Pins: A Novel (8 page)

8

When Joey strained his hamstring some guys called him a wuss, wimp, the usual stuff.

Injuries didn’t fit into “paramilitary” training. If you were sidelined, go home. Don’t hang around here. Fortunately, Assistant Coach Fiasole wasn’t paramilitary, and recommended Joey take a day off.

He didn’t mind staying at home, except for his mom, who started up about him “hurting his young body like that,” as if she had proof that wrestling wasn’t good for him.

After doting on him for a bit, she instructed him to stir the sauce at least once, “if you can manage to get up to the kitchen,” then took off to pick Sophia up from kindergarten. “Adios, amoebas,” he called out, tickled to be alone in the new house for the first time.

After his mother left, he scarfed some leftover coffee. His pile of homework lay untouched on the dining room table since breakfast. Joey scanned the book. Math. Squiggles. Bars. Forget that. What would he use hypotenuse stuff for, except maybe in college? What would he do in college? What would he do after high school?

He flipped through the channels.

$100,000 Pyramid
. “These are things associated with skiing.”

Nine Broadcast Plaza
. “What we are saying is that’s killing unborn babies and–”

Home Shopping Channel. “I’m so glad you dialed in today. A big honk for you–”

“–not fully clean unless you’re Zest-fully clean!”

Sally Oprahue. Men. Stripping. Big muscled men with long hair stripping. He dug his hand into his sweat pants, grew hard in a few seconds, trying to finish off the moment a stripper ground his butt into the camera, did a half split on the stage floor. Joey spilled onto his hand as the show cut to a floor wax commercial.

At school, once, Joey felt like a naked guy on a Greek vase.

Mrs. Bridges the art teacher was a lot nicer than the prim old nun at St. Augustine’s who coveted paper as if it were money. Mrs. Bridges wanted color, still lifes, figure studies, cartoons. “Experiment!” she announced.

Sometimes kids got up on the big tables. Everyone would make a few jokes, but then get down to working, making the classmate’s form come to life on pencil and paper. So when Mrs. Bridges asked him to wear his singlet and shoes, he got teased for it, but it felt great with all the different versions of himself pinned up on a bulletin board for weeks.

He lay on his carpeted bedroom floor, working on a few wrestling poses, positions he’d borrowed from the instruction books Coach Cleshun gave out. Mrs. Bridges said it was okay to “borrow” an image every now and then. He made the outlines, then decided to not draw the singlets.

His pencil drew erections between the wrestlers’ legs. His eraser censored them. He used his own spit to smudge the lines, making the bodies seem to press out of the paper, sometimes even buckling out from the dampness.

His drawing shoved safely away, images came tumbling into his head, interrupted by fascinated glances at his own cock. He felt so joyously lucky to have one right there on his own body.

The remembered smells from practice came to him, then Coach Fiasole’s voice, softly, like the times he’d come in close, showing a move. Fiasole wasn’t married. Coach Cleshun had a wife, but no kids. That could mean something. He’d heard about married guys being gay or getting caught, then divorcing.

He had to hold back just a few more moments, grabbed one arm around himself, licking, biting his tight biceps as if it were Dink’s or Bennie’s, then Dink’s again, then Paul E. Coyote’s legs, for a moment Dink’s father, a crazy image of himself as a little sperm, then Coach again, the guy in
Return to the Blue Lagoon
, then the kid who played Sara Gilbert’s boyfriend on
Roseanne
, but then back to Dink, it always came back to Dink, rolling with him, gripping, tangled up in him.

He started up to what sounded like the garage door opening, but relaxed a moment, then got up to wash off. False alarm.

Joey hid his drawings in a spiral-bound pad high up in the farthest reaches of his clothes closet. He knew better than to hide things under his bed, the first place Mike the Pest would look, the first place his mother hit during one of her Search and Destroy cleaning missions. The comfortable smell of his own body would be wiped away. His dirty clothes would disappear, then reappear, folded on his bed for him to put away. He wondered if his mother noticed the stains. She must have, because she never said anything.

“Uh, this is Joseph Nicci from the Gotyou Collection Agency, calling for a Mister Donald Khors. Sir, it’s about your overdue credit charges. Please call me back.”

He knew both Dink and his mom would laugh. Mrs. Khors once complained that regardless of the credit card’s name, she could never discover what she spent it on. Dink would laugh, so Joey would laugh, but he wondered if maybe Dink’s family was rich, but in a different way.

By the time his mother and Sophia got home, Ricki Lake’s guests were discussing the ramifications of being a straight edge teen mom in a punk rock world.

Sophia had ripped a coloring book to pages on the floor, with all the blank sides up, swirling with three crayons at once in each of her fists.

“That’s it. Very nice. You’re gettin’ it,” Joey said as he knelt on his knees, watching her crayons rotate.

“We did a song and I got a bird in da book an we played on the swings and I fell. Ya wanna see my boo-boo? It’s disgusting.”

“Sure.” Her pre-school adventures never ceased to amaze him.

The phone rang. His mother got it.

