4
Norma Mulvey, our neighbor Bea’s daughter, was four years younger than me, and because there weren’t a lot of kids her age in the plat, she used to always want to play with me. When I was eleven or twelve, I guess it wasn’t so bad, but as I grew up and she’d sort of just be everywhere I was, it drove me nutty. Not that Norma wasn’t nice when she was a girl. Norma was very nice, and quiet and shy, but still, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old shouldn’t have a kid following him around.
Norma adored Bethany, too. She’d just show up. We’d be having supper, and my pop would have the Red Sox on the radio, and, no knocks or anything, in would walk Norma.
“Hi, Smithy!” she’d shout, and sit next to me, all pigtails and nine and grubby.
“Uh,” I’d say.
“Hi, you cutie. Norma Mulvey is my fave,” Bethany would say.
My mom was just so nice. “How about a little bowl of macaroni and cheese?”
“Oh, boy! Oh, boy!” Norma would say. “What’s the score, Pop?” Norma called Mom “Mom,” and Pop “Pop.” She kept it simple.
“Five–four, good guys.”
“Yayyy!”
Everybody laughed but me. I was thirteen. She made my crew cut itch.
One time I remember, in that clear way that stands out in my memory, there was a puppet show that Norma wanted to have. She’d seen one on Captain Kangaroo, and it was all she could talk about and sing about and dream about, so Bethany got this empty refrigerator box and cut out a hole about halfway up for a stage. Bethany came into the house and brought me outside. I was, I think, fourteen then, so Norma would have been ten. It was Bethany’s last year at school.
“Look what Norma and I made.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a puppet show!” Norma screamed.
“We need somebody to be a guy puppet,” my sister said, seriously. “Norma wants to do a show about a princess in a tower and a knight rescues her.”
“That’s stupid,” I said.
“Is not!” Norma screamed.
“Careful, Hook,” my sister said. “You have to do things like this, or you’re gonna end up a fat-ass with no friends.”
“I’m gonna be Roxanne,” Norma said, oblivious to us. She held up a little girl doll with black hair and eyes that closed when you put her down, and she handed me a boy doll. She had put a little handkerchief around him like a cape.
“I’m not gonna play with dolls.”
“They’re not dolls, they’re puppets. He’s Rex. Rex saves Roxanne. I love you so much!” Norma screamed.
“Norma loves Smithy,” my sister sang.
“I’m going.”
“Rex can’t go!” Norma cried.
“You can’t go. If you go, you’re going to end up a fat-ass like Uncle Count, and you’re not going to have any friends.”
“That’s your stupid voice.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I love Smithy this much!” Norma screamed, holding her skinny arms apart.
“Go home, you little creep.”
“Careful, Hook.”
“Stupid little creep. Stop following me everywhere.”
Norma just stood there and started to scream and cry together. Bethany hugged her and glared at me. I glared right back. I was fourteen and had made the ninth-grade basketball team, and I was supposed to play with dolls? Bethany’s eyes were lime green.
“All right. If she’ll stop that stupid crying.”
Norma rubbed her eyes red and said she loved me. I felt so stupid—being Rex, of course, being sort of bullied by my sister. But I rescued Roxanne even though Norma’s Roxanne kept kissing Rex with big, stupid, smacking sounds.
5
In 1963 a guy named Wa Ryan bought a used Volkswagen and fixed it up. Wa had almost finished high school in Bethany’s class, but he was one of the dumb guys about school. It was cars for Wa. He lived three streets down with his mother, who had emphysema and used to exercise by walking incredibly slow, almost in slow motion, up the main street, holding an unlit cigarette. Wa would always work on the Volks on the front section of his narrow driveway. All the driveways in East Providence are narrow, just like all the houses are small, with two, sometimes three small bedrooms and small yards with, usually, small vegetable gardens. There’s a sameness, I guess, that’s nice. There’s a comfort, I guess, in not beating each other. But Wa, like I said, pulled the bumpers off, raised the body with truck springs, put a simulated Rolls-Royce grille on the front, and removed the mufflers. Then he painted it bloodred.
