday came, she would be gone: enshrined, entombed, encoded in a place that for the next dozen years I’d think of only as a dot on the far edge of a Long Island road map. I remember I waited until she was able to focus her eyes on me. “I want you to write,” I said then, and then I added, “but please don’t mail the letters.” One sentence, two independent clauses, and I stopped. If pressed, I’d have said I didn’t want to reassemble her like a jigsaw puzzle, each letter a tiny piece that arrived one at a time. What frightened me was the idea that my mother’s life could endlessly fade, but never end. When I told her not to mail her letters, I was really telling her something else, and I wonder if she knew what that was: that I didn’t want to think about her again—until after she died. When the ambulance came to take her to the hospice, my father took me to the prairie. Everything had already
been sold or shipped or packed in the car, and so, just minutes after the ambulance pulled away, lights on but siren off, we left. My last image of my mother, really, is the back of that ambulance. The impression stayed with me throughout our drive, and I couldn’t shake the idea that my mother would be in the ambulance forever, moving from place to place. Sometimes I believed that my father and I also lacked a destination: we drove for days and days—really only two or three, but in the enclosed monotony of the car I lost track of time. I slept and woke, slept and woke, and each time I opened my eyes I asked my father, “Are we in another state yet?” Usually he said, “No, we’re still in the same state,” though sometimes he said, “We’re in Ohio now,” or Illinois, or Indiana. During the trip, he only allowed his hands to leave the steering wheel to adjust the radio. With his eyes fixed on the road ahead of him, his fingers would fumble with the tuner knob like a blind man’s, and sometimes, when he punched the program buttons, he got only static: those old stations were long gone. When he finally found music without words he left the needle there, and on its way back to the steering wheel his hand would make a detour to squeeze my knee. When he touched me like that I clambered into the back seat. We drove one of those big American things from the seventies, but already I was too tall to stretch out fully and had to put my feet up on the window. These are my clearest memories of our trip: lying on my back and looking through the angled glass of the rear window at the lighted signs of buildings as they
flashed overhead, and at long slabs of pine-covered mountains that darkened the glass, and later, at grassy hills which seemed to unroll endlessly, as though off a spindle. The images reflected in the window were transparent, and with an effort I could look through them and see empty sky, and in that emptiness I believed I saw the real reason for all this scenery, these miles, these hours in the car: emptying the mind. The hills, mountains, and buildings vanished behind us as we passed them, and I forgot them, and I tried to forget the past as well. But my father resisted. Once, at a diner, he said, “She’s probably having breakfast right now.” I broke the yolk of my egg and watched the yellow ooze take over the plate. “What do you think she’s eating?” he asked. I didn’t answer, and my father went on without waiting. “Grapefruit maybe,” he said, “and eggs and sausages, or toast with butter and jelly. Maybe grits if they get into Southern cooking. Did you see they had grits on the menu here?” I nodded my head, eyes down, looking at the food I kept my mouth full of so I wouldn’t have to speak. My mother couldn’t chew: she was probably being spoon-fed oatmeal. While he spoke, my father played with his meal. He moved the two eggs to the top of his plate, put the potato patty in the center, the bacon in a crooked curve at the bottom. He combed the sprig of parsley with his fingers and put it above the eggs, and then he rotated the plate one hundred and eighty degrees. “Looks like her a little, don’t you think?” I had no food left to put in my mouth, no excuse for not answering, but I couldn’t, there was nothing
to say. I looked at him. His expression was impossible to read, and I have to wonder now if he was thinking about her or about what he’d done to her. “The nose is a little too big,” he said finally, and tried to laugh. I looked at his plate. The “face” breathed steam, and gray wisps dispersed in the air like the conversation my father and I weren’t having. We sat in the restaurant, a diner—fifty miles farther west and it would be called a café—and we looked at each other over the dead yellow eyes until a waitress came by and my father had her take the plate away, and then we drove the rest of the way to our new home, in Kansas.

