High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (18 page)

He tried to open the bathroom door one morning while I was getting out of the shower. No knocking, nothing, he just entered. I threw myself at the door, and it closed on his arm.

He screamed. Slammed it open. I was naked.

He was wearing a small towel, barely covering him. His hair was wet, his skin wet and ruddy. Red marks on his arms and collarbones from what looked like a vicious scrub. “Seven times,” he said, and turned, leaving the door open behind him. I moved to close it—he stopped me. He stopped the door. I grabbed his arm and I pulled him back into the bathroom. It was so easy, I remember thinking, He’s so light!

I pushed him into the clothes hamper, and stood over him.

He was stunned.

He was naked now, his towel fallen to the floor. I wrapped a large bath towel around my own waist, covered myself, and left the room.

He passionately explained to me over dinner one night that
his
baptism,
my
baptism, and
Mom’s
baptism—the original ones, mind you—were false, insufficient in the eyes of God.

“They lack commitment,” he said.

We were sitting at the dining room table eating takeout Chinese food, passing the greasy cartons back and forth. Spooning onto our plates. Mom was quiet.

Dad said, “A sprinkling! Ha!” He was laughing; rice fell from his mouth as he talked. “Baby’s getting baptized! Ha! And these grown-ups dunking their heads underwater. In a swimming pool! How very nice and casual. Ida?” he said. “What can I get for you?”

Mom shook her head: Nothing, thank you. Her head was wrapped in a floral silken cloth.

“This is how you were baptized,” he said. “Josiah. You listening?”

I looked away from Mom, and said, “What?”

“Can you believe it?” He couldn’t stop laughing. “We’re supposed to take this seriously? You were baptized in a swimming pool. Above ground! I doubt you were underwater more than half a second.”

I reached for a carton. Dad helped.

He went on to explain that the original baptismal command required full immersion. We
died
in that water, were buried underneath and not breathing, which took more than half a second, you bet. Only to be resurrected upon ascension from a symbolic and watery grave. He was positive this should be done every day.

“Every day,” he said, “we live and die in the Lord.”

Mom was hardly eating at all.

One Sunday, I watched her help him distribute pamphlets in our neighborhood, brightly colored Xeroxes announcing “The End Is Near,” rolled into tight tubes piercing the diamond mesh of chain-link fences. She walked slowly, with a walking stick now. But when the overlarge drunk guy from three houses down cursed at Dad from his porch, when he rushed at Dad and pushed him into the hedges, and when he then tried to put my father in a headlock, it was Mom who hit him back. Hard. She scratched at the big man’s neck. She scratched and punched at the skin showing where his shirt pulled open, and she pulled my father away. She swung her walking stick. It all happened so fast that when I ran over to help, the big man had already fallen back on his yellowing grass. Dad’s pamphlet was in a ball beside him. In the kitchen, I watched her scrub blood from underneath her nails. Nobody ever mentioned what happened.

Bhanu and I often talked about what we would do now that we were out of high school. I wanted to move out as soon as possible, and so did she, but we both knew we were too young to get married. And then in July of 1987, Bhanu went to her cousin’s house upstate for part of the summer. When she left she was wearing jean shorts and a white T-shirt that said “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?” And one day there, while visiting neighbors, she dove into a swimming pool and she hit her head on the hard concrete bottom. Either nobody else was there, or nobody was watching, but either way, at nineteen, she drowned and that was it.

I don’t think I cried, not for a long time, anyway. I went to the funeral. Mom and Dad supported this, it was too serious a thing not to. Mom even sent me to get flowers, and told me to say they were from them. I laid them there on a chair at the funeral home without telling anyone who they were from. I walked up to the front of the room, not really prepared for what was happening. I’d never seen a body before. Bhanu was there, looking fast asleep, and peaceful, and I was weirdly pleased just to see her there. I kissed her mother’s forehead, and saw after, in the restroom mirror, there was a red stain on my lips from her bindhi. I went home and kissed my mother’s cheek and I swore I could taste the dormant death cells of her skin.

*   *   *

Bhanu’s accident gave Dad a sense of hope, I think, about me. They had lost me to her, and the accident was a tragedy, yes, he said, “But this is an opportunity for the three of us to get back to how things used to be. We can regroup. As a family.” We were at the dinner table, always at the dinner table, one of the few times of day Mom would leave her room. I don’t remember what we were eating that night, probably takeout again.

