After school, Irma’s car was gone again. Grocery shopping this time, Tawny said. We still hadn’t made our baby, she told us, so we had to try again. It was part of our regular routine now and didn’t seem so bad. But this time while I was moving around on top of Nadine, I heard funny noises coming from Tawny. I cracked my eyes open just a little and looked over at her. It took me a few seconds to realize what I was seeing. Her pants were down around her ankles and her knees were wide apart. She was touching herself down there. What struck me more than what she was doing was that she had hair down there, the kind my father had. I’d seen Dad naked a number of times, in the changing room at the community pool, walking bare-butt from his shower to his and Mom’s room. But I’d never seen my mother naked. Did ladies grow hair down there, too, the same as men, or was Tawny a freak, like the bearded lady at the carnival? Confused and not wanting to get caught watching her, I closed my eyes again. That was the first time I spasmed while playing “House,” dryly but with a kind of painful pleasure. I was more confused than ever.
The next week was February vacation. Mom took the week off from work, so I got to take Funny home with me. By midweek, vacation had gotten boring. Tommy Mankin invited me over to his house one afternoon, and we played football and Crazy Eights, but that was boring, too. Even playing with Funny got boring. I kept thinking about playing “House.”
On the Monday after vacation, I got to take Funny to school with me. During show-and-tell, I felt like a big shot answering my classmates’ questions: What did he eat? When did he sleep? Peter Clegg asked me the stupidest question of all: weren’t gerbils in the same family as mice and rats? I rolled my eyes and told him no.
“Well, actually, Peter’s right,” Miss Faborsky said. She walked over to the shelf where the World Book Encyclopedias were, pulled out the R volume, and flipped through the pages. “Rodents, rodents . . . ,” she said. “Ah, here we go.” She handed the open book to Roberta Delgado and told her to have a look, then pass it on. When it got to me, I gazed, stunned, at the two-page color spread: mice and squirrels, rats and mole rats, beavers and muskrats. And sure enough, in the company of these others was a gerbil that looked a lot like Funny. Peter Clegg lived close enough to school that he didn’t have to take the bus; he rode his bike. And so later that day, after we’d used compasses for an art lesson, I hid mine instead of handing it in. At afternoon recess, I snuck out to the bike rack and punched holes in Peter’s tires.
After school, at Irma’s front door, I was met by a stranger. “You must be Kent,” she said. “I’m Dottie, Irma’s friend. She had to go to Tawny’s school today, so she asked me to come and stay with youse until she got back.”
“Oh. Is Nadine here?” I asked. She said yes, downstairs. She was waiting to show me something.
“Look what I got, Kent!” Nadine said when I was halfway down the basement stairs. Her mother had bought her a gerbil, too—a white one. She’d named her Tammy after that song on the radio. Both Tammy and Funny were out of their cages, chasing each other. They were friends, Nadine said. She picked up her stupid gerbil and put it against her neck. “Stop tickling me,” she told it, giggling.
“I hope you know that gerbils are in the same family as rats,” I said.
“They are?”
“Yes! So you better hope she doesn’t bite you because it would be the same as getting a rat bite.” I unbuckled my belt, pulled it away from my dungarees, and threw it on the floor. “Come on,” I said. “We’re playing ‘House.’ ”
Nadine said she didn’t really feel like it.
“Well, I do. Come on. Make it snappy!”
A few minutes later, while I was moving against her, our clothes in a pile on the floor, I heard someone say, “Oh, my god! What the hell—” When I looked up, there was Dottie.
That night, while my mother and I were eating supper, the doorbell rang. It was Irma. She was holding Funny’s cage. I went to my room and tried as best I could to listen through the crack in the door, but all I could make out was what my mother was saying. “No, no, I understand. Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out.” I thought I was in big trouble. But after Irma left, all Mom said was that she couldn’t babysit me anymore because Tawny had taken another after-school job so there’d be no one downstairs to watch Nadine and me. I figured that whatever Tawny’s new job was, it had allowed me to dodge a bullet. It wasn’t until years later that the truth dawned on me: if Irma had reported what Dottie had seen, she’d lose her license, and with it her income.
