Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (2 page)

My mother stopped playing and tilted her head at my dad.

"I need a job, Eva," he said. "I lost mine."

My father had been a draftsman, and his job was considered a good secure one.

My father said he'd been out of work for three weeks, and instead of going to work, he'd been spending time at the Black Lantern or the bowling alley or the mall.

The admission seemed odd from him, because he was a slight man, known more for reading science-fiction novels and watching nature documentaries on PBS than for drinking and bowling. My father was always more refined than his friends in Maple Rock. He did not waste his time drinking one-dollar taps, throwing a sixteen-pound ball down a wooden lane. He did not fit in well with his peers. Most of the time he looked the way I had seen him that night outside the bar—shaky and green, nervous, like he might be sick.

After my father made his announcement, he took his newspaper and went into the bathroom, and my mother began to play her violin again. I did not yet realize the tears in his eyes were not for what had happened to him but for what would eventually happen.

My little brother, Kolya, was in the room. He was nine years old, and his belly hung over his belt as if he were a man in his fifties. He looked very somber all the time and was not prone to talking. He stood, always, with his hands in his pockets.

I looked at him that morning to see if he had any idea what was going on, to see if the idea of unemployment and marital discord had any effect on his small brain. It did. His face was shadowed with sadness, and his eyes appeared so faraway and pensive that it seemed like he could see the future better than any of us adults. He stood, hands in pockets, looking at me, his blond hair sticking up like matted straw.

THE VERY LAST MEN LEFT
, it seemed, out of a sense of duty. For a while, you'd see them in their garages on Saturdays, puttering with old car engines, dragging old toilets to the curb. Some of them still had work; their lives were following a plan and a purpose, and their horizons, if not bright, were certainly visible. Still, it was almost as if by hanging around, they were obstructing the natural order of things. They were like robins that wander stupidly through the snow in January.

And so they disappeared.

Later my mother said that all men have it in them, the capacity to leave behind, at a moment's notice, the world they know. My mother said that the last men left because they felt they had to, because they had to prove they were capable of acting on that buried impulse as well as any other man. My mother said she'd like to take me to a doctor and have my synapses reconfigured, lest someday the abandonment impulse would fire up inside of me and then I too would be gone.

Did I think my father was immune? My father was only human. How could he not leave?

My father was in the driveway when I came riding up on my bicycle. Nobody else was home. It was a Saturday, and my mother and brother were out shopping. He was loading a few duffel bags and a box into the trunk of his Oldsmobile. He wore a blue Oxford shirt tucked into faded jeans, and he was red-faced and puffy-eyed.

"Dad," I said, standing at the edge of the sidewalk, "where are you going?"

He stared back at me, squinting and tight-lipped, as if my head had suddenly burst into a ball of fire and the brilliant light was blinding him, as if my voice were the voice coming from a burning bush.

He drove away at a crawl. His speedometer must've not even reached ten miles per hour. Every few seconds I could see him glance in his rearview mirror and then avert his eyes quickly, as if my head were still behind him, burning and flaring up into the sky.

I stood alone in the driveway, throwing sycamore pellets down the wide, empty street. They sailed over the concrete and then bounced and landed, exploding into fluff like crashing birds.

When my mother and brother came home from shopping, I said nothing.

At dinner, my mother set out meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and gravy. She called my father. "Roman! Dinner!"

He didn't come. Kolya and I sat and watched each other, waiting. Kolya seemed to know the score. He didn't look worried or confused, just sad. My mother went to the fridge and took out a bowl of tossed salad, a bottle of Italian dressing, and a jar of pickles.

"Roman!" she called. "Dinner, honey!"

She went back to the counter, got the salt and pepper shakers. She went to the fridge and brought out some butter and some slices of Wonder bread; she called again. When he still didn't come she went to the fridge and got mustard and ketchup, some leftover macaroni and cheese, some lunch meat that she arranged on a paper plate. She called again. She brought to the table a jar of beets, some olives, a bottle of vinegar, and a jar of mayonnaise. "Roman, come on, honey! Dinner!"

Her voice trailed around the house and floated up the stairs where nobody was waiting to hear it. She brought out honey, marshmallows, and chocolate sauce.

