More Than Enough (17 page)

I looked over at my mother and saw a magnified slice of her mouth in the makeup mirror. She snapped it shut. “I'm sorry if Nurse Brown was hard on you two. She is a very unhappy woman. Some people are just unhappy, and they don't know how to be anything else.” The way she said that, I understood that my mother was determined not to be one of them. That's what all this was about.

“I didn't mind Nurse Brown,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “I'm glad my kids know how to get along. Getting along is important.” She looked over at me and glanced back at Jenny and said, “I guess you've figured out that we're going to see Curtis now?”

“No,” I said. “You guessed wrong.”

“Well, we are,” she said in a that's-the-way-it's-going-to-be tone of voice.

“You did that old woman's hair,” I said.

“Excuse me.”

“Didn't she, Jenny?”

Jenny was in the backseat staring out a peephole she'd made in the fogged-up window. “I don't know,” she said.

“You do too know.”

“I don't know anything. Don't ask me anything.”

“You pulled it back and did it just like you do Jenny's hair.” I couldn't suppress a tone of viciousness. “That crazy old woman.”

“She's senile, Steven. Anyway, it used to be a part of my job to take care of Evelyn.”

“Evelyn,” I said.

“Steven hurt her,” Jenny said then. “Steven made her cry.”

I looked back at Jenny, amazed by what she had just said. I didn't understand. “Whose side are you on?”

“I'm not on any side,” she said. “You're different. You're not who you usually are.”

“Whose stupid side are you on?”

“What?” my mother asked. “What are you saying?”

I no longer cared. I really didn't. “I hurt her. I pulled her pretty hair out. I pulled it until she cried.”

My mother did something then that she hadn't done in years. She pulled the car over, lifted her hand, and was about to slap me when I reached up and grabbed her wrist and held it in my good hand. Even with one arm in a sling, I was stronger than she was, physically stronger, and I saw this fact for the first time and it was something I'd rather not have seen. I'd been her little boy for so long, I'd been the one who needed to be protected and kept. But in that instant, I had become something else.

“Let go of me,” she said. I heard the fear in her voice, and out of something more than shame, out of fear, too, I let go.

She drove for a while without speaking. We were cruising through the neighborhoods around Liberty Park on a weekday in the early evening, and the houses were quiet and closed up for the most part. A few people stood out on their porches looking at the rainy sky divided between light and dark, the fleshy pink underbellies of storm clouds on one side and the setting sun on the other. She finally looked at me, a slab of brightness on her face, and said, “You need more punishment than I can give you.” She actually said that, and I knew how she felt since I also believed that she needed to be punished, severely punished, but I didn't know how to do it. Physical strength couldn't do it. I just didn't know how to hurt her as much as she was hurting me.

“I want to know everything that happened back there,” she said. “I want to know why you are dressed in those pajamas. I want to know what you have in that garbage bag. Well,” she said, “go ahead.”

I sat stiffly looking out the window. “No.”

“I think I know,” Jenny said.

“You don't know,” I said.

“I think he messed his pants,” Jenny said.

“No,” I said, though I had sunk down in my seat and was cradling my hurt arm in my good one so that my whole body was an admission of guilt.

My mother was perplexed. “What?”

“No,” I said, “No, no, no.”

“His dirty clothes are probably in that bag,” Jenny said.

I grabbed the bag and put it on my lap and held on to it. I felt like a two-year-old. I felt like I had no secrets from anyone. “Leave me alone,” I said. “I got lost in Oak Groves. It's a terrible place. It really is.”

“Yes,” my mother said. Her voice was soft. “It is. I know.”

“I got lost and went into the room where Mr. Warner … Colonel Warner was on a table and Nurse Brown found me there. She thought I had been putting clothes on Colonel Warner's body. She thought I'd been playing around with him. She really thought that. But I hadn't done anything. I never could have touched him. He scared me. Then I had to clean myself up.”

“Okay,” my mother said. She put her hand on the back my of head and ran her fingers softly through my hair.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“You don't need to be sorry.”

I looked around me at the Buick, the old spacious car that my father had bought from a redheaded old lady who had been a schoolteacher and who had fed us vegetables from her garden when we came over to pick it up for a much better price than we should have gotten. A terrible thought came to me. “Are you going to take the Buick?” I asked. That question made me feel unbearably sad.

She looked around at the car. “I suppose the least I could do is let your father have it. He found it. It was a good find.”

“See,” I said, “he can do things.”

I knew that she was sad, too, because she started crying the way women often cry, subtly, without any mess. I thought maybe this was my chance to change what was seeming more and more inevitable. So I said, “What else are you going to take?”

“I wish you two would stop crying,” Jenny said, even though it was just my mother who was crying. She wasn't looking at us, and she certainly wasn't crying. She was just staring out her window.

“I'm sorry,” my mother said. “Maybe I'm doing all of this too fast. You just have to make decisions sometimes. You just have to.” She was wiping her eyes. “Anyway, it's you two we need to think about, not me. I've already made my decision.” I didn't know what the hell she was talking about. “You're going to like Curtis's house. We're pretty sure all you kids will get along. It's your choice, of course. But you should realize that if you stay with your father, you'll just end up taking care of him. I know him, and so do you. That's what happened to me, didn't it? I had to take care of him, and it took every last drop of life out of me. Then you had to take care of me, and you had to take care of Jenny, too.”

