We're All in This Together (10 page)

She put a hand over her face and peeked at me between her fingers. "I've embarrassed you, haven't I?"

"No, no," I said. "No, really."

Myrna cocked her head and squinted at me.

"Really," I said again, a little desperately.

Her gaze relaxed, but still held me, green eyes fading to amber as she leaned forward into the bright patch of sun that lay
between us. She reached out and grabbed my shoulders. Then, slowly, she drew me into her chest and embraced me. A moment passed.
I hugged back. Myrna sighed. "People should say hello like this," she said, and kissed my forehead.

Myrna broke away, spun and took the stairs in two big steps, and skipped away. "Nice to meet you, George! You're even cuter
than in your pictures," she called over her shoulder. "And tell your mother I love her!"

So I'm polydactyl; I have six toes on my right foot. Only about one or two in every thousand people have a condition like
mine. It's a genetic tendency, something I have from my father's side of the family. As a toe, it's not much more than a pink
nub at the far edge of my foot. My extra toe looks like something that just kind of crawled on, and stuck; the nail is nothing
but a dab of gloss. My grandmother used to tease me about it. Nana called it my "devilish toe." Papa liked to say it made
me a freak. "It proves you're one of us," he said.

I once asked my mother if I could have it removed. When I put this question forth, I was sitting on the cracked linoleum of
the kitchen floor in our apartment in Farmington, clutching a piece of coarse sandpaper.

My mother raised an interrogatory eyebrow.

"I thought I might be able to sand it off," I said. At the time I was only a kid, ten years old.

Of course, Emma said.

Two scrapes, however, had reduced me to tears. The devilish toe was tiny, but it was really attached, no doubt about that.

She sat down across from me Indian style, and put her hands on my knees. Then, she asked me why, and I told her the obvious
thing, because of my father. "I don't want any part of him."

The last few days had been hard. Somehow or other, my father had obtained our phone number. "Who is this?" he had asked when
I answered the first time. "Is that you, George? Is that you? It's your dad, it's your old man." A moment passed. The only
sound I could manage to produce was a humming noise. My father started to laugh, and then he broke into wrenching sobs. "Say
something, George. Can't you fucking say something to your old man? Or are you too fucking good?"

Since then, we had just been letting the telephone ring. Sometimes it rang for twenty minutes. The jingles hit me like screaming
voices. I had wet myself having a nightmare about a man with a glistening black telephone for a head. The man with the telephone
head had scrabbled up the stone blocks of a well, like some awful spider, and I couldn't seem to back away.

"I hate it," I said and slapped my foot, slapped the sad lump of my extra toe that was already raw and sore.

Emma nodded. Her face wore the peaceful expression of a cemetery angel—mournful, but carved with the assurance that no further
harm can come.

Suppose, she said, that a birth defect is like a work-related injury.

"Like when Papa's dad lost his leg in the thresher?"

My mother rolled her eyes at me. Yes, she said, but without the blood and guts, my beautiful little psychopath.

Now, she went on, you got an extra toe on the job. So you turned to your Workers Comp, because you were organized and had
benefits and so forth.

"Naturally," I said. By age ten I was well versed in such necessities.

But your injury is different, George, because you didn't lose anything. She stressed this point, staring hard. You gained
something. You have something more. You're not handicapped at all.

"Well then, how am I getting Comp?" I asked.

My mother took a deep breath. There's a special clause in the life contract for workers who are born with extra toes, she
said. Comp applies to them even though the extra toe isn't detrimental.

"That sounds like featherbedding," I said. "My union is going to be under investigation if it isn't careful."

She looked at me.

"Okay," I said. "But it's just a toe. A toe can't do shit."

It's a gift, Emma said, it's a gift. And Workers Comp insured you while you learned to utilize that gift, and afterward the
union found you another job. Some task your special gift is uniquely suited for.

And watch your language, she added.

I touched my toe. It was barely anything; it was half of a chunky french fry; it could not possibly have a function.

"What task?"

She shrugged. We're still in the rehabilitation stage, she said. I'm your Workers Comp, by the way, Emma added. Roughly speaking,
that's what mothers provide for kids. They rehabilitate them for life.

