The Fragile World (24 page)

curtis

The road through Iowa was familiar to me, even the names of exits, the signage for Casey’s General Store and Cracker Barrel. Kathleen and I had made the drive from Northwestern to Omaha each May, then returned again at the end of August. Those summers had been a happy, languid interval between our busy semesters, a break before real life began. On our way to Omaha, we were loaded down with dirty laundry; on the way back, the Datsun had bulged with supplies Kathleen’s parents had gifted us with for the next semester—toilet paper and laundry detergent and ten-dollar rolls of quarters for the washer and dryer.

Except for airport layovers, I hadn’t been back to the Chicago area since the morning after our graduation from Northwestern, when Kathleen and I had packed up the rest of our belongings, crammed them into my Datsun and headed for Omaha one last time. At that point, our wedding was only two weeks away, and we had a new life planned for us, one that didn’t include anything or anyone in Chicago.

Now, everything on the road seemed familiar to me. I tried to fight down a rising tide of memory, but it was like containing a bout of food poisoning. The closer I came to Illinois, the more the past punched its way into the present. Illinois was Chicago for me, and Chicago was the seat of my childhood, the place I’d escaped. In my Chicago, there was no Michigan Avenue, no Magnificent Mile, no Cubs games or waterfront or expensive shopping or overpriced slices of deep dish pizza. Other than the two trips to Oberlin—the one with Kathleen when Daniel was alive, the one I’d taken by myself after Daniel had died—I’d managed to avoid even a layover there. Not that I would have bumped into my father at the airport; he was poor and drunk, and the parameters of his life were strictly limited to a radius of three or four blocks. Still, even the slimmest of chances, even the snowball’s chance in hell that I would run into my father, had kept me away.

And here I was—on my way back, alone, with a gun, about to settle a score.

I hadn’t thought of this neighborhood in years. My childhood was best seen through a dirty lens from a thousand yards away, where it might have some American-dream, rags-to-middle-class resonance. I took the familiar exit as the drizzle that had started earlier became a steady rain, then a downpour. The old house surprised me by still being there, by still standing. The overall neighborhood had improved over the years, from one housing boom or another, from gentrification, from young couples forgoing rent in high-rises for an old house that could be gutted and redone, top to bottom. But this particular two-bedroom house, with its tiny shared bathroom, its unreliable toilet, its thin walls, hadn’t been updated; even through the rain, I could see that the roof was missing some tiles, and the gutter over the front porch was sagging, weighted down by leaves and debris.

I sat there for a long time, probably freaking out any of the nice young couples who happened to glance out their windows, noting the presence of a middle-aged man in a dirty Ford Explorer with California plates. I sat there for a long time, my toes growing numb inside my shoes, remembering the last time I’d visited, when I’d promised Kathleen I would never return.

It was the one and only time she’d met my parents, a trip that served both as an introduction and a goodbye, a neat two-fer trick. After that visit, I’d effectively ceased to be their son. After that, when the subject of families came up, I said my parents had died when I was in college and brushed off the onslaught of sympathy by saying it was a long time ago.

But Kathleen had insisted she meet them, and it had seemed only fair—after spending two summers with her parents in Omaha, the excuses I’d given her about my family had worn thin.

“How bad can they be?” she’d teased.

“Trust me—bad.”

“You never even
call
them,” she’d said more than once, accusingly. “Don’t they want to know what you’re up to? Don’t you want to know if they’re okay?”

Kathleen couldn’t understand that the answer to both questions was
no.
How could she? Her parents called each Sunday night, and she dropped everything to chat with them for an hour. I couldn’t imagine a world where my parents cared about my classes, knew the schedule of my upcoming papers and projects, wanted to fill me in on everything from the new neighbors to how many bowls full of berries they’d picked from the bushes in the rear of the property.

“My family is nothing like yours,” I promised her. We’d been lounging on her bed at the time, her back against the wall, feet in my lap. I was rubbing each foot slowly, toe to heel, and Kathleen had moaned contentedly.

“They can’t be so bad, if they had you.”

“Yes, they can.”

