Something Happened (44 page)

“Miss Owens doesn’t like me.”

“Yes she does. She gives you good grades.”

“She always hollers at me.”

“She never does.”

“I’m afraid she will if I don’t do my work.”

“Do your work.”

“He says I can’t climb ropes.”

“Can you?”

“I hate Forgione.”

“You don’t have to.”

“How come?”

“He likes you.”

“Did you go see him again?”

“Did you want me to?”

“I’m afraid of Forgione.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“How do you know?”

“He says you’ve got a good build and can run like a weasel. You don’t try to learn. You’re supposed to use your feet too when you climb ropes. Not your legs, your feet.”

“What’s a weasel?”

“A four-legged animal that runs like you.”

“Will I have wisdom teeth?”

“Sure. When you grow up.”

“Will they have to be pulled?”

“Are you going to start worrying about that?”

“Do you think I can help it?”

“If they’re bad.”

“You don’t like me.”

“Yes I do.”

“You go away.”

“Where?”

“To Puerto Rico.”

“I have to.”

“To Puerto Rico?”

“When?”

“Last year. You went away to Puerto Rico.”

“I had to.”

“Are you going again?”

“I have to.”

“Soon?”

“In June.”

“To Puerto Rico?”

“I’m on the committee. I help pick the place.”

“Is that your new job?”

“I don’t have it yet.”

“To make a speech?”

“I hope so.”

“They stole my bike when you were away.”

“I bought you another one.”

“I thought they were going to beat me up.”

“They would have stolen it anyway, even if I was here. I would have been at the office.”

“Don’t go.”

“I have to.”

“Whenever you go away I’m afraid you won’t come back.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“You told me.”

“Sometimes I cry.”

“I’ll come back.”

“I don’t want to be alone.”

“You wouldn’t be alone. You’d have Mommy.”

“Mommy doesn’t like me.”

“Yes she does.”

“She yells at me.”

“
I
yell at you.”

“
You
don’t like me.”

“You’re full of bull. I’m always sorry afterward. You don’t have to worry. I’ll come back. I’m never going to leave you.”

“When you die?”

His question catches me by surprise. “What made you think of that?”

“I don’t want you to,” he answers solemnly. “Maybe that’s what made me think of it.”

“Ever?”

“No.”

“I’ll try not to, then,” I laugh. (My laugh sounds forced, hollow.) “For your sake. I don’t want to, either.”

“You have to,” he speculates. “Won’t you?”

“Someday, I guess. By that time, though, you might not care.”

He looks up sharply. “How come?”

“You’ll be all grown up by then, if you’re lucky, and won’t need me anymore. You’ll be able to take
care of yourself and won’t want me around. You might even be glad. I’ll finally stop yelling at you.”

“Hey, slut, come here,” he calls out excitedly to my daughter with a grin of incredulous wonderment. His eyes gleam. “Do you know what Daddy just said?” His eyes gleam. “He said that when he dies we might not even care because all of us will be all grown up and able to take care of ourselves. We might even be glad.”

My daughter’s mood is dour and unresponsive (and I feel already that she will soon be deep in deadening drugs, if she isn’t using them already).

“What about Derek?” she demands with inspired malice, and her eyes grow bright and cold. I frown. (She is proud of this thrust.)

“I wasn’t thinking about him.”

“You forgot about Derek.”