I studied my toe. It was nothing.

You'll see, she said. It'll come in handy.

Then my mother said, I love you. Then she said, And he loves you. He does love you.

The phone started to ring, and we sat on the floor of the kitchen for a while longer without saying anything.

At the time of my conception in the spring of 1985, Ty Claiborne held a good union job, as a movie theater projectionist at
the Amberson Pavilion Two. This was how Emma McGlaughlin, the daughter of the local union heads, Henry and Geraldine McGlaughlin,
happened to meet him. It was her first summer job, and Ty Claiborne—tall and broad and possessed of the crinkled, soulful
gaze of a much older man—was her first real crush. He carried his pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up in the sleeve of his black
T-shirt and wore huge sunglasses, like a state trooper. I wish he'd pull me over, Emma told her friends.

If, however, a week into the summer, the Northeastern Projectionists Union had not gone on strike, maybe things would never
have gone beyond a crush stage—but the theater chain told the union to take it or leave it, and the projectionists walked
in June. So it was in the spirit of unity that Emma promptly quit her summer job, and whipped up a big batch of pot brownies
to lift the spirits of her fellow workers.

Ten years older, Ty drove a car that was almost new, rented his own apartment, had painstakingly collected every album Bob
Dylan had ever recorded—
on vinyl.
Ty Claiborne could also put away a whole mess of pot brownies. In her teenage bedroom, Emma's poster of River Phoenix rubbed
shoulders with a magazine clipping of Woody Guthrie posing with his "This Machine Kills Fascists" guitar; she never had a
chance. Ty seemed like the perfect combination of both, a dreamboat and a union man.

What Ty Claiborne did not seem like was a man with a drinking problem. Nor did he seem like a man with a cocaine addiction,
or a man who would very soon be forced to sell his complete collection of Dylan records to support that addiction. He did
not seem like a man on the verge of his third strike with the Northeastern Projectionists Union, or a man three months in
arrears on his rent, or a man who would lift cash from his seventeen-year-old girlfriend's Minnie Mouse leatherette purse.
Perhaps above all other things, Ty Claiborne did not seem like the sort of man who would use a condom that he found in the
sleeve of a thrift store copy of
Another Side of
Bob Dylan
(a condom with an expiration date clearly printed on the back, 3/1/66), and who would still use said condom after carrying
it around in his tool pouch for weeks, along with the ring of screwdrivers and pins that he used for projector maintenance.
He was, however, all of these things—and so, of course, it was lucky for me that my mother didn't know.

But in the fifteen years since, we had both learned plenty about my father. For instance, there were lessons about bankruptcy,
about creditors, about rehab, and about the cost of collect calls between the hours of three and five A.M. Once, in the parking
lot outside our apartment in Blue Hill, we learned that laid-back Paul Bagley—hippie potter, borderline narcoleptic, and Green
Party stalwart, Paul Bagley—was capable of disarming a strung-out junkie ex-husband wielding a Swiss Army knife, and then
of beating the wretch unconscious with a snow shovel. We learned about restraining orders.

Meanwhile, my father discovered that he could maintain his fix by stealing cars, but one night in Lewiston he learned that
it was a bad idea to pass out while idling in a stolen BMW in the drive-through line at Arby's. After that my mother and I
learned that when someone sent you a letter from a maximum security prison, the envelope was sliced open by an administration
official and perused for obscenity, threats, incrimination, or anything else that might be interesting, before it was taped
shut and sent along for delivery.

And somewhere along the line, I became self-educated in the indispensable mechanism of pure wishfulness, and I began to fantasize
of a Real Father, a superhero, unavoidably delayed by matters related to the security of the universe. This was the kind of
father I needed, because only the planets and the stars were important enough to forgive for putting us through all this.

Now, as I rode home with Myrna Carp's college girl lips still printed on my forehead, the old despair tickled at the back
of my neck. It had never really left, I knew. That feeling was as much a part of me as my extra toe; it was attached.

I told myself that college was full of beautiful girls, beautiful girls who had not shared their reproductive concerns with
my mother. At a place like Vassar College—wherever that was, and whatever it was—I bet they practically fell down out of the
sky, like rain. I bet at Vassar College you needed to wear an army helmet to deflect all the gorgeous, precipitating girls,
and the birth control pills pinging down like hail. I told myself that she had liked me.