By then I had known that I wanted to marry Kathleen, and this seemed the only fair thing to do—to let her meet my family before I asked her to marry me, to give her all the facts before she made a decision, an informed consent. We’d made the drive on one of the last days of our spring semester—short in distance, long in every other way. Kathleen had grown quiet as we’d neared their neighborhood, where dogs barked behind chain-link fences and groups of young men leaned against storefronts, watching us. We parked in front of the two-bedroom house, walked up the cracked concrete steps and knocked, ignoring the bell that had been broken for as long as I could remember.

My mother had opened the door, and she stared at us from the entry without saying anything. I had phoned that morning to let her know we were coming, but for all the recognition she showed, we might have been visiting from the local Kingdom Hall. It’s possible that my mother had been born this way—slow, dazed, dull—but equally possible that life with her husband had made her this way. I’d never known. She wore a shapeless dress that was dirty along the hem where it grazed the floor, and her hair was pulled back from her face and gathered in an oversize clip. I knew she was in her late forties, but still someone could have convinced me she was at least sixty.

“Hello, Mom,” I said. “This is Kathleen.”

“Oh, it’s so nice to meet you finally,” Kathleen had gushed, but my mother answered with only a polite “hello” before turning away.

We followed her through the narrow hallway, lined with nicotine-yellow walls. I felt Kathleen’s slight intake of breath as she tried to adjust to the smell.

“They’re here,” my mother announced, rounding the corner into the den, and my father heaved himself to his feet from the couch.

He was a tall man, but wider than he’d been three years ago. I’d been home only occasionally, since I spent summers in Omaha and qualified for holiday housing on campus through my work-study job. My father had the kind of body that might have been athletic in his youth—although I had no memory of him this way—and was still somehow powerful and strong, though outsized. When he held out a hand to Kathleen in greeting, his gut came between them, as solid a mass of tissue as a thirty-pound tumor. In the other hand he held a highball glass. His smell was rancid and sour. My mother, easily two hundred and fifty pounds herself, almost disappeared behind his bulk. But she could be invisible even when she was the only person in the room; she had perfected this art, and employed it whenever necessary, like an animal camouflaging itself in the wild to avoid a predator.

Kathleen tried again. “It’s so nice to meet you...” But her words were lost. This wasn’t a house where we observed social conventions and shared niceties. My own father, while giving Kathleen an appreciative up-and-down glance, hadn’t bothered to greet me.

“What do your parents do, Kathleen?” my father asked gruffly, as if this was a standard opening question for meeting your only son’s girlfriend. When he spoke, alcohol fumes leaked from his mouth.

“My dad’s a builder,” Kathleen squeaked, caught off guard.

“Oh, yeah? What does he build?”

Don’t answer,
I thought, but it was too late to stop where this was going. Dad fancied himself a builder, too. I’d heard him refer to himself often enough as a skilled carpenter, but what he meant was that he was a laborer, capable of moving things from one place to another, able to operate some tools, but not with anything close to proficiency, as the run-down nature of this house surely proved.

“Um, residential, some government buildings, things like that,” Kathleen said modestly. Owen had done well for himself; he had a good reputation, which, combined with a genial nature, opened up some fairly lucrative opportunities.

“Government buildings?” Dad wheezed. “So he’s got his hand in that, huh?”

I cringed. This was the sort of thing that delighted my father, because it confirmed his understanding of how the world worked—that some people got the perks, and the rest of the world got shat on. It went without saying that he was one of the ones who was shat on, and he accepted no responsibility for this fact. It didn’t matter that he was drunk more often than sober, that he had lost so many jobs for being insubordinate or obstinate that he was lucky to find intermittent work as a day laborer, that he basically lied and bullied and connived his way through life. No—for my father, the blame clearly lay with the people who had it all, who owed him something. This was the sort of thing he went on for hours about, using the recliner in the den as a bully pulpit from which he had tried for eighteen years to indoctrinate me. I’d managed to escape through good grades and a high school counselor who took me under his wing; if Mom had escaped, it was only by adopting a convenient sort of deafness.

