The Tender Bar (11 page)

When class ended Mrs. Williams called me to her desk. “What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“I saw your face.”

“I don’t have a father.”

“Oh. Is he—did he—pass on?”

“No. I mean, maybe. I don’t know. I just don’t have one.”

She stared out the window beside her desk, then turned back to me.

“Is there an uncle?” she said.

I frowned.

“A brother?”

I thought of McGraw.

“Anyone who can fill in?”

Now it was my turn to look out the window.

“Can’t I please just not come to the breakfast?”

Mrs. Williams phoned my mother, which prompted another dining room summit. “How can they be so asinine?” Grandma said. “Don’t they know what the world is like nowadays?”

My mother stirred milk into a cup of coffee while I sat by her side. “I should’ve told the school about JR’s father,” she said. “But I didn’t want them to treat him—I don’t know.”

“I’m going to say something to you both,” Grandma said. “Now don’t jump down my throat. But, well, okay, what about Grandpa?”

“Oh not that,” I said. “Can’t we just embargo the breakfast?”

Grandpa came into the dining room. He was wearing stained chinos, a flannel shirt crusted with oatmeal drippings, and black shoes with holes in the toes big enough to see his socks, which also had holes. As always, his fly was open.

“Where’s that crumb cake you’ve been bragging about?” he asked Grandma.

“We have something to ask you,” Grandma said.

“Speak, Stupid Woman. Speak.”

My mother tried. “Would you be able to fill in for JR’s father at his school’s Father-Son Breakfast?” she asked. “This Saturday?”

“You’d have to put on clean pants,” Grandma said. “And comb that hair. You can’t go looking like this.”

“Shut your goddamned mouth!” He closed his eyes and scratched his ear. “I’ll do it,” he said. “Now get the goddamned cake. Stupid Woman.”

Grandma went into the kitchen with Grandpa. My mother gave me a blank face. I knew she was imagining what would happen if Grandpa referred to Mrs. Williams as Stupid Woman.

On Saturday morning my mother and I left our apartment in Great Neck at dawn. I wore a corduroy blazer and corduroy pants. At Grandpa’s my mother and Grandma fumbled with my necktie, which was brown and wider than the runner on the dining room table. Neither of them knew how to make a Windsor knot.

“Maybe he can skip the tie,” Grandma said.

“No!” I said.

We heard footfalls on the stairs. The three of us turned to see Grandpa descending slowly. His hair was slicked back, his jaws were shaved so smooth they were blue, his eyebrows and nose hairs and ear hairs were plucked and trimmed. He wore a pearl gray suit, set off by a black necktie and an Irish linen handkerchief. He looked finer than he’d ever looked for any secret Saturday rendezvous.

“The hell’s the mat, mat, matter?” he said.

“Nothing,” Grandma and my mother said.

“We can’t tie my tie,” I said.

He sat on the bicentennial couch and motioned for me to come near. I walked to him and stood between his knees. “Stupid women,” I whispered. He winked. Then he yanked my tie. “This tie is shit,” he said. He went upstairs and selected a tie from his closet, which he wrapped around my neck and knotted swiftly, expertly. I smelled lilac aftershave on his cheeks as he worked under my Adam’s apple, and I wanted to hug him. But we were rushing out the door, Grandma and my mother waving to us as though we were embarking on a long sea voyage.

As the Pinto went putt-putting up Plandome Road, I looked at Grandpa. He didn’t say a word. By the time we reached Shelter Rock he still hadn’t said anything, and I realized this had been a terrible mistake. Either Grandpa was tense about meeting new people, or he was irked about sacrificing his Saturday. Whatever the reason, he was miffed, and when miffed Grandpa was likely to say or do something that people in Manhasset would talk about for fifty years. I wanted to jump out of the car and make a run for it, hide under Shelter Rock.

The moment we pulled into the school parking lot, however, Grandpa changed. He wasn’t on his best behavior, he was on someone’s else’s behavior. He got out of the Pinto as though stepping from a limousine at the Academy Awards, and walked into the school as if he’d endowed the joint. I fell in alongside him and as we met the first wave of teachers and fathers, Grandpa put a hand lightly on my shoulder and turned into Clark Gable. His stutter disappeared, his manner softened. By turns he was gracious, funny, self-deprecating—and sane. I introduced him to Mrs. Williams and thought within minutes that she might have a crush on the old gent. “We’re expecting big things from JR,” she gushed.