Sophia showed her knee, where barely a trace of a scrape had reddened her soft skin. Joey tried not to laugh at Sophia’s concern. His own knees had been scraped, his legs bruised, arms chafed in so many places since starting up wrestling again, they blended together to cover his whole body. He didn’t mind the pain so much. It told him he was there, a person, in his body, unlike the other times where he could feel invisible, nobody, alone. The pain was a dent, a reminder.

Joey played with Sophia awhile, then distracted her while he switched channels to the Smurfs. She abandoned him quickly. Joey took up her crayons, turning her little bubble creatures into Itchy and Scratchy.

During a break between commercials, one of those awkward gaps where some dozing guy in the production room forgot to put in a tape, he heard his mother in the kitchen talking on the phone to some other mother, by the sound of it. But her words were hushed, and he heard just one sentence: “If he became one of those, I’d kill myself.”

Joey cringed on the floor, stilled. It must have meant what he thought it meant. No way could he tell her. No way.

Sophia blithely watched the tube, waiting for it to continue its barrage of cartoon images.

Waiting until he heard his mother finish on the phone, he limped to the kitchen, sat at the table, helped her unpack the groceries, prepare dinner. She placed a big chicken on the counter, began running it under water in the sink. It dropped down with a heavy plop. She was always working, cooking, running the kids from one place to another. Maybe that was why she never had time to look nice like Mrs. Khors, who was always “showing a home” or “going out.”

“You stir my sauce?” She inspected a box of something, unsure where to put it, or why she bought it.

“Yeah.”

She put the box down. “Chicken and shells, and salad. I hope that meets with your approval.”

“Sounds fine.”

“You want something now?”

“No, Ma.” He thought this would be a good time to ask her, tell her, before she got to the point of really meaning what he thought she’d said. As she cooked, he helped put stuff away. That would work. “Who ya talkin’ to?”

“No one. You bein’ nosy?”

“No, I just–”

“Mrs. Gambardello. You know her from church. She’s got that nice daughter, Cara. She’s in your grade, isn’t she?”

“Yeah.” She’s also good at dropping her pencil a lot to get my attention.

Mike marched to the kitchen doorway, halted to attention like a king’s guard. “I demand seven cookies, Madam, to pay your taxes.”

“You can have two.”

Mike dropped the military stance, moved the stool, leaning over the kitchen counter to tug the ceramic teddy bear closer. “We got ants.”

“Here.” She gave Mike a bottle of Windex. He took cookies out with one hand, shot ants with the other.

Joey’s mother continued talking about Mrs. Gambardello and her daughter “and the car they just bought had something wrong with the transmission.” Her only new friends were other Italian women, like their neighbor Mrs. DeStefano, who sometimes babysat Sophia and Mike. The few women in town she’d come to know were all Italian, as if they all spoke a secret language nobody else knew and she wouldn’t dare befriend anyone else. “You hungry? Are you allowed to eat tonight?”

He smiled. “Yeah.”

“So here, eat.” Carrot sticks again. He nibbled one just to please her.

“When did you meet Dad?”

“Why you wanna know?” She cut tomatoes on the counter.
 
It must have been for the salad, because the sauce bubbled slowly in the immense pot that rarely left the stove.

The smells made his stomach growl. He got up, grabbed a piece of bread, dipped it in sauce. “I dunno. Jus’ curious.” The sauce almost burned his tongue, but it tasted good; salty, sweet, everything he loved about food. He got another piece of bread.

“Well, it’s not a very romantic story,” she said. “Your father was with a bunch of his buddies at a school dance and he just walked right up to me and said, ‘I’m Dino. You want a soda?’ and we started dating.”

“Dating,” Mike mimicked, pointing the spray gun at his brother.

“Don’t even.”

“Michael, put that down. Go inside.”

Mike dropped his weapon, marching out in retreat.

“When was that?”

“What?” His mother kept chopping.

“When did you meet Dad?”

“In the fall, in seventy-seven, our senior year in high school.”

The year before his birth. He imagined the young version of his father picking his mother out in front of his friends like a dare. “So, you got married pretty soon, huh?”

She scooted him away from the stove, giving him a suspicious glance. “You wanna know if you were conceived before we were married.”

“I’m not. . .” He tried to block the image of his father and mother having sex out of his mind, even though it seemed nice. They must still love each other, since they didn’t fight. They argued about things, but they always settled it by laughing or going off together to their bedroom. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You have to promise never to tell him, but yes.”

“So I guess I’m a bast–”

“No.” She held the knife up, put it down, folded her arms. “I don’t wanna hear that talk in my house. I love him and we love you. I love all my children.”

“Awright. Awright.” He watched her resume chopping, then dump the tomato bits into a bowl. “Were you in love with him?”

For a moment he could see the same woman in the picture albums, the young girl with the sweet face empty of worries.

“Of course I was in love with him.”

Joey thought this would be a nice way to tell her now, say, That’s great. You know what? I’m in love too! But she stood still, a bit dreamy-eyed, not seeing where he hoped to lead her. She said, “He told me it didn’t matter. He would have married me anyway.”