So there you have it, Mr. Klanski—all the drama on Freesia Court, except of course my own, which I certainly haven’t seen addressed in any soap opera. I mean, their intention is to attract viewers, not repel them.
When Fred got out of the VA hospital, I flew home to see him, and he seemed like the old Fred, minus an arm that could bend effortlessly at the elbow. He laughed and joked and made plans to go back to Penn State, and at the big party my parents threw for him, he held up his glass (with his good arm) and toasted “life, and boy am I glad I’ve got mine.”
His letters those first months he was back at school were cheerful and funny and often accompanied by music tapes he custom-made (featuring Neil Young, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, The Doors, and, inexplicably, Jimmy Dean). He had decided to major in math, formerly a subject that held no interest for him. His reason should have sounded a little warning buzzer: “because it’s orderly.”
The first time I got an SOS call, I thought he was joking.
“Fred, it’s one in the morning,” I mumbled after the jangling telephone had snatched me out of a deep sleep. “It’s all right,” I whispered to Jerry as he gathered his pillow under his chest and pushed himself up on his elbows. “It’s just Fred. Go back to sleep.”
Our bedroom phone has a long cord, so I was able to walk out into the hallway, where I was sure I would listen to Fred tell me about the girl he’d fallen madly in love with or the one he’d just broken up with. What else could be so important to him that he needed to rouse his sister halfway across the country?
“Slip, they keep coming.”
“What keeps coming?” I asked, the last time I was blissfully ignorant of Fred’s troubles.
“The flashbacks.”
For a moment I was confused. “Fred, have you been taking LSD?”
“I wish,” said Fred, sounding as if he were on the verge of tears. “No, Slip, these are real flashbacks of what happened in ’Nam.”
Holy battered psyche. It was as if all my senses were suddenly adjusted, fine-tuned: my breath sounded amplified in my ears; the objects in the hallway, fuzzy in the darkness, suddenly became clear, and I could see the toy truck Joe had been looking for tucked under the radiator; I could feel each vertebra of my spine pressed against the linen closet door, feel how nubbly the carpet felt under my bare feet.
“What . . . what kind of flashbacks?” I asked, even though I didn’t want an answer.
Fred gasped, the way someone who’s been underwater for a long time gasps when he finally breaks through the surface. “All kinds,” he said. “I see my buddy Phil, who stepped on a land mine—he was walking right in front of me, and he blew up just like a firecracker, Slip. Just like a firecracker! And then he’s screaming in my ear, not really screaming, but moaning, ‘Where’re my arms, Fred? Where’re my legs? Where am I?’ ”
“Oh, Fred—”
“And then I’m back in this village again, Slip, we came to it just as the sun went down, when people were probably thinking, ‘Ahh, safe for one more day.’ But they weren’t. They were harboring snipers, Sergeant Myers was convinced of it—and they were, Slip, we caught one—but why did we have to burn down everything? Why’d we have to burn the whole village, Slip? That’s what the old lady keeps asking me, Slip, the old lady with the burned baby in her arms—for a second I thought it was an old charred log in her arms, Slip; she keeps screaming and I can’t stand it, because I don’t have any kind of answer, Slip, and she keeps asking me and I—”
“Fred,” I said, my voice like a slap—I had to get his attention. “Fred, listen to me.”
“Slip, I need—I need—”
“I’ll tell you what you need,” I said in the firm voice of authority my children always paid attention to. “You need to calm down, and I’m going to help you do that, okay, Fred?” I cradled the phone receiver under my chin and drew my knees to my chest, encircling them with my arms, trying to fight the cold that had come over me.
“Slip, I—”
“Okay, you need to listen to me now, Fred. Tomorrow you’re going to go down to the VA hospital and talk to someone, okay, Fred? I need to know that you’ll do that, Fred.”
My brother groaned. “What about now, Slip? What am I going to do now?”
My mind reeled. “Well, now you’re going to listen to a story, okay?”
“Okay,” said Fred, his voice sounding as young as Joe’s.