You could hear Wa coming. He didn’t race around like a nut or anything—that’s not part of the culture of fixed-up Volkswagens. He drove normally but very loud and very pleased with his creation. He loved people to admire his handiwork, never once stopping to consider that most people thought he was just another guy with a crazy car.
It was the first Saturday in April. I remember that because my pop and I never missed opening day of the Rhode Island trout-fishing season. We always got our stuff ready the night before, loaded up the car with sandwiches and soda and night crawlers and fly rods. Opening day was not a day for flies, even nymphs that bounce low. The trout wanted meat, so we made sure we had on long, light leader and split shot to get the bait down where they were—in the deep, slow pools of Wood River. We always got up real early, sometimes four or four-thirty, so we could get to our spots before sunrise, when the season would officially begin.
I’m not clear about what we caught, but we usually had our limit of six each by noontime, and Pop usually fell in or got water over his boots by ten. I do remember that we ate a couple of tuna sandwiches Pop made. Lousy ones, because he didn’t take the time to mix the tuna and mayonnaise good, and then we drove back to East Providence.
When we brought the trout into the kitchen, Mom was sitting at the table crying. She had a way of crying that was so restrained it was truly awful. Pop and I thought the same thing at the same time.
“Where’s Bethany?” my father said, holding the stringer of trout.
Mother waited a moment to get herself under control.
“Want some water, Mom?”
“Bethany’s at the hospital.”
“Oh, Jesus,” my father said, closing his eyes tight.
“She’s fine,” Mom said, “Bethany is fine. It’s our little Norma. She was walking to Sunshine Bakery, and she got hit by Wa Ryan’s crazy car.”
“Oh, Jesus,” my father said again. “Was Bethany with her?”
“No, she went to the hospital the second we found out. Poor Bea.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
I wrapped the trout in waxed paper and put them in the fridge. Pop and I changed clothes. Then we all drove to Providence.
Rhode Island Hospital sits on a small rise and overlooks the little-used Providence Harbor. In 1938, an unbelievable hurricane shot over Block Island into the Connecticut–Rhode Island coast and up the Providence River. A lot of the damage is still there. You could see it out the emergency room’s waiting-area windows. We asked for Norma, and they sent us to Intensive Care on the fourth floor of the new hospital wing.
Bethany sat on a window ledge in an alcove that had been set up as a kind of rest area. Bethany ran and hugged Mom and Pop and me.
“Where’s Bea?” Mom asked.
“They took her down to the emergency room because she passed out. I was holding her hand, and she just passed out. Oh, Mom! It’s so awful. Poor Norma. Poor little Norma.” Bethany began crying, and Mom did, too.
My pop lit a cigarette and shook his head. “Oh, Jesus.”
Bethany calmed down. “She has pressure behind the ear. She has all these broken bones and cuts. When the doctor told Bea they were going to have to operate to stop all the pressure, Bea just passed out.”
•••
That’s what I was thinking about. Our family at the hospital with little Norma. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because we all sat together for a while and
concentrated on exactly the same thing. That could be it. Like how everybody becomes one person for a little bit and how the tiniest thing affects everybody in almost the exact same way. A pretty comfortable share, if you absolutely have to share, in a Wa Ryan souped-up-Volkswagen tragedy. But now it was my pop and mom and other hospitals.
I called Polly at the funeral home and told her there would be two in the funeral, and Polly said that at least they were together. I called Aunt Paula and the Count and told her that Mom and Pop had gone, and then I went back to the motel, loaded up the car with the rest of my stuff, and drove to Rhode Island.
I drove right to my parents’ home, instead of my apartment near Goddard. Mom’s 1971 Karmann Ghia, all rusted out on the front end, was in the garage. It was dark, but I found Pop’s spare key on the nail in the garage. It was behind a pile of paint cans. I walked into the screen porch and opened the back door. It smelled like Worcestershire sauce. That was our kitchen smell. We loved Worcestershire sauce. In meat loaves and hamburgers, and you know what else gets this nice tang with Worcestershire sauce? Codfish cakes. It’s an all-around sauce. I sat for a little while in the kitchen without turning on any lights and thought of pot roast and turnips and cabbage and even corned beef with shots of Worcestershire. I lit a cigarette and took two beers out of the fridge. I drank them fast and took out a couple more.