Kathleen released an uncomfortable laugh. I could feel her eyes on me, pleading for me to guide her through this conversation. She’d been asking from the beginning, from that first date at the bowling alley with a basket of fries between us, what my family was like, what my childhood had been like. I’d managed to dodge most of her questions by supplying only the barest of facts—that money had been tight, that my parents were mainly involved in their own lives, that I’d more or less needed to raise myself. I’d been casual about it, turning the questions back to her, as if it wasn’t a big deal, as if maybe I’d even preferred it that way.

From a framed photo on her dresser, I had learned that Kathleen’s family visited a cabin at a lake each summer. They owned Jet Skis and kept them tied to the dock during their two-week stay. In my mind, all of it—the cabin, the lake, the Jet Skis—had taken on mythical proportions. Our families weren’t just different in their obvious financial statuses, but in general health and happiness, too. Even if my family had rented a cabin on a lake each summer, it wouldn’t have been the same. My father would have sat on the recliner there, or the couch, or even the end of the dock, gesturing with a bottle in one hand, the weight of an unfair world on his shoulders. My mother would have stayed indoors, smoking.

He wasn’t finished grilling Kathleen; in fact, I could tell that he was only warming up. I’d been gone so long that he might have fallen out of regular practice. With only my mother as his verbal and physical punching bag, he had probably been storing up. He took a long sip of the amber-colored liquid in his glass and asked, “He works pretty hard, though, your dad?”

“He works very hard,” Kathleen said cautiously, unable to tell where this was going.

“Not everyone understands hard work anymore,” Dad continued, taking another swallow. He savored this swig, rolling it around in his mouth like a delicacy, rather than whatever had been cheapest at the only liquor store within walking distance. I saw what was coming and wished I could have prevented it or at least given Kathleen fair warning, but I was paralyzed, almost fascinated by this glimpse of my father in action. “You take my son here, I can’t figure he’s had an honest day’s work in his life.”

Kathleen laughed again, probably thinking this was a joke. When my father’s hard grin didn’t change, she bristled. I let her take my hand, although my skin had gone clammy to the touch. “I don’t know if he tells you, but Curtis works incredibly hard,” she began.

Dad’s laugh stopped her. His eyes were pitiless. “Nose in a book. Not what I call work, exactly.” Behind him, my mother smiled as if we were discussing something as banal as the weather. Maybe she wasn’t following the conversation; maybe she’d drifted to whatever world she visited when Dad started in.

I gave Kathleen a look, but she couldn’t stop. It was her basic sense of justice, of what was good and right and fair. Kathleen picked up trash on the sidewalk, she openly scorned cheaters, she stood up for the underdog. “He does work, though, besides going to school. He has two—”

I squeezed her hand sharply, trying to convey the pointlessness of the situation, and she stopped, midsentence. I’d worked harder than my father could ever understand, bussing tables through high school, weeknights at one place and weekends at another. “Women’s work,” my father had called this. I hadn’t kept a cent of the money at home, where he could get to it. I’d deposited my checks and threw away the receipts. Northwestern was paid for by scholarships, loans, working four afternoons a week as a physics lab assistant and bartending weekends, an off-the-books gig I’d picked up even though I’d barely been eighteen at the time. Mostly the bar catered to a young crowd, college students who had inherited disposable income from their parents, or older men who threw down big bills to impress twenty-year-old girls. But sometimes I served men at the bar who reminded me of my father, men who were garrulous and unhappy, beaten down by life and unable to do anything about their situations, except raise a finger to get my attention, one more time. I could no more understand their lives than my father could understand mine.

I’d only intended our visit to last a couple of hours, figuring we would arrive after lunch so my mother didn’t have to be troubled to sort through the refrigerator for cheese and lunch meats that hadn’t passed their expiration dates. I also figured that by early afternoon, my father would have polished off a few beers but not yet started his serious drinking of the day, which typically began during the evening news, escalated through unfunny sitcoms and peaked during the late show. By the time he was sloppily, angrily drunk, screaming insults and throwing dishes and twisting my mother’s arm behind her back, I hoped that Kathleen and I would be back on campus in my dorm room or hers, making pasta from a box—
if
she still wanted to be with me.