Zero at the Bone (16 page)

“What do you mean, you
underestimated
me?” I gave the word a peculiar twist, stretching it out. I sat on the edge of my bed, Bronto sitting on the windowsill, looking out at the night. He had been washing himself and had left his tongue sticking slightly through his whiskers, absentmindedly, like a person forgetting to tuck in his shirt.

“It's just, for so long,” she said, not sure how to express herself, perhaps trying to be polite, “for so long I had the impression all you ever thought about was sex.”

26

My mother's parents flew out from Iowa for Anita's birthday. Nobody described it that way, although the date was right there on the Sierra Club calendar, a bristlecone pine at sunset—or sunrise, it was hard to tell which.
Anita
was written in, her block-lettered name filling the whole square on the calendar. Mom did that early in January every year, wrote in all the dates no one would ever forget anyway. Anita had been gone two weeks.

My grandfather owned and operated an eight-hundred-acre farm near Roland, Iowa. He raised corn and soybeans, and he had men working for him. Gramps was a beefy man with a grin, but sometimes during this visit, I would catch him without his usual expression and he looked red-eyed and unsteady.

He helped my dad mix up a load of cement, and the three of us poured the base—gravel and sand and Portland cement. It was hot in the backyard, and if we worked hard enough we reached the point where we were tired and could think of nothing but churning the wet concrete and then shoveling it out. The stuff had a wet, granite smell, like an underground tunnel. The concrete splattered into drops on our pant legs and dried stiff, comets of cement.

When we were done, we washed the implements off with the garden hose carefully, so they wouldn't crust up. We rinsed the hoe and the shovels, spraying the gray residue out of the wheelbarrow. A thin gray puddle fled out from the tilted wheelbarrow, but as long as we kept spraying, the gray mud fanned out and soaked in, and didn't turn into a stone puddle.

After that, the next day, we mixed up the top layer of cement, just cement and sand, no gravel, smooth gray frosting over the gravelly underbase. Both Gramps and Dad were adept at troweling the surface into the corners of each section, smoothing it flat, and then silking it even flatter with the blade of the trowel.

Bronto discovered the sidewalk, and left his paw-prints dappling across one section, gentle imprints. Dad filled in the Bronto-marks with a little cement he mixed up in a plastic bowl, soothing it into place, not talking about it, disgusted with the cat, but having too much respect for animals in general to want to throw anything at Bronto, who appeared now and then to look out from the back porch.

When concrete dries, it goes hard, but not the usual white gray. It turns the color of a sky about to storm. Sometimes veins appear in it, ghost lightning. Then after a day or two or more, the fade sets in, the surface giving up the darkness, and going chalky, but new-looking, fresh sidewalks all the way out to the weeds at the end of the yard.

The Bronto-prints were visible, a lighter color than the rest of the concrete. Dad and Gramps rented Weedwackers, and when we weren't down at the factory loading nightstands into Di Salvo trucking line rigs, we were all out there laying waste to the drought-bleached weeds, thistles and oats and foxtails that speared into our socks and bit the skin.

Mom wasn't so lucky, shut in with my grandmother, who had something wrong with her outlook on life. No one ever talked about it, but Grandma was always walking into a room shaking out a cloth, someone else's clothing, a sweater, and giving people a pained sigh, telling everyone without saying anything what a burden life was. If there were no clothes to shake out, she would take ahold of a rug and straighten it, grunting dramatically.

My grandmother came out to see us every year or two. She was always entering a room saying, “I just can't believe it,” or “God give me strength.” I always felt her disapproval, and knew she didn't like me, or my father. Everything my mother said pained her.

My grandmother would rearrange the magazines on the coffee table, or sit and listen to my mother try to talk about neutral subjects, the new Life Science building on campus, freeway projects due in the near future, and Grandma would not say anything at all, soaking up Mom's talk until Mom began to sweat and go pale, still offering subjects to entertain her mother, none of them working.

There were family meetings, stories of my mom when she was a girl, such as the time during a thunderstorm the telephone bit her—gave off a tiny crackle of lightning. There were tales of my mother in the Midwest, tornado warnings and dogs in fights with raccoons.