I forgot about Derek. I wish I could forget about him more often. It’s hard to forget about him for long (while he’s still here in the house with us, although I always try. When he’s out of sight, he’s usually out of my mind. We should send him away someplace and have him out of our house and minds for good. What a relief that will be. It would be upsetting. My daughter wants me to. My boy doesn’t. It’s no use seeing doctors anymore). Like my boy, I am afraid of doctors, nurses, and dentists (although I pretend not to be), and I guess I always have been. I’m afraid they might be right. (In the army, I would look directly at the needle when I got my immunization shots because I wanted so strongly to turn my head away. I am no longer a blood donor: I no longer give blood to my company blood bank when the Personnel and Medical Departments set up facilities annually to take blood from hardier employees than myself who volunteer and get thinned orange juice back in exchange. I do not set a good example for the people who work for me.) I am empathizing already with my boy’s wisdom teeth. He has never mentioned them before (or I would have been empathizing with them sooner. I hope they’re not impacted. How will I ever be able to get him to a dentist if he knows they
are going to be pulled? Maybe he’ll be different by then. And maybe he won’t. I am not looking forward to having my own teeth pulled. I rarely get new cavities now, but old fillings fall away and teeth do have to be cleaned, and I don’t like having my soft gums pricked by those hard, sharp dental instruments until they’re sore from back to front and awash with blood. I don’t like having my palate tickled when the backs of the uppers are polished. I am afraid to visit my dentist twice a year. I need periodontal work and have to go once a week). I am afraid of Forgione too (and would not want to have to climb ropes for him. He sneaks into my dreams occasionally too, along with niggers and other menacing strangers, steals through shadows in the background and slips away before I can find out what he is doing in them), although I do not associate him with the anesthetist at the tonsillectomy (who did not threaten me at all, although he did, quite cheerfully, give my boy a liquid anesthetic through a pink rubber tube as we watched. Is that an enema? Maybe he’s right). No, I know I will never forget that tonsillectomy of his, or my own, or my daughter’s, or the sequence of repetitious medical messages in hushed tones from doctors who told me to my face that my mother had probably suffered another small brain spasm or stroke and was degenerating simultaneously from progressive arthritis, so it was sometimes hard to be sure (for all of these were morbid and revolting experiences and I am unable to repress the memory of them), and I know I will also remember and dislike that last prospering young doctor with the pinstripe suit and exaggerated good posture (he was younger than I was and makes more money) as he stepped out onto the patio (I will never forget him) after examining Derek that pearly spring day (I will never forgive him), the screen door banging closed behind him, to tell us, with something of an unconscious quirk of a smile on his otherwise smug and emotionless face (I think I will always remember his smile):

“He will never speak.”

That bastard.

All my life, it seems, I’ve been sandwiched between people who will not speak. My mother couldn’t speak at the end. My youngest child Derek couldn’t speak from the beginning. My sister and I almost never speak. (We exchange greeting cards.) I don’t speak to cousins. (
I
may never speak. In dreams I often have trouble speaking. My tongue feels dead and dry and swollen enough to choke my mouth. Its coat is coarse. It will not move when I want it to, and I am in danger and feel terror because I cannot speak or scream.) I wish I didn’t have to leave my family and go to Puerto Rico. (I worry when I have to go away. I worry about all of us. I worry what would happen to them if I did not return.)

Derek is pleasant enough most of the time (for a kid that cannot speak) and toilet trained now. He hardly ever causes a disturbance anymore when we take him out in public and usually does not act strange. But he will achieve a mental age of not much more than five, and arrive at that slowly, and turbulent emotional changes are expected with adolescence and full physical sexual maturity. (If he lives that long. I have heard that certain kinds of retardates—that’s another thing we call him now—have a life expectancy shorter than average, and that’s another thing I catch myself counting on.) He has a dreamy, staring, uncomprehending gaze at times that makes him appear preoccupied and distant, but apart from that, his face is not especially distinctive. (He does not embarrass us unless he tries to speak. We tell him not to.

“Shhhh,” we whisper.)

“Will he ever speak?” my boy asks.

“No.”

“Will you send him away?”

“We’ll do what’s best.”

“Would you send me away if I couldn’t speak?”

“You can speak.”

“If I couldn’t?”

“You can.”

“But if I couldn’t. If something happened to me.”

“We would do what was best.”

“For who?” sneers my daughter.

“For all of us. We aren’t sending him away just because he can’t speak.”

“Please don’t give him away,” begs my boy, who is unable even to look at him without drawing back.

“Then why don’t you help us with him?” I demand. “You never want to play with him. Neither of you.”

“Neither do you,” sneers my daughter.

I do not reply.

My boy is silent.

In the family in which I live there are four people of whom I am afraid. Three of these four people are afraid of me, and each of these three is also afraid of the other two. Only one member of the family is not afraid of any of the others, and that one is an idiot.

It is not true that retarded (brain-damaged, idiot, feeble-minded, emotionally disturbed, autistic) children are the necessary favorites of their parents or that they are always uncommonly beautiful and lovable, for Derek, our youngest child, is not especially good-looking, and we do not love him at all. (We would prefer not to think about him. We don’t want to talk about him.)