She smiled. "For dessert," she said.

Kolya and I started eating. The meat loaf was getting cold.

Mom kept setting out food until everything in the fridge and freezer and pantry was on the table.

I sat between a bag of frozen corn and a box of crackers. Kolya shoved aside a can of sliced peaches and drank from his glass of milk. He put a bag of frozen peas on his head and we both laughed, and then felt bad for laughing.

My mother left the kitchen and opened the door to the garage where my dad's car was missing. She looked at me hard, for fifteen or twenty seconds, then I nodded, and she left the room instantly. Kolya started to put the food back where it belonged and I sat still and listened to our mother play her violin—"Norwegian Wood" and "I Am a Rock" and "Penny Lane."

BY SEPTEMBER
, the heat began to give a little bit, and the summer wilted and yielded to a far-off breeze and jet streams and cold fronts. Broke and bored and without better options, my friends and I went back to school for our senior year. My mother was so pleased that I was going voluntarily that she took me to Wonderland Mall and bought me some new clothes with a Penney's charge card. In a pair of stiff, clean Levi's and new brown hiking boots, I wandered through the halls with Nick and Tom Slowinski, noting what was new and what was the same. Maple Rock High had launched a "Success for All" campaign ("Sex for All" became the too-easy nickname) which, as far as I could tell, meant only that we started school a week earlier than most other public schools, and that our hallways were decorated with a few murals urging us to
REACH FOR THE STARS
and
DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM.

A guidance counselor or someone must have decided that the school's color scheme could help relieve the gloom of economic recession and the widespread abdication of fatherhood, because during our sad and muggy summer break, somebody had painted the hallways and classrooms a deep canary yellow. Under the fluorescent lights, the new color scheme turned our faces muted and soft. We looked jaundiced and puffy, like alcoholics. With the buzz of the lights, the teachers' rolling monotones, and the smells of Lysol and stale coffee that pervaded every room, school felt more like a drying-out facility than a place of education. It was appropriate. Nick and Tom and I would drink beer in the janitor's room in the basement. Sometimes Big Tim the janitor, who was only a few years older than us, would come in and drink too. He said, "Why should I care if you guys go to class? Then you go to college and become the kind of assholes I have to spend the rest of my life working for."

ON A COLD AIMLESS
autumn afternoon, Nick and I skipped class and drove out to a mall in Novi to get a gift at Victoria's Secret for one of his girlfriends. I was envious of him, having girlfriends at that level of sophistication.

At the mall, I made Nick go into the lingerie store alone and I went over to the drugstore to look at baseball cards. I wandered up and down the rows of toiletries and stopped near a display of razors. There stood a life-size cardboard cutout of a man with a towel wrapped around him, his face covered in shaving cream, the razor about to touch his cheek.

When Nick found me, I was smelling a bottle of Old Spice and tears were in my eyes. Nick asked me what I was doing. I shrugged, and smelled the Old Spice a little more. Nick stood there, a white gift bag stuffed with tissue paper in his right hand.

"Are you crying?" he said.

"No," I said, my nose still hovering over the bottle of Old Spice that smelled like my father.

"You're crying," he said.

I handed the bottle to Nick. "Try it."

He took the bottle and put it under his nose. He inhaled slowly and deeply, then he recapped the bottle and set it back on the shelf. He walked up and down the aisle, found a bottle of Brut, and inhaled. He closed his eyes, dropped his head, and inhaled again.

The manager kicked us out. "This isn't a 'free smell' store," he said.

WITH ALL THE MEN GONE
, we boys became men. Suddenly, the week of my seventeenth birthday, in the endless gray dampness of a Michigan autumn, I became an adult male. Nick and I drove to the Black Lantern and ordered vodka shots, and then beer after beer. Around us in the bar, everyone was drinking illegally. Spiros shrugged as he made thirteen-year-old Billy Markovich a vodka martini. "Nobody else is here to drink," he said. "I need to make a living, don't I? If you have money, you drink."

Billy nearly gagged on his olive, but he knocked the drink back and motioned for another.

