“Mom? Are you serious?”
“What? I thought you’d—”
“Well I don’t, all right? I don’t ever want to fucking talk about it ever again, I’ve told you that.”
“But honey—”
“Mom, shit.” Devon stands and snatches up her iEverything. “I’m going to the bathroom.” A muffled buzz is in her ears. She’s moving quickly over the squeaking wooden floor, people chewing and swallowing and sipping and nodding their reasonable heads at one another. She wants to be somewhere where there’s no one. A white, silent room. No windows. No door. Just music in her head, her fingers on buttons that will bring whatever she wants when she wants it, which is nothing.
Except that’s not true.
She does want that video gone, and she’s grateful to her mother for trying to get rid of it, though she doesn’t believe it’s possible. Those little netfilms are forever, and she can’t take the thought of how many people have seen it already, have maybe jacked off to it, have sat around—if they’re Trina and her new fucking friends—and gloated about it. And Devon hates that her mother had to see it, and Sick, and if her father actually watched it she’s almost glad, though it’s the kind of glad you feel when in a fight you break something you didn’t mean to, that dark echo after.
She locks the bathroom door and sits on the closed toilet. The room smells like lemon soap and tissue paper. Something cold rolls deep in her belly before she thinks it: What if Hollis in Texas finds out? What if she did give him the wrong number and he types in Devon? Could he be led to Dirty Devon? Would he actually see her and the others? Though hers is the only face he’d see, the only mouth.
Fuck.
She taps her screen on and pulls up Sick’s text. D, y arnt u here anymore? That’s not good. Everybody fucks up and guess what? I forgive u. I do. U were always 2 easy, D. Not that way. The other way. Yur like a blank picture in a frame and you let everybody else paint u. But u should paint yourself, D. Yur beautiful.
Don’t looz our cup. All my good memories r in there.
My dreams 2.
Sick
Devon’s face is hot. There’s not enough air in the room. Her thumbs start punching letters under glass. U were the only one, Sick. U do know that, right? Please tell me u know that.
A knocking at the door. A little girl’s voice. “’Scuse me?”
Devon stands and flushes the toilet and unlocks the door for a black-haired girl staring up at her. She’s wearing a green T-shirt with a turtle on it. She can’t be more than five or six, and there’s not a grownup anywhere near her.
“It all yours, honey.” Devon holds the door for her, then pushes it closed behind her. She waits until she hears the slide of the lock on the other side, then she walks through the full tables back to her mother smiling sadly at her from the corner. Devon feels she’s just cursed that little girl. It’s all yours, honey. Good luck with everything. Let me know how it turns out, boys and blow jobs and feeling you have to do something even if you don’t want to, and then you take pride in killing that part of yourself that used to care and you do things with such little feeling about it you’re surprised people think you actually did them.
Devon sits and drops her napkin onto her lap. Her mother starts talking about the Welches, about Laura living in the big house while poor Mark has to sleep on the couch in his mother’s garage apartment. Devon knows the story, and she’s surprised her mother’s talking about it. Did she forget Mark had his own wife filmed, too?
Devon sips her coffee. She’s hungry now, her eyes drifting to the white flowers outside. I forgive you. I do. She’s going to save that one. She needs to. And she’s glad she texted what she did to him. It makes her feel like something bad is falling further behind her and that good things might be coming. And could she have typed the wrong number to Hollis? No. She knows it better than her own name. She sees him smiling at her, pulling off his cavalry hat and tossing it onto what has to be his bed, the one he’s probably just waking in right this second, the one he’s going sit up in and text her in before he does anything else.
FRANCIS DRIVES DOWN River Street feeling naïve, inept, and exposed. Charlie was right, he has been judging him his entire life, this boy who had been given a father, a man who—drunk those early years or not—provided well for his family; Charlie had also been given a warm and doting mother; he’d been given new bicycles and tennis and golf lessons; he’d been given four years at a private high school on acres of wooded green, his graduation gift a shining Camaro, his college education paid for in full, and then he was given a job. How could Francis not have judged him? And to see Charlie walk through this world as if he deserved all this, well, it made Francis hate him, really. His brother’s son or not, he did. Part of him always had.