One evening we handed around the version of Anita's graduation picture that would go out to millions of households, along with junk mail, delivered by the post office. Her photo, reproduced in blue, was next to the picture of another missing person, over the words “Have you seen us?”

At moments like this, my grandparents did not have anything to say, and shook their heads, looking spent and heavy as they waited for the subject to change and someone at last suggested a drive to the Hall of Science, or another cup of coffee.

Anita's birthday was on the fifth day of their seven-day visit, and all day we kept busy, pitchforking the bare stubble, planning a garden, Dad making diagrams, how much would be lawn, how much vegetable garden. For dinner my grandmother made meat loaf, and we spooned it out on our plates, crumbly and crusted with a sauce she was proud of, ketchup and dried onions.

My mother had stopped even trying to carry a conversation, but I got my grandfather to talk about farming equipment, how dangerous the corn-shucking machines used to be. “And still are,” he said, “if you don't keep your fly shut.”

“Is this what we talk about at family dinner?” said my grandmother.

We drove them to the Oakland Airport, up Hegenberger Drive, and my dad kept talking. He told us who owned each hotel, what union the restaurant employees belonged to, and who their bargaining rep was. When we saw some egrets in the marshes along the airport, Dad talked about how well the fine white bird was doing, living in Africa and Europe and even India.

We were quiet on the way back from the airport, all of us exhausted.

27

Sometimes Dad drove off to the factory, late, after-hours. He would stay there until two or three in the morning, then sit in the kitchen with expanding files of documents he didn't bother to look at.

Some mornings he would be out in the backyard with his hands on his hips. He showed me what he wanted to have me rake, where he wanted me to put the birdbath when it arrived. He dug a trench for sprinkler pipes. He sketched plans with a pencil, maps labeled
DWARF LEMON, FLAGSTONE
. He paged through catalogs of lawn furniture.

“The sod I want to get isn't just bermuda hybrid,” he said. “It's going to be hybrid bermuda hybrid.”

“Maybe we should be thinking drought resistance,” I suggested. “Sage and poppies.”

He liked that, looking at me over his glasses, his face gaunt and hungry. “Juniper,” he said.

He flew off to Omaha, after a layover at Denver, to meet with Find the Children, and stayed longer than he expected, helping them plan a funding drive.

Before I got my graduation photo taken, my mother drove me to George Good's on Bancroft Avenue. I had told her that I owned a dark jacket already, and all she had said was, “Go ahead and try putting it on.” I did, and it wouldn't button over my chest and I came down the stairs like someone tied up with a rope, swinging my arms until the sleeves gave a suspicious little rip.

My mother said, “Case closed.”

She had put on more weight and had trouble if she got up out of a chair quickly, putting her hand out to steady herself. But she was staying calm, sleeping a lot, not talking unless she could say something pleasant, or at least useful, unlike Dad, who carried the phone around with him, even to the bathroom.

My mother and I went into the men's store, where neckties are lying under glass and men in dark suits with the slow manner of literature professors ask if they can be of any help today. It isn't like most stores, no one to help, everyone chewing gum. The store was soundless, headless dummies in tweed suits.

“We can't spend that much on a jacket,” I said.

I liked the jacket. It was like the blazer someone would wear in an ad for Scotch whiskey, and I looked at myself in the mirror in my bedroom. I buttoned it and unbuttoned it. I let it hang off my thumb, flung over my shoulder, the casual Californian. I draped it over my shoulders, cape-like, sleeves dangling, the French aristocrat.

I don't like having my picture taken. I didn't realize this until I sat there, and Mr. Quarry, the photographer, marched into the room carrying a stuffed toy bunny. He caught the look I was giving him and laughed, “It's not for you. I take pix of little kids, too, when I'm not snapping the entire student body of every single high school in the city of Oakland.”

I sat on a hard wooden stool, the kind they have in art classes and biology labs.

“We want that back straight,” said Mr. Quarry, not even looking at me. There was an umbrella in the corner of the ceiling, something to do with reflecting light. I had been here a few times as a boy, and had never really thought about Mr. Quarry, how he smiled so much he had trouble enunciating his words, his lips so tight, the smile stuck into place.