All of us live now—we are very well off—in luxury with him and his nurse in a gorgeous two-story wood colonial house with white shutters on a choice country acre in Connecticut off a winding, picturesque asphalt road called Peapod Lane—and I hate it. There are rose bushes, zinnias, and chrysanthemums rooted all about, and I hate them too. I have sycamores and chestnut trees in my glade and my glen, and pots of glue in my garage. I have an electric drill with sixteen attachments I never use. Grass grows under my feet in back and in front and flowers come into bloom when they’re supposed to. (Spring in our countryside smells of insect spray and horseshit.) Families with horses for pets do live nearby, and I hate them too, the families
and
the horses. (This is a Class A suburb in Connecticut, God dammit, not the wild and woolly West, and those pricks have horses.) I hate my neighbor, and he hates me.

And I have plenty more I could let myself hate
(if I were the type to complain and run off at the mouth, ha, ha, or yield contemptibly to impulses of self-pity, ha, ha, ha). I can even hate myself—me—generous, tolerant, lovable old Bob Slocum (in a kindly and indulgent way, of course)—for staying married to the same wife so long when I’ve had such doubts that I wanted to, molesting my little girl cousin once in the summertime when no mothers were looking and feeling depraved and disgusted with myself immediately and forever afterward (as I knew, before I did, I would—I didn’t enjoy it. I can still recall her vacant, oblivious little girl’s stare. I didn’t hurt her or frighten her. I only touched her underpants a moment between the legs, and then I touched her there again. I gave her a dime and was sorry afterward when I realized she might mention that. Nobody said anything. I still keep thinking they will. I didn’t get my dime’s worth. She was a dull, plain child. I wonder what became of her. Nothing. She is still a dull, plain child in my archives. That’s the way she stops. The branches of my family have grown apart—I can kick myself for fumbling all those priceless chances I had with Virginia at the office for more than half a year, and with a couple of Girl Scout sisters I knew from high school earlier. I thought they were only kidding in their giggling insinuations. And they were having genuine sex parties with older boys from tougher neighborhoods who would crash parties in our neighborhood they had not been invited to and break them up. It was rumored they raped girls), seeing my big brother with his fly open on the floor of that shadowy coal shed beside our brick apartment house with a kid named Billy Foster’s skinny kid sister, who was in my own class in grade school but not as smart (my big brother wasn’t even that big then), had nipples you could notice but no breasts, but was doing it anyway (Geraldine was not as smart as I was in geography, history, or math but was going all the way already with guys as old and big as my big brother. While
I
wasn’t even jerking off yet!), abusing and browbeating my children (I have seen them turn dumbfounded and aghast when they thought I was annoyed, observed how insurmountable their plight in trying
to talk normally. Their heart clogs their mouth. I see them trembling in such debilitating anxiety and want to hit them for being so weak. Later, I condemn myself, and I am even angrier at them), dishonoring my wife (I no longer want to tyrannize her and I try not to make passes at anyone who knows her), capitulating in craven weakness and camouflaged shame so often in the past to my possessive, domineering mother-in-law (who bossed me around a lot in the beginning) (while I had to make believe she didn’t) and my shrewish, domineering sister-in-law (who is pinched and nasty now and whose face is drying up into lines as hard and deep as those on a peach pit), for surrendering so totally, despairingly, fatalistically to broad and overbearing unforgettable Mrs. Yerger in the automobile casualty insurance company, who towered over me then, it seemed (and comes to mind always now when I’m fuming over Derek’s nurse—I don’t know why we call her a nurse. She does no nursing. She’s a caretaker. She takes care of my mentally retarded son), when she hove into view like a smirking battleship, moving out of one indistinct department, of the company to take command of the file room—I knew on sight with a chill in my blood and bones and a feeling of frost on my fingertips that she would fire me soon if I didn’t quit sooner—and again and again for fumbling it so thoroughly with luscious, busty Virginia back there in the office I worked in as a dumb, shy, frightened, and idiotically ingenuous virgin little boy, who felt like a waif, and sometimes worse.