Except then Charlie had the surprising good sense to marry loving Marie Labadini who bore him Devon Denise, and Charlie wasn’t so unattractive anymore. Somehow he had brought joy into their family. Charlie’s house became the home they would all gather in for holidays—George and Evelyn, Francis and Beth, and all those loud, animated cousins, aunts, and uncles from Marie’s side of the family. Then, as more children came into the world from the Labadini side, Sundays became family dinner days at Charlie’s house, and it was something Francis and Beth both looked forward to, all that warm chaos once every week.
Beth would bake dinner rolls or a strawberry rhubarb pie or sometimes toss a salad, and Francis would bring bottles of red and white. Because his drinking years were behind him, it was now quality over quantity and he made sure he chose expensive wines from France or the West Coast, handing smiling Marie the bottles in her kitchen, feeling selfless and virtuous and so very happy to be in his nephew’s house, Devy running up and wrapping her arms around his legs. “Uncle Franny!”
Making any pornos lately, honey?
Francis shakes his head so hard his sunglasses shift and he has to push them back into place. He’s driving under a hot white sun, his sports jacket bunched up around his shoulders, though it has always been his habit to lay his jacket along the back so he won’t wrinkle it, but he barely remembers even driving away from the lot of the country club. Nor does he recognize this neighborhood.
The triple-deckers are still here, their asbestos or asphalt shingles and small crooked porches, their dirt or cracked concrete driveways. But on the river side there’s a Dairy Queen and BMW dealership, the sun on red, white, and blue balloons tied to windshield wipers. There’s a package store whose front window is completely covered from the inside by Xeroxed copies of winning lottery tickets, and on the other side of the street it seems as if every other three-family home has been torn down and replaced by an auto parts store, a bodega—its Spanish neon sign a mystery to Francis—more liquor stores, a check-cashing shop, a Cambodian restaurant in front of which stands a sandwich board advertising meals in that language, too.
Ditch of the Bodos. A tilting of what he thinks he knew for what he obviously does not. A horn barks behind him. In his rearview mirror is a white sports car, the driver bald and middle-aged, expensive sunglasses across his eyes like an executioner’s mask.
It’s a relief to speed up, and it’s a relief to drive under the trestle of Railroad Square, for while these brick and granite mill buildings of his youth are full of restaurants now, microbreweries and art galleries, clothing stores and bank offices, they are still familiar, and seeing them under the sun, the street always in shadow, he feels the empty passenger seat beside him like a knife under his ribs. How lovely those Sundays had been.
Perhaps another childless woman would have stayed away from a house of young kids and their young mothers and fathers, but at Charlie’s, Beth came alive the way she would much later on their car trips, more curious about everything, more grateful for whatever she was given. She’d sit on the living room floor with two or three of Marie’s nieces and nephews, playing a board game or teaching them Crazy 8’s or helping to pull a sweater onto a Barbie. Or she’d be out in the ba
ckyard tossing a ball or pushing a boy or girl in one of Devon’s swings, and after dinner, when their exhausted parents were lingering over coffee and dessert or one more glass of wine, she would offer to supervise the whole brood down in the basement playroom.
On the drive home later, gone was her vigilant hunt for flaws or incompetence. Instead, her cheeks would have more color to them, her eyes more light, even her hair seemed thicker, her lips, and while she told Charlie about a game she’d played with one of the kids or the remarkable thing one of them had said, he’d reach over and squeeze her hand or rest his fingers on her knee and he’d be aroused.
It’s what he never understood about pornography and prostitution, the easy way so many men could become erect at the prospect of flesh and flesh alone. For him, what happened below his waist was inextricably tied to what happened behind his sternum and between his ears. And it was a rare Sunday afternoon after a family dinner at Charlie and Marie’s that Francis and his wife did not go straight home to bed and make love. After, as Beth held him and he held her, there was the clear and unburdened air of acceptance, not so much of one another and their slowly aging bodies, as of their roles in this life as aunt and uncle; it could have been so much worse.