Wanting to lighten the mood, if that was at all possible, I laughed, a little chuckle I hoped wouldn’t sound fake to Fred. “You remember when you thought your sock monkey watched you when you slept?”
A pause and then, “The one Grandma Sophie made for me?”
“Uh-huh. You hauled it around everywhere and you wouldn’t go to sleep unless it was in bed with you.”
“He,” said Fred softly. “Danny was a he.”
“Oh, yeah, Danny. And no matter how James and Drew teased you about playing with a dumb old sock monkey, you wouldn’t give him up.”
“Danny was my buddy,” he said in a tone that I swear was almost cheerful.
“Until he started watching you while you slept,” I reminded him. “You said you couldn’t sleep anymore because the minute you closed your eyes, Danny sat up on the pillow and started watching you.”
“Scared the shit out of me.”
“And do you remember how I offered to stay in your bed all night so that you could sleep and I could tell Danny to stop looking at you?”
“You always were a good sister.”
“Thanks. You were always a good brother.” A tear fell on my knee and I felt it through the flannel. “And do you remember I was going to tell you what Danny had told me, but you said I didn’t need to, because he already had?”
“I don’t,” said Fred, his voice apologetic. “I don’t remember that part.”
“Well, you don’t need to,” I said. “Because I remember. You told me that you woke up in the middle of the night to find Danny sitting up staring at me, and you told him, ‘Hey, stop that. Go to bed, Danny, and quit bothering people.’ And you never had any problems with Danny after that, did you?”
For a long time I heard nothing but Fred’s breathing. Then he finally asked, “So?”
“So,” I said, “you hadn’t needed me at all. You were brave enough to get Danny to stop staring all by yourself.”
“So are you saying you won’t help me now?” said Fred, again in his little-boy voice.
“Oh, Fred, I’ll help you all I can. I’m just reminding you how much you can help yourself.”
And I had helped him, that night, but my cute little story about a sock monkey could go only so far. It wasn’t big enough or powerful enough—could any words have been?—to fight Fred’s demons.
At the end of the semester, he decided to drop out—a moot point, as he was already flunking out. For the first time in my life, I began to dread the calls I got from my family.
“You should see him, Slip. He’s a freak,” said James, second oldest next to me, and the most conservative in the family. “His hair’s past his shoulders, and all he does is hang out at the Diamond Lanes.”
“Maybe he just likes to bowl,” I said, hoping for a laugh—if James laughed, then things couldn’t be that bad.
He didn’t laugh. “He doesn’t bowl, Slip. He sits there and drinks. Sits there and drinks with all the other losers in Jersey City.”
“My girlfriend saw him standing in a phone booth screaming,” said Drew, older than Fred by just a year and a half.
“Well, maybe he was mad at whoever he was talking to.”
“Slip, he wasn’t even on the phone.”
Both James and Drew had been ineligible for war, thank God, James because of his asthma, and Drew because he wisely stayed in school. Because they had been lucky, you would have thought they’d be grateful for their luck and more compassionate toward their own brother, who wasn’t so lucky.
“Try to be a friend to him,” I counseled.
“T
hat’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to see him mumbling at the dinner table at Ma’s or standing in a phone booth screaming.”
“I thought it was your girlfriend who saw him screaming,” I said, “not you.”
“That’s not the point!” said Drew. “God, Slip, don’t you think we all feel terrible? Don’t you think we try to help him? But don’t you think it gets a little tiring when you try and try and nothing seems to help?”
My mother and father offered their own grim commentary.
“Honestly, Slip, he’s not Fred anymore,” said my mother, and I could hear the tears in her voice. “He was always the happiest little boy, the happiest teenager, and now—now he’s like one of those bums that we used to see at the Port Authority whenever we went into the city.”
“Remember his Indian name?” my father asked in another phone conversation I’d just as soon hung up on.
I swallowed. “Laughing Spaniel?” I said it like a question, even though I knew it was the correct answer. A lump bloomed like a flower in my throat.