For the rest of fourth grade, I had to go over to this weird old lady Mrs. Weingarth’s house. Funny lived in my bedroom now, but I played with him less and less and grew to resent having to clean his cage and make sure he had food and fresh water. One afternoon, when I looked in at him, I was shocked to see him lying down with these fat, pink wormy-looking things crawling all over him—six of them! I knew dogs got worms, but I didn’t know gerbils got them. Careful not to touch any of them, I lifted Funny out of his cage, then unhooked the bottom tray and carried it into the bathroom. I poked at the slimy pink things with a pencil until each one dropped with a little plunk into the toilet. Then I flushed it. Watching them swirl around in the water and disappear, it suddenly dawned on me that they weren’t worms; they were babies. . . . That Funny must be a girl and Tammy must be a boy, instead of the other way around. And that while Nadine and I had been pretending to make a baby, our gerbils had made six of them. I kept my mouth shut, though. I didn’t tell my mother. And when Funny died a few months later, I wasn’t even that sad. I put her stiff little body in a lunch bag and buried her in our backyard as if I was burying everything that had happened in Irma’s basement.
When I was in fifth grade, my mother finally let me stay home by myself after school. Left to my own devices, I almost never did my homework, or set the table, or took out the garbage like I had so often promised I would. I mostly just watched TV, built airplane models, and made crank phone calls to strangers whose numbers I called at random. “All your friends think you have bad breath but they don’t want to tell you,” I’d say. Or “Someone’s going to rob your house tonight. You better watch out.” When they’d demand to know who was calling, I’d hang up.
When I was in sixth grade, my father got married again—not to Peter Clegg’s mother but to another woman named Helene, who had no kids. Dad invited me to the wedding, but it was on a Sunday night and I told him I’d rather stay home and watch Bullwinkle. He wasn’t a mailman anymore; now he worked for some shipping company. Just before he got transferred to Cincinnati, he took me out to lunch and told me he wanted us to stay in touch. Did I want that, too?
“Not really,” I said, hoping he’d notice what a surly little bastard I’d become, thanks to him.
“Well, okay, suit yourself,” he said, instead of offering me the objection I was hoping to hear. After he dropped me off back home, I went upstairs to my room and destroyed the Pinewood Derby car he had helped me make in Cub Scouts. Then I cried into my pillow so that Mom wouldn’t hear me.
Sometimes on those afternoons between the time I got home from school and the time my mother got home from work, I’d think about Nadine and me playing “House” and diddle myself until the spasm came. During one of those sessions, it changed from dry to wet. After that, I’d do it so often that I’d make my dick sore. I stuffed the balled-up tissues in the pockets of my sports jacket, which I hardly ever wore anymore. Mom didn’t go to church much now, and when she did, I made such a stink about going with her that she gave up and let me stay home. By April of that year, I began to sprout pubic and underarm hair. I became the first of my male classmates to shave. I was drinking coffee at breakfast now, and reading the newspaper—the comics and the police report, mostly. I was delighted the morning I read that Tawny Cake had gotten arrested for something called “aggravated assault,” whatever the fuck that was. That was another change: I swore now. Saying the word fuck out loud sent a small thrill through me, and saying it in front of my disappr
oving mother was an added benefit. By the time I was in the ninth grade, I was stealing Mom’s smokes and swigging from the bottle of gin she kept hidden in the china closet. I shoplifted candy at the corner store, answered back my teachers. One day, I got so mad at my shop teacher—I can’t remember why—that I stormed out of class, grabbed onto the drinking fountain in the hall, and ripped it away from the wall. They suspended me for two weeks and billed my mother for the damage. I never did go back to that school. Mom was at her wits’ end by that time and decided that, since my real father had bailed, what I needed was a father figure. She went to see her brother, Uncle Chick, and asked him to help. That was when I went to live with the O’Days.