Francis drives through Post Office Square, then east along Merrimack Street. In front of an office supply store an obese woman leans on the handle of her shopping cart smoking a cigarette. The cart is stuffed with bulging plastic trash bags, and Francis looks away. He tells himself to be grateful, but it’s turning into a tough afternoon. How is it possible that sitting in the deep nest of those Sundays at Charlie’s, he rarely, if ever, imagined them never happening again? How is it he did not anticipate his disciplined wife dying first? How could he not have ever considered, given the nephew he knew, that Charlie and Marie would not last? How could he not have foreseen the day Devy’s body would change and she would be too mature to sit on his lap while he read her a story, his gratitude for her love for him bottomless?
Francis is too warm. He turns up the air conditioner and presses buttons to crack his windows. The car ahead is a gold sedan with twin exhaust pipes, the back and front seats filled with young men. Their hair is short and they have brown skin and their stereo system is blaring so loud Francis can feel the thump of bass in his chest. The singer doesn’t sing but recites, his voice low and what they used to call negro then black then African-American and now the N-word if you’re black yourself, and every other word is an obscenity. Francis resists the old man’s urge to condemn them all. On the sidewalk before the boarded-up Woolworth’s building, the same one his mother would take him to when he was a child, a girl of no more than twenty holds a young boy’s shirt collar while she stares at the small screen in her hand. She moves her thumb along it. She glances up at the passing noise and Francis looks away from her son, for he sees him ten years from now sitting in a classroom lighting a cigarette.
At the intersection the gold sedan swings right and accelerates onto the bridge over the river, its twin pipes belching blue exhaust, and Francis drives straight ahead. His breath is uneven and he’s aware of his heart being a muscle, one that simply will not go on and on forever. He’s already outlived his brother by ten years and his mother by one. And what about his putative father, Billy Brandt? Did he die old somewhere? Or was he one of the young ones? More than once over the years Francis has imagined his father leaping up into the open doors of a moving freight car only to lose his grip and fall, those spinning iron wheels slicing him in two.
On Francis’s right is a shopping plaza, half its store space taken up by a weight-training gym. Another change. No one lifted weights when he was young. Or tattooed themselves so much. Or shaved their heads and pierced holes into their skin. They all look like convicts now, a generation of felons.
That butterfly on Devy’s ankle. All those holes in her ears, the blue stud in her nose. He passes a weed lot to his left, the river reflecting the sun beyond, and he shakes his head again for he’s glimpsed only one stag film and that was, of all places, at Charlie’s bachelor’s party over twenty-five years ago.
George and Francis had driven there together in George’s Seville. They had taken their wives to dinner first, then dropped them off, and both Brandt brothers were clean and sober so Francis was hoping for perhaps the pleasure of a cigar, a hand or two of poker, a cup of hot coffee and a slice of pie. He did not know any of his nephew’s friends, but he knew the club. It was in a granite building on the river on the north side of the trestle in Railroad Square, and when Francis was a boy it had been a factory for buttons and zippers, but sometime in the fifties, not long after he’d returned home, it had become a social club for men.
