This Boy's Life (6 page)

My mother was laughing with the rest. She loved to watch men goof around with each other; lifeguards, soldiers in bus stations, fraternity brothers having a car wash.

It was a clear day. Hawkers moved through the crowd, selling sun glasses and hats and Seafair souvenirs. Girls were sunning themselves on blankets. The air smelled of coconut oil.

Two men holding bottles of beer stood nearby. They kept turning and looking at us. Then one of them walked over, a pair of binoculars swinging from a strap in his hand. He was darkly tanned and wore tennis whites. He had a thin moustache and a crew cut. “Hey, Bub,” he said to me, “want to give these a try?” While he adjusted the strap around my neck and showed me how to focus the lenses, the other man came up and said something to my mother. She answered him, but continued gazing out toward the water with her hand shielding her eyes. I brought the Lions and the Odd Fellows into focus and watched them push each other overboard. They seemed so close I could see their pale bodies and the expressions of fatigue on their faces. Despite the hearty shouts they gave, they climbed the ropes with difficulty and fell back as soon as they met resistance. Each time they hit the water they stayed there a while longer, paddling just enough to keep themselves afloat, looking wearily up at the boats they were supposed to capture.

My mother accepted a beer from the man beside her. The one who’d offered me the binoculars sensed my restlessness, maybe even my jealousy. He knelt down beside me and explained the battle as if I were a little kid, but I took the binoculars off and handed them back to him.

“I don’t know,” my mother was saying. “We should probably get home pretty soon.”

The man she’d been talking with turned to me. He was the older of the two, a tall angular man with ginger-colored hair and a disjointed way of moving, as if he were always off balance. He wore Bermudas and black socks. His long face was sunburned, making his teeth look strangely prominent. “Let’s ask the big fella,” he said.

“What say, big fella? You want to watch the fun from my place?” He pointed at a large brick house on the edge of the park.

I ignored him. “Mom,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

“He hasn’t had lunch yet,” my mother said.

“Lunch,” the man said. “That’s no problem. What do you like?” he asked me. “What’s your absolute favorite thing to have for lunch?”

I looked at my mother. She was in high spirits and that made me even grimmer, because I knew they were not due to my influence. “He likes hamburgers,” she told him.

“You got it,” he said. He took my mother’s elbow and led her across the park toward the house. I was left to follow along with the other man, who seemed to find me interesting. He wanted to know my name, where I went to school, where I lived, my mother’s name, the where-abouts of my father. I was a sucker for any grown-up who asked me questions. By the time we reached the house I had forgotten to be sullen and told him everything about us.

The house was cavernous inside, hushed and cool. The windows had stained-glass medallions set within their mullioned panes. They were arched, and so were the heavy doors. The living room ceiling, ribbed with beams, curved to an arch high overhead. I sat down on the couch. The coffee table in front of me was crowded with empty beer bottles. My mother went to the open windows on the harbor side of the room. “Boy!” she said. “What a view!”

The sunburned man said, “Judd, take care of our friend.”

“Come on, Bub,” said the man I’d been talking to. “I’ll rustle you up something to eat.”

I followed him to the kitchen and sat at a counter while Judd pulled things out of the refrigerator. He slapped together a baloney sandwich and set it in front of me. He seemed to have forgotten about the hamburger. I would have said something, but I had a pretty good idea that even if I did there still wasn’t going to be any hamburger.

When we came back to the living room, my mother was looking out the window through the binoculars. The sunburned man stood beside her, his head bent close to hers, one hand resting on her shoulder as he gestured with his beer bottle at some point of interest. He turned as we came in and grinned at us. “There’s our guy,” he said. “How’s it going? You get some lunch? Judd, did you get this man some lunch?”

“Yes sir.”

“Great! That’s the ticket! Have a seat, Rosemary. Right over here. Sit down, Jack, that’s the boy. You like peanuts? Great! Judd, bring him some peanuts. And for Christ’s sake get these bottles out of here.” He sat next to my mother on the couch and smiled steadily at me while Judd stuck his fingers into the bottles and carried them clinking away. Judd returned with a dish of nuts and left with the rest of the bottles.

