“You . . . if you asked him, Norma, I’m . . .”
Norma shot out her hand and grabbed my left fat, sweaty paw, so hard it hurt. She held it, and she held her look at the radio. I didn’t move, even though I was amazed at how strong she was. I looked at the radio, and when I looked back, a tear was rolling out of her eye. She let my hand go and rubbed it away.
“I’ve got to go now, Smithy.”
I didn’t say anything, stupid or otherwise, and lifted her back to the driveway. As soon as she was on the ground, she began to quickly roll away.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, I’m . . . I don’t . . .”
“Mail’s on the table,” and she was gone.
It was a warm night, not unusual for the end of August, and when I went back in and shut off Pop’s radio, the crickets were already working. I lit a smoke and grabbed some beers out of the fridge and drank. An hour later I was pretty shaky, but I managed to get down to the basement and bring the vodka upstairs to the kitchen table, where I made a big screwdriver. Then I remembered the mail.
I don’t enjoy reading as an adult. There’s something about it now. But I had read until I fell asleep almost every night in this house, and I read fast, too. Good books that often I would hate to finish because they took me into their lives and let me out of mine, for a while anyway. I thought about what I read then, but these days I read the same page over and over, and of course there’s beers. Sometimes I miss reading, but I still don’t do it in my adulthood.
So I don’t get magazines and things sent through the mail to me. Just some bills, that’s about it. But Mom and Pop loved the magazines. They subscribed to Time, U.S. News & World Report, Sports Illustrated, Field & Stream, National Geographic, the Sporting News, and the Red Sox Quarterly, which not only had profiles of the ballplayers but included favorite recipes and original poetry. There were two magazines in the batch of mail Norma had dropped off. I separated them and placed them neatly on one section of the kitchen table. Next I put the bills in a separate pile and letters that looked personal in another pile. Most of the mail was junk, so I threw it away.
Wouldn’t you think when a person dies there would be a “that’s it” kind of thing? I think that. I think that when somebody dies, there ought to be a process where everything about them, like bills and taxes, stops. They don’t even slow down. As a matter of fact, they seem to come quicker and louder. In my parents’ pile of bills was American Express, two separate phone bills, Mobil gas, Wood’s Heating and Oil, Visa, a Travelers Insurance premium, and a pledge card from the East Providence Rescue Squad. They do not stop when you die.
Aunt Paula had set up an appointment with a lawyer she knew who was going to help me sort out my parents’ “estate.” I love that what they had is called an “estate.” Mom particularly would have enjoyed it. The lawyer was going to tell me how to get the bills and things to stop, because Mom and Pop had stopped, so I put a rubber band around the bills and would just give them to whoever the lawyer was when I met him after work on Tuesday. That left only the letters that looked personal. There were two from friends of Mom’s who were visiting England with a church tour, one from Pop’s rotisserie baseball commissioner, and one from the City of Los Angeles Department of Health. This was the only one I opened. I knew the rotisserie league was to do with his efforts to get Roger Clemens on his fantasy team, and I didn’t want to read the letters to Mom. I opened the official-looking one from Los Angeles. It was addressed to Pop:
In response to your letter of the twenty-sixth of July, it is with regret we inform you that Bethany Ide, 51, died from complications of exposure. Her date of death was June 4, and she has since that time been in the Los Angeles Morgue West. The inclusion of Ms. Ide’s dental records with your inquiry was extremely helpful in the identification procedure.
I felt a shortness or an absence of breath for a second, and this weird feeling of panic spread out of my chest and covered me. I stood up from the kitchen table and walked out to the porch and air. I found some, and I breathed it. Then I walked back to the kitchen and the Los Angeles letter. I read the first part again, but I was too drunk to finish it, so I folded the letter, put it in my pants pocket, and walked back to the porch. That’s when I saw her again. She was in the garage in front of Mom’s Karmann Ghia, and she was in her pose. Her hair was longer than before, and the creamy skin caught the last of the sun. My beautiful sister, Bethany. Perfectly still. I opened the screen porch and walked to the garage.
“Bethany. Mom and Pop. They’re gone, Bethany. You’re gone. What am I gonna do?”
I get tired. I get drunk. I see her. Clearly. Her green eyes. I’m a fool.
I walked into my pop’s garage and leaned my big butt against Mom’s little blue car.
“Bethany,” I said again, almost like a prayer. I lit a cigarette and smoked for a minute.
Pop’s garage was about smells. Like Mom’s kitchen and Worcestershire sauce, the garage was 3-In-One Oil, citronella candles, kerosene, and latex paint. Good smells. Smells that go on.
I looked around and appreciated Pop’s order. I don’t have order. Pop had a place for everything. Shelves for paint. Hooks for rope and garden hose. Nails for the rakes and shovels. Above the small window in the back, hanging over Pop’s long workbench, was my Raleigh. My Raleigh. I never saw it there.
I was drunk, but that was my Raleigh. I stood on Mom’s blue hood and pulled it away from the hooks.
We both crashed onto the roof of the car, me and my Raleigh. The bike pitched again, over me and out the garage door. I lay in the dent of the car roof for a few minutes, then rolled off and walked to the bike.