“He’s got his mother’s brains,” Grandpa said, clasping his hands behind his back, standing ramrod straight, as if a medal were about to be pinned on his chest. “I’d rather see him concentrate on the baseball. You know, this boy has a rifle for an arm. He could play third base for the Mets someday. That was my position. Hot corner.”

“He’s lucky to have a grandfather who takes such an interest.”

The students served the fathers scrambled eggs and orange juice, then joined them at long tables set up in the middle of the classroom. Grandpa’s manners were impeccable. He didn’t dribble crumbs down his shirtfront, didn’t make any of the explosive noises that normally indicated he was full and digestion was under way. Sipping his coffee he educated the other fathers on a variety of subjects—American history, etymology, the stock market—and gave a sensational account of the day he saw Ty Cobb go five for five. The fathers stared, like boys listening to a ghost story around a campfire, as Grandpa described Cobb sliding into second base, “screaming like a banshee,” the blades of his sharpened cleats aimed at his opponent’s shins.

When I brought Grandpa his fedora and helped him into his topcoat, everyone was sorry to see him go. In the Pinto I let my head fall back against the seat and said, “Grandpa—you were amazing.”

“It’s a free country.”

“Thank you so much.”

“Don’t tell anyone—they’ll all want one.”

At home Grandpa went straight upstairs while Grandma and my mother sat me down in the dining room and debriefed me. They wanted every detail, but I didn’t want to break the spell. And anyway, I didn’t think they would believe me. I told them everything went fine and left it at that.

Grandpa didn’t reappear until later that afternoon when the Jets game started. He sat down in front of the TV wearing his stained chinos and oatmeal-crusted shirt. I sat beside him. Every time something interesting happened I looked his way, pointedly, but he didn’t flinch. I said something about Joe Namath. He grunted. I went to find Grandma, to discuss my Jekyll-Hyde grandfather, but she was busy making dinner. I went to find my mother. She was taking a nap. I woke her, but she said she was tired, and asked me to let her sleep a little while longer.

My mother had good reason to be tired. She was slaving to pay for our Great Neck apartment. But in early 1975 we discovered another reason. She had a tumor on her thyroid.

In the weeks before her surgery Grandpa’s house was actually quiet, everyone filled with dread. I alone remained calm, thanks to my mantra. I wore out my mantra. When I overheard Grandma and Uncle Charlie whispering about my mother, and the risks of her surgery, and the chance that her tumor would be malignant, I shut my eyes and took a deep breath.
I will not worry about something that will not happen.

On the day of the surgery I sat under the pine tree in Grandpa’s backyard, saying my mantra to the pinecones, which Sheryl once told me were the “pine tree’s babies.” I wondered if the pine tree was the mother or the father. I placed the pinecones closer to the tree, reuniting them with their mother-father. Grandma appeared. A miracle, she said. My mother was out of surgery and everything was fine. What she didn’t say, what she didn’t know, was that I’d done it. I’d used my mantra to save my mother.

Bandaged around her neck, my mother left the hospital a week later, and our first night in Great Neck she went straight to bed. I ate a bowl of noodles and watched her sleep, saying my mantra under my breath, wafting it over her like a blanket.

Grandma and Grandpa congratulated my mother on how quickly she recovered after the surgery. Good as new, they said. But I noticed something different. My mother was given to more blank faces than ever. She would touch her bandage and look at me, blankly, and though she shed the bandage eventually, the blank faces didn’t stop. Sitting with her, doing my homework, I’d look up and catch her staring at me, and I’d have to say her name three times to bring her out of it. I knew what she was thinking. While she’d been sick and out of work, our bills had piled up. We were going to lose that Great Neck apartment. We were going to have to return to Grandpa’s. Any day now I would wake to find my mother pecking at the calculator, talking to her calculator. Any night now she would cover her face and sob.

When the inevitable moment came, my mother took me by surprise. “We’re a family, you and I,” she said, sitting me down at the kitchen table. “But we’re also a democracy. And I’d like to put something to a vote. Do you miss the cousins?”

“Yes.”

“I know. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. So here it is, babe. How would you feel about moving to Arizona?”