I hadn’t known where we were going when we left, and I didn’t know we’d arrived when we got there. Only a concrete slab in the middle of a vast treeless field marked the site of our house, and we ate our first meals there on a picnic table in the center of it. Though my father bought some food in restaurants, he usually barbecued, and when he did he wore an old, old apron whose yellow ruffles, darkened by dust trapped in their creases, trailed around his knees. The men building our house teased me about this. “Your old man wears the pants in the family, huh?” they’d say while my father was busy flipping burgers. I’d just look at them until they finished. “And the dress!” they’d guffaw, and slap each other on the back. When they saw I wasn’t laughing, they’d relent and say, “Aw, but you’re okay, John, anybody can see that.” They only talked to my father to complain about the lack of a floor plan. “Just put a wall there,” my father would say with a construction
foreman’s bellow. “I know what I’m doing,” he’d say. “I was working construction when you were still sucking your mother’s tit.” He said these words as if they lacked a literal meaning, as if their only purpose was to show the workers who was boss. His yells earned him a grudging respect, but the beers he’d hand out at the end of the day served him better. “Just a couple to start you on your way,” he’d say. At first I thought he meant on their way home, but soon I realized that he meant on their way to being drunk, and later I came to see another meaning lurking behind his words: the men who worked for my father were young, all newly married or about to be married, and those beers he handed out, and the bawdy stories he told them as I hid and listened—stories that were sometimes about my mother—were sending them all on their way to the place in which he’d lived for years, a place in which men sometimes got blind drunk, and did things, and in the morning felt only their own pain, and not the pain they’d caused. Late on those nights, as my father slept next to me in a tent on the cement floor, I’d listen to the sounds he made, which were amplified by the incredible silence of the prairie surrounding us. He snored, cried, ground his teeth, and, in his sleep, said, “I’m sorry.” He was still sorry. It was during those nights that I let myself wonder for the first time since my mother’s miscarriage if my father was actually asking forgiveness for something he’d done. But I never pushed that thought very far. Usually I was distracted by the erection that pulsed between my legs—I was thirteen then, and
more than I wanted to know why my father kept repeating “I’m sorry,” I wanted a place to masturbate. Every night I pressed the fingernails of my left hand into the fingertips of my right. I’d press hard, until my right hand ached, and I concentrated on that pain until it was all I could feel, or hear, or remember.

“PEOPLE DO BAD things,” he said once. I don’t remember why we were talking, or under what circumstances, but I remember that he was drunk. “It’s so common it’s almost not important. What’s important is what they do afterward.” “You mean how they try to make up for it?” I said. “I mean
if
they try to make up for it. I mean, you can’t ever make up for hurting a person like that, but if you don’t try, then you’re twice as low.” Something went cold in me then. The pieces of the puzzle fell together before I could stop them, and the picture they made was of my mother in the kitchen chair. I looked at my father differently after that. His grieving, his guilt, the things he did to remember her—it all started to seem like a bad TV movie. Like the way he cooked up a storm after the house was finished. He still worked in her apron, which he’d washed, and he was usually hard at it by the time I got home from school. “How was your day?” he’d call from the kitchen as I came in. “Fine,” I’d say, “but I’m on my way—” “Come here,” my father interrupted me. “Can you read your mother’s handwriting?” In the kitchen, my father
held a recipe card. I looked at it. “Meatloaf,” I read, and tried to hand the card back to him. “I know that,” he said. “It’s the recipe I can’t read.” I looked at the card again, at the whorls and scribbles and seemingly random slashes and dots that were supposed to be letters, words. “Ground beef,” I read aloud. “Medium … medium cracker crumbs. Tomato soup—no, not soup, sauce.” He listened to the words as if they were a homily I was translating from Latin. “One more time,” he said when I finished. “I want to make sure I’ve got it.” I paused. “Look, why don’t you write this down?” “Why?” he said. “I’ve got the card. And I’ve got you.” He’d turned away and I looked at his back now, at the knot of the apron which sat just above the worn leather of his work belt. “A pound and a half of ground beef,” I said. “But it says to use less if you’re cooking for two.”