I heard a rasping sound and knew my father was running his hand over his bristly, always-present five o’clock shadow, a gesture he used whenever he worried about something. “I called him that because he was like a happy puppy, always ready to play.” There was that raspy sound again. “Well, Marjorie, he’s not Laughing Spaniel anymore.”
I burst into tears. My dad only called me Marjorie when delivering bad news.
Still, you can’t discount the power of distance as far as troubles are concerned; it wasn’t my table Fred was mumbling at, or the phone booth by my library that he was yelling in. Even though my heart broke with each conversation I had with someone back home, especially those scary and fractured conversations with Fred, I had the luxury of forgetting about him for hours, sometimes days at a time. My family was given the same luxury when Fred decided he needed to get out of New Jersey, and we all felt hopeful: maybe that’s what he needs, to go somewhere new, maybe that’ll make him feel better.
One of us would hear from him—a postcard from Florida, a letter from Colorado, a phone call from Seattle. This went on for a couple years until a week ago, when, checking to see if the weekly coupon circular was rolled up and stuck into the mailbox, I opened the door to find Fred sitting on my front steps.
Granted, this man looked nothing like my fresh, freckle-faced brother, who was so particular about the back pleat of his Gant shirts being pressed straight, so diligent in polishing his loafers, in making sure that the hem of his khakis came down as far as where the penny went and no farther.
This man was about thirty pounds heavier than the slim boy I remembered and was wearing a green fatigue jacket with dirt ground into it so thoroughly that it gave off a sheen. His hair, not as red as mine but as kinky, was in a matted ponytail, and a beard sprang off his face like copper wiring.
“Hey, Slip,” he said, taking a cigarette out of his mouth with dirty hands.
“Fred!” I said, throwing myself at him so that he almost fell off the steps and into the rhododendron bush.
He laughed, and for a moment I was filled with joy: Laughing Spaniel was back.
HE’D BEEN HERE a week, bunking down in the basement on the pull-out couch, and joy had been an infrequent visitor.
It wasn’t that he was a demanding guest; it was just that he was an omnipresent one, even though he slept until noon and only came upstairs when he was hungry. His uncommunicative and surly presence changed the whole tone of the house.
He played a rambunctious game of tag with the kids the day he got here—Flannery and Joe were screaming with delight and Gil was just screaming—but it didn’t take long for the kids to learn that Uncle Fred only wanted to play when he wanted to play, and that was most often “not now.” Every invitation was pretty much greeted with that same answer. For the first two nights, he did deign to eat with all of us, but he told me the clamor of a family dinner gets on his nerves, and would I mind if he came up after the kids went to bed and ate whatever was left over? I felt like one of those women in the Depression, leaving food out for a visiting hobo. Although a hobo might have been more sociable than Fred; trying to engage him in a conversation was like trying to force someone with laryngitis to scream.
I came to dread the sound of his footsteps on the basement stairs (which I heard for the first time each day after I washed my lunch dishes and sent Gil off for afternoon kindergarten), came to dread the company of the sour, distant man my brother had become.
He said he would be leaving, that he had a war buddy in Detroit who was going to fix him up with a job at General Motors, and I hoped to God he was serious. About leaving, I mean; I didn’t really care about the General Motors job. I felt awful about it, but if there is a season to everything, then that was my season of being a lousy sister. Fred taught me that if you feel sorry for a person and angry at him too, the anger usually overrides the pity.
I didn’t know what to expect when he came lumbering into our book club meeting, where no man had ever dared to tread.
“Ladies, my brother Fred,” I said as he stood scratching his sloppy belly, while inside I screamed, Get out, get out, Fred! Just leave!
Introductions were made, and then I expected Fred to flee (being polite and sociable was not high on his things-to-do list), but, surprising me, he said, “So these are the infamous Angry Housewives. What book are you discussing?”
Audrey exhaled a smoke ring and cocked one eyebrow. “The Total Woman.”