Francis remembers the night was cold. There were dead leaves scattered over the sidewalk as he and George walked into the club. George handed his cashmere coat to the coat check girl, a ten between his fingers. It was understood this was a gratuity from both of them, and perhaps Francis had been feeling patronized once again as he followed his brother into the main barroom, the party having already arrived at its center, an assault of men cheering and whooping and applauding, cigar and cigarette smoke so thick Francis’s eyes began to water. The room was lit only by dim lights from beneath the bar that was empty because the crowd of Charlie’s friends, twenty or thirty of them, was gathered around the dance floor, young executives in ties and shirt sleeves holding drinks or bottles of beer or both, and at first Francis thought they were watching the flickering screen behind them, for on this screen a man’s erect penis was plunging in and out of a woman, and it was such a private sight that Francis couldn’t quite take it in and his eyes moved to the center of the floor where a young man in a dark suit sat in a chair, his pants and underwear around his ankles, a blond woman in shorts and heels kneeling there between his legs, her head bobbing up and down. Three or four feet away Francis’s nephew Charlie was hollering louder than the rest, his tie untied and hanging on either side of his unbuttoned shirt. He held a bottle of brandy and turned laughing at a big man to his right, and now George was nowhere Francis could see and he’d seen enough. On his way out he’d turned and looked back once more at that bright flickering screen just as the man began to ejaculate onto the woman’s belly, Triz in the Tiki light smiling up at him, the only woman Francis had ever done that to, all of his seed inside his wife for all of these years, and perhaps he’d taken a cab home that night, Francis does not remember, but there was the raw, skinned feel of some important barrier inside him having been kicked down, the sense that we are all ugly and that beauty is a respite and innocence is a lie.
Of course he never assumed Devy to be without any experience, though he’d not let himself think too much about that part of her life. It had been his failing as a teacher, too. So many girls over the years who would sexualize themselves just as soon as their bodies began to change. They wore makeup and low-cut shirts and tight jeans, and Francis saw the new power these girls held over the boys in class. It was like watching a child light a match and see that she was capable of starting a fire all by herself.
Rita Flaherty would take all this in and regularly depart from her lesson plan to talk about birth control and the risk of having a baby when you were still one yourself, the diseases you could catch and perhaps never cure. She would chastise Francis and their other colleagues for not doing the same. “Hell, I’ve given rubbers to some of these girls. You should too, Frank.”
But he hadn’t. Even to the boys, though he was happy to give out hallway advice about college or a practical choice of work after school and, once he was sober, he began to take more of an interest in any kid who showed signs he might be a drinker. But when it came to these young people and their sex lives, Francis preferred the natural generational wall between them to stay up, no windows or doors or ladders over to the other side.
Making any more pornos lately, honey? Devon not being able to write. The way she walks with her head down and that music pounding in her head. How she spends so much time
alone in her room, and when they eat dinners together at the table, how she eats quickly and makes conversation as if she’s pressed some automatic button inside her. How some nights while Francis reads the newspaper in his living room chair, Devy will sit on the couch where Beth used to read, and she’ll stare at the screen in her hand or thumb through one of Beth’s old People magazines, but it’s as if some timer is clicking away inside his niece for she’s only doing these things to be polite. So why has he felt even closer to her these past five months? Is it because she reminds him of himself when he was only a year or two older? Back from the other side of the world and a plunge into a way men should never be? That distance after? That wanting to be left the hell alone?
And perhaps this is what he should do. Just leave her alone. If she does not want the GED or a shot at college, why should he force her to? Francis passes the fire station on his right, the old folks’ home on his left, and his cheeks flush hot for while he does believe she should get that certificate he also knows the joy he’s taken in preparing those lessons for her. She’s made you useful again, hasn’t she, Francis? This young woman he now feels utterly incapable of helping in any way, Devy, who last night called herself Sarah to a boy on the screen.
Francis presses buttons and rolls up his windows. He drives slower. He is in no hurry to get back home. Through the trees the river shines under the sun, though he knows how dirty it is. Everyone knows how dirty it is.
HER MOTHER WANTED to go shopping. She wanted to drive up to the outlet stores in Kittery, buy a blouse or something, maybe get an ice cream at the Ben and Jerry’s stand between the endless parking lot and the salt marsh. There are picnic tables under the sun where they’d sat before, but Devon just wanted to go home. She said that, too.
“Home?”
“I mean Uncle Francis’s.”
Her mother looked hurt, which was funny after what she said at breakfast. But Devon didn’t want to be at Francis’s either. She was going to wait for her mother to drive away, then she was going to put on her Dr. Dre’s and walk to the beach under the sun with her iEverything, find a place for herself between the boulevard and the water where she could stare at her screen and wait.