I liked living there okay, although I wasn’t crazy about having to share a bedroom with my goody-goody cousin Donald. Mr. Athlete, Mr. Honor Roll. And I got the message that he wasn’t that crazy about the arrangement either. But Uncle Chick was pretty cool. Sometimes after school I’d go down to the Shamrock Barbershop where he worked and hang around, watch him cut hair and entertain his customers. Uncle Chick was funny; he was like a comedian or something. He’d tell jokes, make Uncle Brendan’s mynah bird that he kept at the shop say stuff. (Uncle Brendan was Uncle Chick and my mother’s uncle, my great-uncle. He owned the barbershop and Uncle Chick worked for him.)
Sometimes on Sunday when the rest of the family would go off to church, Uncle Chick would take me fishing, or out to breakfast, or both. We even went ice fishing once, him and me, and I caught a decent-size striped bass. Donald didn’t like to fish, plus he always had a lot of homework. He took college prep classes and I was in general studies. If Uncle Chick and I got back from breakfast before the others returned, he’d show me how to fix things around the house. “How’d you like to learn how to use a socket wrench?” he’d go. Or, “How about you and me tackle that leaky faucet in the bathroom? Yeah? Okay then. Go out to the Merc and get my toolbox.” Uncle Chick’s Mercury station wagon had two rows of bench seats up front, but he had pulled out the third row of seats and set up a kind of portable toolshed in the car’s way-back, which was pretty cool.
I liked Aunt Sunny, too. She was pretty, and nice to me. And, unlike my own mother, easy to talk to. When she got pregnant, I was the first person she told. She had come back from the doctor’s earlier that afternoon and I was the only one home, except for my little cousin Annie, who was taking a nap. “Guess what, Kent?” she said. It made me feel like kind of a big deal: knowing before anyone else, even Uncle Chick.
I used to hang around in the kitchen with Aunt Sunny sometimes and help her make supper—chop up vegetables or whatever, peel potatoes or stir something on the stove. And while we were working together, she’d sometimes ask me my opinions about stuff: civil rights, whether or not I thought Kennedy was a good president. She made me think, you know? She always had the radio on in the kitchen, and I liked the way she’d sing along with the songs they’d play: “Soldier Boy,” “Johnny Angel,” and that Patsy Cline song, “I Fall to Pieces.” Patsy Cline was Aunt Sunny’s favorite singer. She’d dance sometimes, too, when the faster songs came on. Annie would wander in, sleepy-eyed from her afternoon nap, and the two of them would start dancing with each other. “Come on, Kent. You, too!” Aunt Sunny’d say, and I’d go, “Nah, no thanks,” but she’d pull on my hand and make me. It was silly, but kind of fun: Annie and Sunny and me dancing in the kitchen. One time, in the middle of us dancing, Sunny said, “Whoa,” and sat down on a kitchen chair. “Come here, you two,” she told Annie and me. “Someone wants to say hello.” She lifted up her shirt, exposing her swollen belly, and had us put our hands on it so we could feel the baby kicking. It felt weird but kind of cool, too. “Can we name her Tinkerbell?” Annie asked, but Aunt Sunny laughed and said it might be a him, not a her. “But I want a little sister,” Annie insisted.
Aunt Sunny kissed her forehead and said it was up to the baby what it was going to be, not us. But Annie got her wish. Gracie was born at the end of the summer. Labor Day weekend, it was. Just before school started up again.
Aunt Sunny was always urging me to go to the school dances when Donald went. I tried it once; that was enough for me. I spent the whole night leaning against the wall, or sneaking down to the boys’ room to smoke. They had a ladies’ choice near the end of the dance—that corny Bobby Vinton song, “Blue Velvet.” I stood there, watching all these goody-goody college prep girls cut in on whoever was dancing with Donald. About halfway through the song, this girl Alice from my homeroom asked me to dance, but she was a chub, so I said I didn’t know how to slow-dance. I did, though; Aunt Sunny had taught me. God, I hated Donald that night. When we got home, I went to our room while he was in the kitchen getting something to eat, and I grabbed one of his eight billion sports trophies—the one he’d gotten for good sportsmanship in indoor track. It had a little statue of a runner on top, and I decapitated it and put it back on Donald’s shelf. Hid the head under my mattress. Donald didn’t even notice until a couple of days later. I walked into the room and he was holding his headless trophy. “How did this happen?” he wanted to know.