I went to the kitchen sink and splashed a little cold water on my face. There was a moon and stars out, and a nice damp, cool night breeze came in when I opened the window above the sink. The Mulveys’ house was next door, and there were no lights on, but it was very late. Sometimes I would be at Mom’s kitchen window doing the dishes, because when I would drive over from my apartment for dinner, I’d help clean up, and when I stood at the window, I would see Norma, on the side of her window, looking at me, I think. I would, I think, catch her, just looking, and then she’d turn away as if she wasn’t looking.
After she had been so hurt with the Volkswagen, we visited the hospital a lot, and when Bea brought her home in that wheelchair, we’d go over, but Norma was so sad and she cried so much and Bethany had started hurting herself with fists and fingernails, so we sort of stopped going over. Sometimes I’d see her getting into the special van the state used to pick up those kids, those hurt kids, to go to the school in Pawtucket that was, I guess, for handicaps. Later on, with Bethany and everything, it was as if little Norma and her little wheelchair were never really there. For us anyway, the family of Bethany. It just gets so hard to go over, and the more you say to yourself to go over and then don’t, it actually becomes so hard it seems impossible. So except for that glance at the sink, her sort of peeking out behind Bea’s blinds, I guess I hadn’t seen Norma, really, for thirty years. I wondered if she saw me—all of me, the weight, the cigarettes, the cases of beer—and knew I wasn’t a runner anymore. You think odd things in your parents’ house.
I opened two more beers and walked through their house in the dark, into the parlor. Sitting there, on Mom’s green couch, I tried to focus on my responsibilities for the next couple of days, tried to order exactly what I should be doing. I smoked a couple more cigarettes, finished the beers, slept on the couch. Too cold to get comfortable, too drunk to get a blanket.
6
You have to learn to look at someone you truly adore through eyes that really aren’t your own. It’s as if a person has to become another person altogether to be able to take a hard look. Good people protect people they love, even if that means pretending that everything is okay. When the posing and disappearing became a way of life for Bethany, we’d take on this almost casual attitude in our searches. As if we were trying to convince ourselves it was not a bad thing. Even the running into walls had that unintentional fog about it, after it filtered through my parents’ conversations. But once Bethany had graduated from high school, her voice began to throw away any subtle signs of self-destruction.
My sister stayed home after school. She’d been accepted at a Catholic girls’ college, St. Regina Teachers College in Bristol, Rhode Island, and for a while my parents thought that a perfect situation for her was living at home and commuting the twenty-five miles to Bristol. That way she would still be sort of independent, but Mom and Pop could watch her. My pop bought her a neat little blue used Renault Dauphine. We all had such a wonderful feeling about our college plans. It was euphoric, and this lightness fell all over my parents and, I suppose, me, too, as if there was sun coming out or something.
Bethany had gone through the long summer working at Peoples Drug Store. Her job was a huge success in the Ide house, and Mom and Pop never stopped complimenting her on how nice she was to customers and how hard she worked. I was mowing lawns when I could get the mowing jobs, but mostly I’d get my fish gear and ride the Raleigh to Shad Factory. I was going to be sixteen that fall and already had a driver’s permit, but driving wasn’t something I thought was so great. As long as I had my bike.
In the summer, especially in August, the lakes would evaporate quite a bit. Streams that fed or were fed by lakes also shriveled. Shad Factory was particularly low the summer of Bethany’s senior year, but it had a certain kind of beauty in its black water and how it contrasted with the countryside, which went stick brown.
A fisherman did not have to be an expert to see that catching some good ones had to do with getting the bait down low. I used weighted orange-and-black woolly worms that my pop and I used to tie. They were pretty good for spring trout, which Pop fished for, and absolute killers on the pickerels, bluegills, and fat perch that lay in the holes beneath Shad Factory falls. The bushes on the bank were thick and dry, and even when I took off my sneaks to wade in, a back cast with that big old nine-foot glass fly rod of mine was out of the question. You had to roll the woolly worm or the nymph up above, into the falls, and let the current bounce it into and around the holes and the edges of the big rocks. This is the only way to fish below the falls. I don’t have fishing equipment anymore. I don’t think I’d remember how to tie that terrific orange-and-black woolly worm, but I’d sure know enough, if I ever found myself up against a falls with nothing but a fly rod, to throw the fly right up into the churning water.