Images flooded my mind. Riding horses with McGraw. Climbing mountains with McGraw. Trick-or-treating with Sheryl.

“When can we leave?” I asked.

“Don’t you want to think about it?”

“No. When can we leave?”

“Whenever we want.” She smiled, a fragile smile, but fierce. “It’s a free country.”

eleven
| STRANGERS IN PARADISE

J
UST EIGHTEEN MONTHS IN THE DESERT HAD TURNED THE
COUSINS
into precious metals. Their hair was gold, their skin copper, their faces a stunning bronze. As they ran toward us at Sky Harbor Airport, my mother and I took a half step back. Bundled in our dark coats and woolen mufflers, we looked and felt like refugees from another century. “How white you are!” Sheryl shouted, holding her forearm next to mine. “Look! It’s chocolate—vanilla! Chocolate—
vanilla
!”

Only the oldest three girls met us at the airport. It was late at night. Driving to Aunt Ruth’s house, where my mother and I were to stay until we could find our own place, Sheryl promised that we’d love Arizona. “We live in paradise,” Sheryl said. “Literally! Says so on all the signs. ‘Welcome to
Paradise
—Valley.’ It’s a ritzy suburb of Scottsdale. Kind of like the Manhasset of Arizona.”

I peered out into the darkness, which was twice as dark as nighttime in New York. All I saw were vague outlines of ominous mountains, a shade blacker than the night itself. I’d read that there were mountains in Arizona, but I’d expected something different, something on the order of the mountains in
Heidi
and
The Sound of Music,
lush and green, with sun-dappled meadows where aproned women and cherubic kids gathered daffodils. These mountains were barren, pointy triangles rising abruptly from the flat desert, like the pyramids. I stared at the biggest, which Sheryl said was called Camelback. “How come?” I asked. “Because it looks like a
camel’s back,
” she said, as though I were a dope. I turned to look at the mountain again. I couldn’t see any camel. To me it looked like the pinch runner from Dickens sprawled on his back, and the two humps were his knees and paunch.

My mother found a job immediately, as a secretary at a local hospital. Finding an apartment proved more difficult. With so many senior citizens in Arizona, most apartment complexes, especially affordable ones, didn’t allow children. Finally she lied to a landlord, saying she was a divorced woman, alone. After we moved in she told the landlord that her ex-husband had custody of me, but he’d been transferred out of state and she was taking care of me until he got settled. The landlord didn’t like it, but he didn’t want to go to the trouble of evicting us.

With the money we got from selling our waiting-room furniture and the T-Bird, my mother and I rented two beds, a dresser, a kitchen table and two dinette chairs. For the living room we bought two folding beach chairs at a drugstore. After buying a junky 1968 Volkswagen Bug we had $750 left, which my mother kept in the freezer.

Not long after our arrival Aunt Ruth and the cousins took us to Rawhide, a pretend town in the middle of the desert, which featured a pretend gold mine, a pretend jail, even pretend people. At the front gate, within a circle of authentic Conestoga wagons, was a group of huge mechanical mannequin cowboys gathered around a campfire. Their hushed voices crackled from speakers in the cacti. They were worried about Apaches. And snakes. And weather. And the Great Unknown, which lay beyond the Rio Grande. “If we don’t get across the Rio Grande by August,” the head mannequin said, “we’re goners fer sure.” The others nodded gravely. McGraw and I nodded too. Far from home, surrounded by desert—the difference between a Conestoga wagon and Aunt Ruth’s station wagon seemed slight.

We walked through the pretend town, down its one main road, which started at the saloon. The smoke from the mannequins’ campfire followed us down the street. I’d thought the woodsmoke in Manhasset was intoxicating, but Arizona woodsmoke was even more fragrant, more magical, with flavors I couldn’t identify, which Sheryl said were hickory, sagebrush, piñon, and mesquite. The stars in the desert were better too. Closer. Each one was a penlight held before my face. I looked up, filled my lungs with clean desert air, and decided Sheryl was right. This was paradise. The mountains and cacti and roadrunners, everything that had seemed so strange at first, now gave me hope. My mother and I had needed something new, and this was as new as we could get. I felt the difference already. My mind was clearer, my heart lighter. My habitual worry was lessening. Best of all I could see the difference in my mother. She hadn’t given me a blank face in weeks, and she seemed to have twice the energy.