“There you go, Jack. Dig in! Dig in!” He watched me eat a few handfuls, nodding to himself as if I were acting in accordance with some prediction he had made. “You’re an athlete,” he said. “It’s written all over you. The eyes, the build. What do you play, Jack, what’s your game?”

“Baseball,” I said. This was somewhere in the neighborhood of truth. In Florida I’d played nearly every day, and gotten good at it. But I hadn’t played much since. I wasn’t an athlete and I didn’t look like one, but I was glad he thought so.

“Baseball!” he cried. “Judd, what did I tell you?”

Judd had taken a chair on the other side of the room, apart from the rest of us. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head at the other man’s perspicacity.

My mother laughed and said something teasing. She called the man Gil.

“Wait a minute!” he said. “You think I’m just shooting the bull? Judd, what did I say about Jack here? What did I say he played?”

Judd crossed his dark legs. “Baseball,” he said.

“All right,” Gil said. “All right, I hope we’ve got that straightened out. Jack. Back to you. What other activities do you enjoy?”

“I like to ride bikes,” I said, “but I don’t have one.”

I saw the good humor leave my mother’s face, just as I knew it would. She looked at me coldly and I looked coldly back at her. The subject of bicycles turned us into enemies. Our problem was that I wanted a bike and she didn’t have enough money to buy me one. She had no money at all. She had explained this to me many times. I understood perfectly, but not having a bike seemed too hard a thing to bear in silence.

Gil mugged disbelief. He looked from me to my mother and back to me. “No bike? A boy with no bike?”

“We’ll discuss this later,” my mother told me.

“I just said—”

“I know what you said.” She frowned and looked away.

“Hold on!” Gil said. “Just hold on. Now what’s the story here, Mom? Are you seriously telling me that this boy does not have a bicycle?”

My mother said, “He’s going to have to wait a little longer, that’s all.”

“Boys can’t wait for bikes, Rosemary. Boys need bikes now!”

My mother shrugged and smiled tightly, as she usually did when she was cornered. “I don’t have the money,” she said quietly.

The word money left a heavy silence in its wake.

Then Gil said, “Judd, let’s have another round. See if there’s some ginger ale for the slugger.”

Judd rose and left the room.

Gil said, “What kind of bicycle would you like to have, Jack?”

“A Schwinn, I guess.”

“Really? You’d rather have a Schwinn than an English racer?” He saw me hesitate. “Or would you rather have an English racer?”

I nodded.

“Well then, say so! I can’t read your mind.”

“I’d rather have an English racer.”

“That’s the way. Now what kind of English racer are we talking about?”

Judd brought the drinks. Mine was bitter. I recognized it as Collins mix.

My mother leaned forward and said, “Gil.”

He held up his hand. “What kind, Jack?”

“Raleigh,” I told him. Gil smiled and I smiled back.

“Champagne taste,” he said. “Go for the best, that’s the way. What color?”

“Red.”

“Red. Fair enough. I think we can manage that. Did you get all that, Judd? One bicycle, English racer, Raleigh, red.”

“Got it,” Judd said.

My mother said thanks but she couldn’t accept it. Gil said it was for me to accept, not her. She began to argue, not halfheartedly but with resolve. Gil wouldn’t hear a word of it. At one point he even put his hands over his ears.

At last she gave up. She leaned back and drank from her beer. And I saw that in spite of what she’d said she was really happy at the way things had turned out, not only because it meant the end of these arguments of ours but also because, after all, she wanted very much for me to have a bicycle.

“How are the peanuts, Jack?” Gil asked.

I said they were fine.

“Great,” he said. “That’s just great.”

 

GIL AND MY mother had a few more beers and talked while Judd and I watched the hydroplane qualifying heats on television. In the early evening Judd drove us back to the boardinghouse. My mother and I lay on our beds for a while with the lights off, feeling the breeze, listening to the treetops rustle outside. She asked if I would mind staying home alone that night. She had been invited out for dinner. “Who with?” I asked. “Gil and Judd?”