Other boys of thirteen and fourteen howled wildly, glasses raised, bottoms up. The television was switched from ESPN to MTV. We made lewd comments about the women in the music videos.

We took after-school jobs to help our mothers pay bills. You could find us gutting abandoned houses, cutting lawns, pumping gas, flipping burgers. After work we'd come back to the Black Lantern. Vodka, our fathers' drink of choice, coursed through our veins and through our minds and hearts and finally down to our pubescent cocks, which were alive and on fire. Every sixteen- and seventeen-year-old male in Maple Rock was a commodity that year, and we lost our virginity like it was spare change. I had sex with Mrs. Gagliardi, a large-breasted, dark-eyed Avon Lady in her early thirties, who came to the Black Lantern one Saturday evening, drunk, and led me up Warren Avenue to her house. In the morning, she had me get dressed immediately and leave. She didn't want to see me in the daylight, and because I was young and unskilled in these areas of the heart and flesh, I was hurt by her coldness.

Nick, always more precocious and confident than me, was having sex with half the women who worked at the Kroger where he was a stock boy. His redheaded manager, Sue Parsons, was the best, he said. He said there were rainbows in his eyes when he came. He said he didn't care if the fathers ever returned from the moon.

Older women didn't seem to have the same consistent interest in me, but many nights I did go over to see Sonya Stecko, and we made out in her basement for hours. I pulled off her sweatshirt and she undid the zipper of my jeans, knowing that there was nobody who'd come tearing down the stairs, wanting to kill me for what I was doing with his daughter.

Walking home from Sonya's one night, I saw Nick sprawled out on the front lawn of Tanya Jaworski's house.

He had a puffy eye and blood all over the front of his shirt. He said he thought his nose was broken.

I said, "Is Tanya's father back?"

He said, "No. Her mother did this."

And believe me, it was true: if we became men, our mothers did too. They took jobs. Those who already had jobs took second jobs. Sometimes a few of the mothers came to the Black Lantern and drank with us. They arm-wrestled and hollered and broke bottles for emphasis when making speeches. They were working ten, twelve, sixteen hours a day. Once the police even brought my mother home. I stood there in the living room, appalled, as they told me to get her some aspirin and put her to bed. My mother yelled, "Fucking fascists." The cops simply nodded and said good night. They were thinking, I imagine, what I was thinking. These strong women were doing the best they could. So what if they acted a little out of character, if sometimes they let their responsibilities slide? Their husbands were on the moon. Who could deny them some happiness?

My mother worked two jobs. Days, she taught music at St. John's grade school, and three nights a week she cleaned offices in Plymouth, one of the suburbs to the north where men could still be found on Saturday afternoons, mowing lawns, washing cars, fixing bikes. Meanwhile, our house was in chaos. Kolya and I tried to keep up with the laundry and dishes, but we failed. My mother would come home tired, and soon her face was blank and void of worry thanks to a few beers. On her bed would be a pile of clean laundry I had not had time to put away. She'd crawl into towels and underwear and sleep the sleep of the hardworking under heaps of clean linen, smelling of fabric softener. The next morning, she'd try to get some housework done, but she could do little more than drink half a pot of coffee, shower, get dressed, and drive off to work.

THAT DOESN'T MEAN
that we gave up hope that our fathers would return. Nick had the idea that he knew where some, if not all, of them had gone—Camp Kiev, an old hunting cabin on forty acres up near Cadillac where his father, and many of our fathers, went a few times a year.

Kyle Hartley was pretty much sober, and he owned an old Dodge work van that had room for almost a dozen of us to cram in the back. My mother was working that night and Kolya was with me, smiling like God's grace itself. I let him have a can of beer as we sat in the back, balancing on paint cans and crates and toolboxes. When we hit the interstate, we yelled and sang and roared, whiskey fires in our bellies. We made Kolya dance. We boasted of the women we planned to sleep with, the jobs we were going to get in places like Texas and Alaska, the houses and cars we were going to buy someday.

Near Midland, people started to fall asleep and it got quiet. Kyle kept driving, Nick in the front seat egging him on, whispering how he knew this was the place—the only place—all those men would have gone.