My Raleigh. My maroon three-speed. I set it on its wheels and popped the kickstand. It still had the light on the front, but there were no batteries inside. It still had my small leather pack hooked onto the back of the seat. I unzipped it.
“The zipper works good,” I said out loud.
I threw a leg over, and the bar sat way below my crotch. Had I grown that much? I sat on the seat, keeping balance with my left leg. It was a tight fit, like the blue suit I had on, when I sat down I couldn’t keep it buttoned. The tires had no air, so they groaned under the beer and pickled eggs, and the tire rims crunched on the pavement. I lit a cigarette and sat on my bike.
I sat smoking until the cigarette was gone. Then I put up the kickstand with my heel and walked with the bike between my legs, to the end of the driveway. It must have been around eight, because I remember a full moon.
Now, I don’t understand this, except I knew there was a Sunoco station at the bottom of our street, and it probably had an air pump, but, as I said, this is a gray area because all of a sudden I gave the Raleigh a few steps, sat ridiculously on the seat, and began to coast on the flat tire rims of my bike, down our little hill.
10
After the Red Bridge Jump, Bethany went into what Pop called a “lull.” She was put on a tranquilizer by the doctors at Bradley that lulled the hell out of her. Almost always the bill of goods on these medications is that they are “calming.” Bethany was calmed. In fact, my sister pretty much slept through my junior year of high school. She couldn’t wake up in the morning and couldn’t stay awake when she did. My pop’s take on it was almost mystical. He truly believed that during this long rest period, her body and mind were healing.
Sometime around the beginning of May, I realized that Bethany had been cutting down on her dosage. At night, when I was pretending to do homework, I could feel her looking at me. When I would glance up, though, her eyes were closed. I’d talk to her those times, but she’d pretend to be asleep. I had this really bad feeling she was planning something, or at least her goddamn voice was, and it made me nervous. It was one of those things that get inside your head and won’t get out. From May on, I had a terrible baseball season. When Coach finally benched me, he told me I had no glove and no bat. That’s baseball for being a shitty player. But how can you turn the double play when you’re
nervous about your sister’s goddamn voice?
I did get a date for my junior prom, though. It was going to be at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, this beautiful old dance place. Mom told me there was a bandstand in the middle and everyone danced around it. That’s where her prom was. I was pretty excited. I had never had a date before, and I really didn’t think I’d be able to get one, what with not knowing anybody and not having too many friends. Like most things that happen to me, though, getting a date just happened.
I was walking to baseball practice, and the only way you were allowed to go if you had on cleats was through the basement hallway past the music room. You couldn’t go the direct route by the science labs on the first floor, because the hall had green linoleum and the cleats would dig it up. So I’m walking by and feeling crappy because I’m not getting to play much for stinking so bad, when I hear this wail. Like a scream, only a little less, and then lots of big crying as if someone’s just been hurt. I look into the music room, which is usually empty because it’s after school, and there’s Jill Fisher and Billy Carrara.
“I’m sorry,” Billy says.
“Oh, God! Oh, no, no, oh, no,” Jill sobs.
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no! Oh, God!”
“I’m really sorry. Look, can I have my ring back?”
Suddenly Jill stops crying and looks at Billy like he’s just killed her puppy. Her eyes all wet and her teeth kind of pink from where she’s chewed her lipstick.
“You want your ring? You want your ring? You want your damn ring?” she screams.
“Yes,” he says, and the poor guy is already flinching.
She rips that ring off her finger and snarls at poor Billy Carrara, “There’s your ring.”
Jill Fisher threw the little gold ring with the red fake ruby and the East Providence townie motto in Greek, VICTORYWITHOUTMERCY, across the long room with all her might.
“Ughhh!” she screamed as she let it go. The ring flew all the way to the percussion section, bounced off the wall, boomed against a brass kettledrum, and slid back across the room, finally stopping at Billy’s left foot. He bent down and picked it up.
“Thanks, Jill,” he said sincerely.
He slipped it onto his finger, took out a piece of tissue paper that had been folded into a tight ball, and handed it to her. Then Billy left the room.
I watched Jill Fisher from the doorway. She unrolled the tissue, and I noticed it was toilet paper. Her ring was there, and she looked at it. I looked at Jill’s big chest. I hadn’t noticed it before, and that was strange for me, because big chests were what I was concerned about at that time. I guess I knew she was going out with Billy, or maybe it was because she was in a group that thought I was a piece of shit, but for whatever reason, that day in the music room was the first time I noticed.
Suddenly she threw her own ring and collapsed in tears. There was nothing else to do but get the ring. I picked it up and walked over to Jill.
“Here,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I’m going to go to the junior prom.”
“You’re a junior?”
“Yes.”
I felt relaxed and confident. Jill lifted herself off the ground and sat in a metal folding chair. She had to take deep breaths because she was cried out, and when she did, her chest expanded and her red blouse got tight against it.
“Your ring looks okay.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not one of those cheap rings. It’s a good ring.”
I was about an inch taller in my cleats, but my practice uniform was baggy. I tried to stick out my chest and stomach, but I didn’t have either one.