“Oh, I read that book,” said Fred. “Mind if I sit in?”
It took me a while to shut my unhinged mouth. “You read The Total Woman?”
Fred nodded, sitting down on the couch next to Merit. She flinched a little but tried to turn it into a smile.
“On a ride from Boise to Rapid City. With a trucker, no less. He bought a copy for his wife, and it was sitting on the console in his cab.”
“So what did you think?” asked Kari, a twinkle in her blue eyes.
“Why, she was dead-on right, of course,” said Fred.
When the groaning died down, he nodded at the wineglass I held and said, “You mind pouring me one of those, sis?”
“So, Fred,” said Audrey, leaning forward in her hot-pink sundress so that he might wallow in the cavern of her cleavage. “For the amusement of all of us, why don’t you elaborate?”
My brother smiled, and through his mess of red beard and sunken eyes, I saw a glimpse of Laughing Spaniel.
“Well, come on. You girls are always yapping about not having this right or that right, when you already have everything. Men are out in the dog-eat-dog world, having heart attacks while they try to earn just one more promotion so the wifey at home can keep her hair appointment and her ladies’ lunch appointments and her weekly trip to the department store.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Audrey threw a brownie wrapped in cellophane at him. (I wasn’t as good as Faith and Audrey at carrying out a theme, but I must admit, I thought my idea of wrapping all the finger food in cellophane—à la what the author liked to wear to surprise her husband—was a pretty inspired one.)
“Hey, thanks,” said Fred, unwrapping the brownie and putting the whole thing in his mouth.
“You are a male chauvinist pig,” said Audrey.
Chewing the brownie, Fred shook his head. When he spoke, his teeth were brown. “No, just a realist. And please, let’s not stoop to name-calling. Because two can play at that game, you bra-burning man-hating feminist.” He wiped the brownie slime off his teeth with his tongue and smiled.
We all started talking at once.
“Surely you’re not serious,” said Kari.
“Do you really think that?” asked Merit.
“Excuse me,” said Audrey, “I know you’re Slip’s brother and all, but would you like to step outside?”
“You remind me of some of the boys back home,” said Faith.
“Fred,” I said, “is this some sort of a mind game?”
>
It was the last comment he chose to address, after he drained the wineglass and held it out for me to refill.
“You’re right, I’m just messin’ with you,” said Fred, and we all laughed, me the hardest, relieved that he was not, after all, such a pig.
“I hate to tell you, ladies, but I’ve traveled cross country—hell, I’ve been overseas—and what I’ve heard men say about women would first scare the bejesus out of you and then make you lose your lunch. You’ve got to realize that to a lot of men, you’re the enemy, and it does no good when women like this Morgan chick break rank and give more ammunition to the other side.”
“Wise words for such a young man,” said Audrey.
“Thank you,” said Fred, and I saw his eyes linger for a moment on Audrey’s chest. “Might I bother you for a cigarette?”
“Be my guest,” said Audrey, handing him an Eve, her new brand.
“You expect me to smoke a cigarette with flowers on it?” said Fred.
“Real men aren’t afraid to take walks on the other side,” said Audrey, leaning over to light his cigarette.
Fred sat up straighter, and I thought I saw a slight flush rise above his beard. It bugs me that Audrey needs to bring a little seduction into every interaction she has with men, but I appreciated it now, because Fred appreciated it, was responding to it.
“I would imagine any family that had Slip in it would be a feminist family,” said Kari.
Fred exhaled a thin stream of smoke, considering this.
“Well, she wasn’t really into equality,” he said. “She made sure we knew she was our superior. And I tell you, when she beat my dad at arm wrestling, it wasn’t hard to believe her.”
“He probably let me win,” I said, suddenly feeling shy.
“She’s being modest,” said Fred to the others. “For a change.”
His second glass of wine was nearly empty, and he held it out for a refill.
“I’m all out,” I said. It was the first time I had served wine instead of cocktails at a meeting, and I hadn’t known how much to buy.