It was about the middle of August. I had gotten up early like I usually did, because a runner almost never sleeps, and anyway I wanted to mow Mrs. Lopes’s lawn and still have a full day at Shad. I was sweating like crazy when I got there, what with the yard work and the bike ride, so I took off my clothes and swam a little in the lake, then waded into the stream below, throwing my woolly worm as I went. Casting is hypnotic. The roll cast, the one I used on the flies, is only perfect about once every fifty throws, but by the time you hit that first perfect roll, there’s not a thought in your head, so you don’t notice that big, round traveling loop.
I caught some beauties, hard and full of colors and, of course, fat, because of all the bugs and minnows that rolled over the falls and into their mouths. I like the perch the best, so I kept a few, cleaned them good, and let pickerel and bluegills go. I always felt successful with a creel of perch. My pop liked to say that not only was I an expert fisherman, but nobody could fry up a perch better than me. He was right. I could catch them and cook them perfectly. The secret, I remember, was, instead of bread crumbs, I used crushed cornflakes.
The best ride home from Shad Factory was past the turkey farms of Rehoboth. It added a few miles onto the trip, but there weren’t a lot of cars on these old roads, and the turkey smells that people found so disgusting I thought were kind of nice. It’s hard to think their crap smells nice, but what I mean is the turkey itself is so interesting, even beautiful, in its odd way, that you have to get above its smell. Anyway, it made for a satisfying ride home. In the late afternoon, breezes over the small farm ponds cooled everything off, and when I got into an easy pedal, it was like the roll cast. Hypnotic.
Taunton Avenue unofficially divided Rhode Island from Massachusetts. It wasn’t a border, or in some spots even close to a border, but the ol
d Taunton–Twin Pike had a sovereignty that you had to live around to understand. I think of it as a kind of asphalt river. I turned onto Taunton Avenue just past the last turkey farm, Amaral Turkey Land, and headed into East Providence. Sometimes on the Seekonk-Rhody border I’d stop for a soda at the Chip ’n’ Putt and, if it wasn’t too late, play a round alone. There’s no other way on the Chip ’n’ Putt. I liked it me against me. But this day it was getting dark, so I skipped the soda and the game. I rode past the new bowling alley with the automatic pin boys, the Bay View Drive-In Movie where there were no bay views, and up the big hill where the famous Rendini car crash took place in 1951, when eleven members of the Rendini family from North Providence hit an oil truck from Pennsylvania. My pop played ball with a couple of the Rendini boys. He said they had good arms and were quick to the bag. All dead in ’51.
After the Luck Is All Trailer Park at the top of the hill, it was only about ten minutes home. Instead of turning up Pawtucket Avenue for our house, I rode straight on Taunton for the little shopping center where Bethany worked in Peoples Drug.
There were two police cruisers, doors open, engines running, parked outside of Peoples. From my bike I could see a crowd in the back right corner of the store, where Mr. Allenizio, who managed the drugstore, kept a small soda fountain and magazine rack. I got a tightness in my stomach and I realized that the day had turned into gray dark. I smelled autumn even though dust kicked up in the parking lot. I put the kickstand down, dropped my creel over the handlebars, and walked inside.
Mr. Allenizio had stocked a huge supply of summer stuff, and because it was now August and a lot of it hadn’t sold, he had moved it up front in two sale aisles. It was a good idea, except it made the store seem cheesy, with plastic floats and cheap sunglasses. But it wasn’t a cheesy store. It was actually classy and, I guess, sophisticated in Mr. Allenizio’s filing system for prescriptions and credit system for billing. At least Bethany said it was sophisticated, and she had, when it was a good time, a great sense about such things. Now she was pinned on the floor by Bill Poland from the EP Police and another cop.