“Okay, on the count of three. One, two. Think: sex!” And there was a flash.

“How did I look?” I asked.

“Okay, here goes another one. Pow! We're on a roll.”

“Was that one okay?”

“Serious now, very intellectual. No, don't smile. Turn your shoulders. Beautiful.”

“Is my hair sticking out funny? Is there food between my teeth?”

“You're star quality all the way. Keep your chin down. Terrific. You and your folks will get a set of proofs in the mail, in a stiff cardboard envelope marked ‘photos.' These are proofs, and will not be the finished portrait.” He spoke rapidly, mechanically, like someone running an auction.

Only at the end, as he stepped into the waiting room to see the six students who were slumped nervously in chairs, did he slip out of character. He walked me all the way to the front door, and said, leaning against the door frame, “I keep hoping about your sister, Cray.” And he didn't even look like the same smart, brisk man, his eyes suddenly tired, looking out at the sunlight, blinking.

The look in his eyes reminded me of how I really felt, all the time, inside. It was August. Anita had been gone three and a half weeks.

Paula was leaning against a parking meter on Lakeshore Avenue. “That didn't take long.”

I unbuttoned my jacket but left it on. “Do you like Mr. Quarry?”

“He's not my favorite human being,” said Paula. She shrugged. “He was professional.”

“He took all my pictures in as much time as it takes to sneeze,” I said, unthinkingly borrowing one of my grandfather's favorite phrases. “Decades from now I'll look at my expression and I'll see that I wasn't ready. My face was just hanging there. I didn't know what to do with my mouth. Or my eyes.”

“You look wonderful.” Paula rarely gave me a flat-out compliment, so I was quiet as we walked past storefronts, to the Jeep. “What are you supposed to do with your eyes—take them out?”

The top of my body was dark jacket, navy blue silk necktie. My bottom was Wrangler's jeans, cut off experimentally just below the knee the day after school was out for the summer. “The school district should find someone who isn't l-have-to-do-everything-in-three-seconds.”

“He was the same way with me,” said Paula. “Flash, flash, good-bye. We'll come out looking pretty good.”

Paula and I were trying out a slightly different relationship. We tried to talk more, about various subjects. She was set to spend the rest of the summer at the Language Institute in Monterey, a crash course in German for students with special talent in language.

I had to bend to one side to hook the key ring out of my front pocket, and it took a few seconds. In that amount of time, I understood why Mr. Quarry had irritated me so much. It wasn't only because my face would be preserved for history looking vacant and characterless. It was because he had photographed my sister.

I didn't want Paula to go to Monterey. It was one hundred miles to the south, but in a different world, sun, dunes, and old adobe buildings, and an aquarium with sea otters. Some dark-eyed linguist would sweep Paula into his arms.

Paula was changing. She had learned enough to pass an aptitude test. She had always pretended to know a lot of languages, and now she did not have to pretend.

“Let's give Bronto a bath,” I said, shifting into third as I accelerated onto the far right lane of 580, having a little trouble finding the gear.

“Why?”

“I'm allergic to him because he's full of cat dander and dust. I can't pet him very much. My eyes swell shut. If I wash him, I can be more loving to him.”

“Poor thing.” I didn't know whether she meant the cat or me.

We were leaning over the bathtub, Bronto with his feet splayed against the sand pink porcelain. My dad had ordered this tub custom designed from a friend in the fixtures business who was on the verge of Chapter 11 and needed purchase orders. It didn't match the yellow sink.

Bronto was making a long, low rattle, vibrating.

Some of the Palmolive dish soap from the kitchen was sprayed into the tub, a green squiggle. Bronto stopped vibrating and hunched, stiff, unmoving. The water was splattering, too cold, starting to dilute the green soap. I freed one hand to work the hot faucet.

Bronto made his move.

Paula and I grabbed him, holding him down. “This isn't working, Cray,” she said. Bronto snaked up into the air, and I caught him. I wrestled him back down into the tub, and Bronto began a new kind of low wail. His fur was sticking up in bristling wet spikes all over his body.