“Gil,” she said.

“No,” I said. I was glad. This would firm things up.

The room filled with shadows. My mother got up and took a bath, then put on a full blue skirt and an off-the-shoulder Mexican blouse and the fine turquoise jewelry my father had bought her when they were driving through Arizona before the war. Earrings, necklace, heavy bracelet, concha belt. She’d picked up some sun that day; the blue of the turquoise seemed especially vivid, and so did the blue of her eyes. She dabbed perfume behind her ears, in the crook of her elbow, on her wrists. She rubbed her wrists together and touched them to her neck and chest. She turned from side to side, checking herself in the mirror. Then she stopped turning and studied herself head-on in a sober way. Without taking her eyes from the mirror she asked me how she looked. Really pretty, I told her.

“That’s what you always say.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“Good,” she said. She gave herself one last look and we went downstairs.

Marian and Kathy came in while my mother was cooking dinner for me. They had her turn around for them, both of them smiling and exclaiming, and Marian pushed her away from the stove and finished making my dinner so she wouldn’t get stains on her blouse. My mother was cagey with their questions. They teased her about this mystery man, and when the horn honked outside they followed her down the hall, adjusting her clothes, patting her hair, issuing final instructions.

“He should have come to the door,” Marian said when they were back in the kitchen.

Kathy shrugged, and looked down at the table. She was hugely pregnant by this time and may have felt unsure of her right to decide the finer points of dating.

“He should have come to the door,” Marian said again.

 

I SLEPT BADLY that night. I always did when my mother went out, which wasn’t often these days. She came back late. I listened to her walk up the stairs and down the hall to our room. The door opened and closed. She stood just inside for a moment, then crossed the room and sat down on her bed. She was crying softly. “Mom?” I said. When she didn’t answer I got up and went over to her. “What’s wrong, Mom?” She looked at me, tried to say something, shook her head. I sat beside her and put my arms around her. She was gasping as if someone had held her underwater.

I rocked her and murmured to her. I was practiced at this and happy doing it, not because she was unhappy but because she needed me, and to be needed made me feel capable. Soothing her soothed me.

She exhausted herself, and I helped her into bed. She became giddy then, laughing and making fun of herself, but she didn’t let go of my hand until she fell asleep.

In the morning we were shy with each other. I somehow managed not to ask her my question. That night I continued to master myself, but my self-mastery seemed like an act; I knew I was too weak to keep it up.

My mother was reading.

“Mom?” I said.

She looked up.

“What about the Raleigh?”

She went back to her book without answering. I did not ask again.

M
arian and Kathy and my mother decided to rent a house together. My mother offered to find the house, and so she did. It was the most scabrous eyesore in West Seattle. Paint hung in strips off the sides, the bare wood weathered to a gray, antlerish sheen. The yard was knee-high in weeds. The sagging eaves had been propped up with long planks, and the front steps were rotted through. To get inside you had to go around to the back door. Behind the house was a partly collapsed barn that little kids liked to sneak into, drawn there by the chance to play with broken glass and rusty tools.

My mother took it on the spot. The price was right, next to nothing, and she believed in its possibilities, a word used often by the man who showed it to her. He insisted on meeting us there at night and led us through the house like a thief, describing its good points in a whisper. My mother, listening with narrowed eyes to show that she was shrewd and would not be easily taken in, ended up agreeing with him that the place was just a few steps away from being a real nice home. She signed the contract on the hood of the man’s car while he held a flashlight over the paper.

The other houses on the street were small, obsessively groomed Cape Cods and colonials with lawns like putting greens. Ivy grew on the chimneys. Each of the colonials had a black, spread-winged eagle above its door. The people who lived in these houses came outside to watch us move in. They looked very glum. Later on we found out that our house, the original farmhouse in the area, had recently been scheduled for demolition and then spared at the last hour by the cynical manipulations of its owner.