“How the fuck should I know?” I said. He told me to keep my hands off his stuff. “And what if I don’t?” I said. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Make you sorry you didn’t,” he said.
“Oh, yeah? You and whose army?” It was a bluff, of course. Donald wasn’t just smarter than me; he was also bigger and stronger. He could have taken me easily. The next morning when he and I were eating breakfast, I got up and went over to the fridge. “Hey, cuz, could you pour me some milk?” he asked. I got out a glass, looked over to make sure he wasn’t looking, and spit a hawker into the bottom. Then I poured his milk over it and handed it to him. He thanked me and took a sip.
“Don’t mention it,” I said.
Maybe Donald didn’t like me living with his family, but his little sister sure did. After the dismissal bell, Donald would usually stay at school, going to practice or some club meeting, but I’d head back to the O’Days’. “Wanna play dolls with me?” Annie would ask, or “Wanna color in my coloring book?” Sometimes I would, sometimes I wouldn’t. If I said no, she’d follow me around the house. “Whatcha doing, Kent? . . . Wanna read me a story? . . . You know what, Kent? Mommy said next year or the year after that my teeth are gonna get wiggly and come out and then a fairy’s gonna fly in my window and take them and leave me money. And I think this one’s already wiggly. Wanna feel it?”
“You and Annie have gotten to be real pals, haven’t you?” Aunt Sunny said once. “She’s crazy about you. I hope you realize how good you are with little kids.” I liked hearing her say that, and I liked Annie, too. She could be pesty if you weren’t in the mood, but I got a kick out of her most of the time. I acted more like her big brother than Donald did.
Having to share a room with Mr. Perfect cut seriously into my jerk-off sessions. They were limited mostly to the times when I went in the bathroom and locked the door, or at night under the covers after the lights were out, or when I could get the lavatory pass at school and beat my meat while looking at the dirty graffiti scrawled all over the walls of the stall. Sometimes, to get myself in the mood, I’d think about Nadine’s flat chest and hairless twat, me lying on top of her and gyrating like a fuckin’ milk shake. But I didn’t think of my little cousin in that way. I just liked Annie because she liked me.
Chapter Twenty
Annie Oh
Minnie and I are seated in back, and Africa is riding up front with Hector. He’s a beautiful child: big eyes, long lashes, and that hair that was so popular with blacks back in the 1970s. A “natural,” they called it. But the boy is antsy, shifting around in his seat, fingering the buttons on the console. “Sit still up there!” his mother scolds. He unbuckles himself and turns back on his knees. Cups his hand to his mouth and whispers something I don’t quite catch. “What you mean you gotta go again? It ain’t but twenty minutes since we stopped the last time.”
Ca
use and effect, I feel like saying. Maybe she shouldn’t have bought him that big blue slushie at the comfort stop. I reach over the seat and tousle his hair. “It’s okay, honey. When a guy’s got to go, he’s got to go. Right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t you ‘uh-huh’ her,” Minnie says. “You say yes, Miz Anna.”
“Yes, Miss Anna.”
We’re in East Hartford now, another forty-five minutes from Three Rivers, still, but just a few miles from the mall. “Hector, why don’t you take the Buckland Street exit up ahead? There are plenty of restaurants along there where we can stop.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I’m paying Hector and Minnie each a thousand dollars to make this trip. They can both use the money more than I can use their services, but I’m glad I’ve hired them. With the exception of my kids and a few others, most of the people coming to the wedding are friends and clients of Viveca’s. Well, Minnie and Hector are my friends, more or less. Approaching the exit, Hector puts on his blinker. Drives the quarter mile and stops at the light. “Chuck E. Cheese!” Africa shouts, his face to the window.
“You keep still,” his mother tells him. “We ain’t stopping at no Chuck E. Cheese. You just gonna go into wherever Mr. Hector stops so you can do your bidness. This trip ain’t about you. You just along for the ride.” Africa’s bottom lip pokes out, but he doesn’t protest.