Dad said, “I have an announcement to make.”

My stomach tightened. I tried not to show any physical response. Mom said nothing.

He could hardly contain himself anymore. He was fidgeting in his seat.

“Well?” I said.

He said, “Not yet.”

I looked at Mom. Her eyes didn’t say much of anything. I looked back to Dad. “What do you mean, ‘Not yet’?” He was practically bouncing in his seat.

“Wait,” he said. He stood up, and walked over to where I was sitting, put his hands on my shoulders. Rubbed, squeezed. “Give me a second,” he said.

He walked over to the window, looked out. Walked over to Mom, stood behind her. She stayed still. I’d been holding my fork in the air all this time. I set it down.

“What?” I said.

He started unraveling the cloth on Mom’s head. She tried to stop him, took hold of him by the wrists. But he kept unraveling. He took off the cloth. She sat there, bald-headed. He grabbed her head, hands over her ears, and began kissing her head, here, there, everywhere, kissing her. He threw the cloth against the wall, laughing, “Haha!” He walked back to my side of the table, and then on into the living room, mumbling, and saying things louder. We couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“We’ll do it here. Right here,” he kept saying. “Right here.” He walked back into the dining room and tried to sit, could hardly contain himself. He stood again, this time with a food carton in his hands. He ate from it, pacing back and forth, dining room to living room, in and out of the kitchen. Sometimes over to Mom, to kiss her head, or grab her head and kiss it. She stayed still. Her head cloth lay on the floor in a crumple. I watched it all as if I weren’t there, as if, if I stayed still enough, he wouldn’t see me. He paced, ate, and paced. Set the carton down. Picked it up again, pacing back to the table.

“We’ll do it here, do it here, do it here…” He was sweating.

At some point that evening I picked up Mom’s head cloth and gave it back to her. Dad’s pacing and mumbling had moved to other rooms. Upstairs. At one point, he stood in the bathroom beneath the stairs and scrubbed at his face, looking in the mirror, and calling out the numbers one through seven. Mom went to bed. I started cleaning up the dinner table just as Dad sat back down. He was saying, “Leave it, leave it, leave it…” He had a notebook, and started writing in very small script. It looked like he was making a list.

Dad had decided he was starting his own church, at home. He’d received a revelation.

He said, “We’ll invite everyone we knew from the Brothers in the Lord congregation.”

He was making a list of names.

“And the neighbors.” He asked me to get him a glass of water. I did. “And you’ll give the very first sermon.”

He probably assumed that if he could tell the old brothers and sisters from church that I was giving the sermon they’d simply have to attend. According to him, they had been eagerly awaiting my return. I don’t know where he got this information. The idea seemed silly to me, even then.

He looked up at me, sipping water, his face glowing. “You’ll do it?”

I didn’t answer. I think he took this for a yes. But it didn’t matter. Nobody came.

We sat there at the table next week, suit and tie. Mom in a dress. A stack of bagels. Cream cheese. He’d moved the table as far back to the wall and windows as he could, and set up a makeshift podium for me, a tall and slender chest of drawers he brought from his bedroom. He had called everybody, he said. Left messages. Told them it was “imperative” they attend.

We sat there for two hours. Silent. Until Dad suddenly left the room, the house. We heard the car start. Mom insisted she help me move back the furniture. We put the bagels in a paper bag.

Would I have spoken? I never thought about it, what I would do if anyone showed.

That night, at dinner, Dad informed us he’d received a brand-new revelation, a shower was no longer sufficient and I must swear to bathe myself, fully immerse my body underwater, at rise and fall, to keep the house and my mother’s body clean. For me, this was too much to ask. The request was just too intimate. For the first time in my life, death was suddenly a worthy adversary, something worth fighting against, not something to be washed, or massaged, or colored with fear or fantasy.

A year went by before I could leave and afford an apartment of my own. I had a job at a Radio Shack and I finally cried for my girlfriend. A few years passed before I gave my savings to a coworker who had been developing what seemed a good idea for a video game. We got lucky. And before long, I was living in the future. When did that happen, exactly? Life was about what comes, and this was a frightening time for me because you cannot ever really know what is coming, no matter what, not the hour or the day. I was suddenly hanging out there like a leaf about to fall. But I was getting more and more okay with the idea of falling; everything that ever made me afraid started sloughing off like scales. One by one. Then I started picking them off.