Unconvinced, I pedaled down Route 12 with a hard-on and a feeling of general gloom. I imagined Myrna Carp falling nude through
the sky, and landing, with a squeal of joy and a pillowy bounce of her breasts, onto the broad shoulders of Steven Sugar.
"Let's raise the flag, babe," said Steven. "Oh, let's!" cried Myrna.

Then, at dinner, I almost choked on a lump of mashed potato. I started coughing and needed to drink half a glass of water
to get it all down.

"You okay?" Dr. Vic asked.

"Did you ever sell a Bob Dylan record?" I hacked a fragment of potato into my napkin.

Dr. Vic scratched his head. "Pardon?"

My mother lowered her forehead to the table and sighed.

I repeated the question.

Dr. Vic said he was sure he hadn't. "I don't know as if I was ever hip enough for Bob Dylan, you know?"

"Yes," I said, relieved. "We can see that."

7.

Dr. Vic cleared his place at the table and announced he was going down to the dock. He didn't ask my mother if she wanted
to come. Shutting the sliding glass door with painstaking care, Dr. Vic slouched outside, his footfalls creaking heavily on
the planks.

She remained in her seat, doodling on her legal pad. She drew a cartoon of Bob Dylan, with the incredible sixties Afro, the
opaque sunglasses, the jagged nose and the dubious eyebrows, and slid it over to me.

I gave her a thumbs-up. Then I penciled a light saber into Dylan's hand. I gave him a speech bubble:
LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER.

Her sudden, tinkling laugh stung my eyes.
Do you want to assist
me in a secret mission?

Yes,
I wrote back.

Meet me in the car.
She stood up, patted my shoulder, and left to gather her things. I wiped my eyes.

Before we left, my mother loaded the trunk, and when she climbed in, I saw that she had changed into a navy tracksuit. She
handed me my black windbreaker, and I put it on. This seemed promising.

We pulled onto Route 12 and passed through the quiet of Amberson at nine o'clock on a Tuesday night.

In the old brick-faced downtown—where the buildings stood together in a stately arrangement that always reminded me of the
well-worn but carefully polished and soberly colored Oxford shoes that lined the bottom of Papa's wardrobe—there were signs
of the recent economic downturn. The shoe store had a HUGE SALE, the art supply store had an EVERYTHING MUST GO SALE, and
according to a Jimi Hendrix poster taped in the window, the head shop was SORRY: CLOSED FOREVER HONKIES! (The statement bloomed
from the corner of Jimi's mouth in a psychedelic word bubble.) At the Amberson Pavilion Two, a film called
Rat Race,
about people willing to undergo any humiliation in order to win a fortune (performed by actors who were apparently willing
to take any part), played on both screens. The pawnshop seemed to be doing okay.

It occurred to me that for days, my life had been narrowed to a window not much larger than the circle at the end of the IL-47's
scope. Papa should get out more, I thought to myself, before everything in town goes out of business.

Some skaters were pushing themselves around the modest town square. They wore long, jingling wallet chains, and low-hanging
carpenters jeans, and wove their boards in drunken circles around the WWI monument of a huddled squad of battle-weary doughboys.
Parked at the curb a couple of cops sat in their cruiser and kept watch, probably listening to the Red Sox as they finished
up a disaster against New York, or just started on one with Oakland.

My eyes naturally drifted upward, to a second-floor office in the squat, ten-story building that overlooked the square.

It was from this office that Dale Crispin, my mother's last ex-boyfriend, wrote, edited, and published the local weekly, the
Amberson
Common.
When they were dating, I spent a number of happy hours playing cribbage in that office, and listening in wonder and admiration
at the musical vulgarity of Dale's speech.

"The shoe, my young friend," I remembered him saying to me as he counted a clutch double-run to pull himself within range
of the finish line, "is now on the other dick."

But in the next hand, when he mud-holed, and I won with a flush double-run, Dale threw up his hands and pronounced, "Great
Scott! The shoe returneth dickward! Of all the piss-ass luck!"