Sometimes he fed the finished dishes to me and the girl I dated then, Susan. Sometimes when we were sitting in the living room, waiting for something to come out of the oven, he broke off in the middle of a sentence and just stared at us, and his wet eyes held answers to questions I didn’t want to ask, or be asked by Susan. Soon I started to avoid our house. Our town was tiny and there was nothing to see in it; inevitably, the prairie drew me. Nothing on Long Island had prepared me for the long wind-smoothed rolls of land surrounding our new house. Tall brown grass covered everything. The grass had a dull side and a shiny side, and when the wind blew, the grass rippled and the sun flashed as though off glass,
or water. Seeing that, I reached back and imagined the prairie as the sea it once was, and I imagined myself on the first island to raise itself above the water’s surface. I stood there in mud fast drying under the sun. As I watched, all the water retreated under the land around me, and then for a time there was nothing except me and the naked wet soil, and we waited for the wind to carry the first seeds there, we waited for the grass to grow and cover us like a blanket.

There was a place out there called the red cliffs. When I first saw them, they reminded me of my dream. The cliffs were like a gash in the earth, eons old but still raw, and their exposed soil was red as if it had just been soaked in blood. Susan took me there. We walked through a fallow pasture; the prairie grasses came to our waist so we high-stepped, and I remember shivering in the cold wind that blew at our backs. At a barbed wire fence Susan stepped on the third strand and pulled up the second, and I crawled through and held the fence for her. On the other side the grass bunched in chewed clumps, and in many places the ground was bare, as if the grass had been pulled out by the roots. “Sheep,” Susan said derisively. “They graze a field to death.” The only thing that had escaped were a few prickly pear cacti crouched with their long needles rigidly displayed. Susan picked an ugly brown pod off one of them and forced it open. Five pale blue petals blew from her hand. “Their flowers,” she said. “They only bloom when it rains.” It wasn’t love that filled me then, but wonder that she should know these things: awe. I took her
hand awkwardly, and we walked the rest of the way in silence on an old cow path that must have been there before they brought in the sheep. Something about the prairie forces your eye down: it’s like your mind is trying to spare you something that is at once empty and grandiose. But when I looked up I remember being able to see for the first time as far as one can see. There was truly nothing there, just a flatness that rolled away to the horizon, and the sky gaping like an open mouth. I walked with my head up, staring at the sky, until I heard Susan’s voice. “John,” she said, “look down.” A last bit of yellow grass hung like thatch over a rift in the earth, and below that was the bare red clay of the cliff, dropping away from us at a steep angle. At its base a dry streambed whose flow had once been powerful enough to create this rift in the earth now wandered aimlessly, as if in search of its water. “There’s only one way to do it,” Susan said. She stepped off the edge and coasted on her ass in a cloud of red dust. I tried to step off carefully, but I was immediately lost in the cloud, the sound, the fall. Susan waited for me at the bottom. It seemed immensely warm down there and I looked up, searching for the wind, until I realized that it blew far above us now. I looked down. Susan’s pants had red circles on the seat. “Did you bring a blanket?” she asked, and when she smiled her teeth were a reddish brown. Later, she screwed me with a passion and intensity that overwhelmed me: beneath her, I felt as useful as a newel post on a bed. I looked over her at the red wall of the cliff, at the invisible wall of the sky. Grit bit into
my back: I hadn’t brought a blanket. I remember thinking that I was some sort of freak because I felt no love, no lust even, no emotion for the girl straddling my hips. I remember thinking that I felt the same way about Susan that I did about my mother: I was trying to forget her while she was still there. And I remember trying to fit my father into it all, trying to blame him, and none of it worked, because these things had nothing to do with each other. I knew this, but not conflating them was impossible. Susan didn’t say anything after I lost my erection, just dressed and led me from the prairie, and the land swallowed the cliffs behind us. As I followed her strong silent back I remember I felt that the night had somehow pushed its way inside me, and that I had been left in darkness.