“I play third base.”
“You’re on the baseball team?”
“Third base. That’s why I’m wearing cleats.”
“Thank you for getting me my ring.”
“You threw it. . . .”
“Thanks.”
“I just . . . picked it up.”
I saw Jill’s face and realized she was pretty. It was a round face, and she had black eyes, or at least they looked black through her tears. Also, she had long, straight black hair. Chest men don’t notice, I guess, the details. That day, for the first time, I noticed some details.
“I got to go. I got to walk home. Billy was supposed to take me home, but now he’s . . .”
She threw her head back and let out one final sob/moan. I forgot about her face. I thought she might just break that red blouse to pieces. She didn’t.
We walked to the music-room door and into the hallway.
“Listen, I’m going to my junior prom.”
“I know.”
“I’m going alone. By myself.”
“Why?”
“I want to.”
“Oh . . . okay.”
This was not good, and I was stupid. We walked to the field door. I was going out, and Jill Fisher was heaving her chest up the stairs.
“You wouldn’t want to go. You probably wouldn’t like it. You probably would hate to go.”
“Where?”
“My junior prom.”
“I’m a sophomore.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I’d have to go with a junior, or I couldn’t go.”
“Exactly. Some junior would have to ask you, and you’d probably say no.”
“I guess.”
“Like, if I said, ‘Want to go to my junior prom?’ you’d say what?”
“I’d say what?”
“Exactly.”
“Okay.”
“What?”
“I’ll go.”
And it happened to me in the music room like it almost always did. It just happened. I was a pool ball, really, ricocheting off everybody and everything. So even though my boy life didn’t come complete with a specific plan or some logical course of action, it was my own little way of being in the world. Being a part of the whole. But nothing happens anymore. I’m not on the pool table anymore. It wasn’t getting hurt, or Bethany, or nothing, really. I just found the TV easier, the beer, the pretzels. You put on the tube, you drink the refreshing lager, you settle in for a good smoke, who needs contemplation?
I didn’t talk to Jill for a couple of weeks. Then one day a girl passes me a note in English class with Jill’s phone number, and it says to call her. That night I talk to a girl on the phone for the first time.
“Are you mad or something?” she asked me, sort of pissed off.
“No.”
“Then what’s the story? Are we going to the prom?”
“Sure.”
“It’s in two weeks.”
“I know.”
“Well, God! What color cummerbund are you wearing?”
“Cumber—What?”
“God!”
“I mean . . .”
“Look, a cummerbund is a wide belt they wear with tuxedos. They come in different colors. Usually the cummerbund and bow tie are the same color. I want you to get a purple one.”
“Okay.”
“And . . . have you got some paper?”
“Uh . . . yes.”
“Okay, write this. A yellow corsage with some lily in it. Doesn’t that sound perfect? I’m so excited. What’s your name?”
“Smithy Ide.”
“Smithy. Okay. Are you driving?”
“I’ve got my license.”
“Okay. Call me tomorrow night, same time.”
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
It didn’t seem like much, but it was a terrific first phone call to a girl. I felt good. I walked downstairs to the kitchen and thought about a bowl of cereal, but I was never hungry and wasn’t hungry that night. Bethany came into the kitchen in her robe and slippers and made herself a bologna and cheese sandwich and a coffee milk.
“Want one, Hook?” she yawned.
“No thanks.”
She made her sandwich, put the mayonnaise and cheese and bol
ogna in the fridge, and sat down at the table with me. She looked a little ratty.
“I’m feeling icky,” she said between chews. “I stopped taking those pills, and I feel clammy.”
“You’re not supposed to stop taking those pills. C’mon, Bethany. They’re good for you.”
She looked at me and took a bite of sandwich without looking away.
“C’mon,” I said again.
“A lot of times, Hook, not all the time but a lot of times, you can be a real cocksucker.”
I hated when she talked like that. Sometimes she could use words that made me actually throw up. I looked away from her and out the window wearing a good hurt face. I heard her take another bite of sandwich, but when I looked back, she was still watching me.
“Asshole,” she said, her mouth full of bologna and cheese.
I got up to leave the kitchen, but Bethany grabbed my arm.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she laughed.
“Why do you do that?”
“If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t call you names. I heard you’re going to the prom. She pretty?”
I sat back down. “Jill Fisher.”
“I don’t know her.”
“She’s pretty.”
“I went with Bobby Myers to my junior prom.”
Her junior prom. The school gym. The parallel bars. The police. Bobby Myers in that Boston hospital.
“Bobby and his friends all wore plaid cummerbunds and plaid bow ties. They looked so dumb.”
The stolen car, the first long disappearance.
“I’m wearing purple. And I’m getting Jill a yellow corsage with some lily in it.”
“Purple and yellow? Okay. That sounds pretty good.”
I watched her finish the sandwich, then rinse off her dish and put it in the sink. Yes, I was nervous because she had taken herself off the pills, and yes, there still was that crummy feeling that something bad was going to happen, but yes, it was more my sister, even looking ratty, than the sleepwalker that had taken her place for three months. She walked to the door that led out of the kitchen.