I went to work one day at Radio Shack suddenly filled with the feeling that I was no longer a Laudermilk, which was thrilling and scary as hell. I gave my notice and decided to make a longish bet on my future. I would take my cash and move to California, where computer electronics meant more money, the magazines said, and because it seemed so far away.

Finally, one Sunday (always a Sunday!), I went home to say goodbye. I found Mom sitting in the kitchen, at the table, and she was sipping Lipton tea with milk. Her hat on the table beside her. Her white head like a bright pearl doorknob. The blinds were louvered almost closed, the atmosphere of the room more like evening than the midday outside. She wore her blue slippers, her robe. I would be leaving New York in the morning.

She said, “Come over here.”

I put my hand on her shoulder, picked at the pilling of her robe. The tea was half finished, so I turned and took the pot from the stove and poured more water in her cup. I said, “I’ll be back soon to tell you all about it.”

She patted my hand. It was on her shoulder again.

“And we’ll talk on the phone,” I said. “It’s just a matter of making a living, and nothing else. You know that. This isn’t the place for what I’m planning. California is the place for what I’m doing.”

“You could just go to Florida, open a store. Not so far away. Or upstate,” she said. I tried to respond, but she stopped me, and said, “I shouldn’t say that. Don’t listen.”

“Josiah!” Dad shouted from upstairs. “Is that you?”

Mom looked up at me. She put both hands on my hand, and squeezed my hand. Her eyes were so very anxious. “You know that I want you to go, don’t you? You know I am not your father.”

“It’s gonna be fine,” I said. “I promise. And the moment you don’t feel good, you call me. I’ll jump right on a plane.”

Dad’s footsteps were on the stairs. “Josiah?”

Mom pulled at me weakly. I crouched down and we looked at each other face to face. My God, I came from
inside
this woman. Life was inside her, my life, and her life, and the very void I came from. Her cells would rise up and kill her, the second time around.

Dad’s footsteps were in the hall. “Josiah?”

I took her face in my hands, pulled her close, and kissed her head.

“Up,” she said. “Before your father—”

I shot up at the sound of his steps in the kitchen.

“So,” he said. “A big day for the big shot.”

A shadow, probably of some cloud, or of a passing plane, must have fallen over the house as the light gave way to dark through the blinds. The three of us stayed quiet, waiting for the daylight to right itself, because it always does. The next morning, I left for California, a brand-new millennium inching over the horizon.

It was high time for inventory: and what lovely things can I say of that storeroom? Not much. Then again, how was it that a room a third the size of all of Otter Computer contained so many things, more than the rest of the store combined? Boxes on shelves, on tables, on the floor—where was the floor? I could barely see it. I remembered painting the floor when we first moved in, a slate gray color, and we even tried to get fancy. We started painting decorative yellow caution lines around the shelves. They were tall shelves. But we abandoned the idea halfway. Who was ever back there, anyway, but us? Plus, business got busy so fast—back in the beginning, I mean—that we never got around to finishing. A good problem to have. But now we had plenty of time, a good thing, too, because it would take all day.

The storeroom was a mess. Rubber storage bins bursting with unwieldy spools of wiring, tools new and rusting, plastic tabs and drive plates removed from system cases, packages of nonscuff floor pads, of batteries and power cords. The cases themselves, desktops, large, small, and huge, arranged along the floor, against the wall, like VCRs tipped on their sides. And monitors! The dinosaur parts of the ’90s and early 2000s. Because they took up so much space. Like a television showroom in there, but stacked (of course, everything stacked), and precariously balanced on top of one another, 13-inch, 15-inch, 20-inch screens. Some were missing glass altogether, looking like cubbyholes for shoes. Screens were cracked, even shattered, broken shards protruding from the sides like teeth. My God, there was so much media, too. Zip discs, floppies, and compact discs. Bags of magnetic tapes. And the drives for each and every one, floppy drives and hard drives, the all of a sudden everywhere CD-ROM. And of course the boxes, so many boxes—of brand-new products, or broken products, or wrong products waiting for RMA return authorization stickers from distributors so we could hopefully, let us pray, get our money back. Laptops piled like impenetrable textbooks. Keyboards piled high like delicate rectangular plates. Green translucent motherboards like slices of vegetative earth, freeze-dried for science and posterity. And not just the current, but the past, the long and recently dead stuff mercilessly mined for parts, from manufacturers who had long ago disavowed their products. It was overwhelming, gloomy, and cold.