“I didn't have to take care of Jenny.”

“He didn't have to take care of me,” Jenny said.

“You had to make sure she did her homework. You had to make sure she came home from school every day by a certain time. You had to tutor her in reading. You shouldn't have had to do that. One of us should have done that. You should've been off being a kid.”

“I was,” I said. “I was off being a kid.”

“No,” my mother said. “You weren't. You aren't. You're not happy. None of us is happy.”

“I'm happy,” Jenny said loudly.

“Shut up!” I shouted.

“This is not happy,” my mother said, shaking her head and looking hard at the road. “I deserve to be happy. My kids deserve to be happy.”

“Fuck happy,” I said. “Who cares about happy?”

“Steven,” my mother warned. Then she said, “I'm sorry that you've had to take on so much more than you should have to.”

“Don't be sorry,” I said.

“Well, I have been sorry. I really have been. But a person has to stop feeling sorry eventually and make some decisions.” She dug in her purse for some cigarettes, but they were all gone. So she tossed the empty pack down and began to take advantage of the fact that I was now bawling like a stupid three-year-old, loud and snotty, so hard I couldn't breathe. “I love you, you know,” she said. “More than anything.”

“Don't say that,” I said. I couldn't get through the tears. They just kept coming, even though I wanted my anger back. At least anger seemed to promise a solution, some way of making the world be what you wanted it to be, even if that meant hurting people.

She pulled me in to her and held me. “You're going to like Curtis's house. I know you will.”

“No,” I said.

“You will.”

“Please be quiet now. Please don't say anything else.” She let go of me and just drove. I sniffled, trying to get some air, and looked through my tears at the lower Avenues. The Avenues were the largest and oldest neighborhoods in Salt Lake City, built over the hills and foothills south of the Downs. On the lower Avenues, packed tightly together in rows, were large and medium-size colonial, postcolonial, and Victorian homes, some of them poorly kept up with peeling paint and dead yards and weedy gardens. But higher up, as was the case everywhere in the Salt Lake Valley, the newer, larger houses rose out of the steep slopes like small fortresses of glass. The huge windows of these houses, my father had often explained to Jenny and me, enhanced the owner's enjoyment of the city view below. He called it a million-dollar view and claimed that this view would be one among many amenities of the luxury home my family would soon own. I'd sometimes imagine us—Jenny, me, my father and mother—all sitting together, as almost never happened then, in our future living room, a ghostly space, which I could picture only vaguely, furnished with cream-colored sofas and armchairs. The carpet was also white, as were the drapes, everything white, not as that nightmare Oak Groves had been white, but a softer shade, not blank, not blinding, but a gentle, glowing, barely real white. It would be just before dark, and we'd be sitting in front of an epically large window with the city at our feet beginning to shatter into separate points of light, and just beyond it the long pink-purple smear of sunset melting to a velvet sheet of evening. Very pretty, a perfect picture, except that I hardly knew what we'd be doing with ourselves. Maybe we'd be eating black olives out of porcelain bowls and crackers smeared with whatever—salmon paste, fish eggs, goose liver—all that stuff we'd tried and hated, thrown away a few weeks before when we'd had the money to buy it on account of my arm. Only in this soft, white living room, we'd love it, we'd eat it up, and might have licked our fingers had we not known better and wiped them with cloth napkins instead. Maybe my father and mother would be playing a game of chess with marble chess pieces and a marble board, drinking red wine from wineglasses, carefully eyeing the board and being considerate, delicate, losing or winning with grace in a way that Mr. Alan at Oak Groves had not even been able to do with just himself. From time to time they would look at each other with some quiet, unspoken message, or out the window at the glittering dark of the city below or over at Jenny and me, who would also be nice as could be to each other as we played backgammon, even though we'd never played that game, just as my parents had never played chess, and didn't know the rules. There it was, all the same: we were all happy in our white room with evening coming on. For some reason, Noir wasn't there. I just couldn't place him in that picture. He hated to have to behave himself. He hated to be shut into a room where he couldn't chew on and rip apart anything he wanted to. So maybe he was out in his backyard, unchained, licking himself or killing a rodent or looking up at the birds and fantasizing about somehow reaching them, hunting them down in their sky, or maybe he was just sleeping, his head between his paws, sleeping and dreaming a dream that was probably a hell of a lot nicer than mine. Noir was secretive and without ambitions, the way animals are, so no doubt his dreams were different in ways that I could not begin to imagine. I guess even then I suspected that mine had been empty and that even my dog with his simple and very real appetites could have outdreamed me. Or maybe I didn't know that yet, maybe I had not even begun to guess it.

“I'm happy,” Jenny said quietly from the backseat, though her voice hardly sounded happy. It was small and tired and weak, and I half wanted her to intone the Commandments just to hear that strength in her voice again. “I don't care what you say, I'm happy. I've always been happy.” Then she turned around and put her forehead against her fogged-up, rain-speckled window. No one said anything for a while. We just drove through that strange, bright evening rainstorm. I must have been pretty tired, because my eyes wanted to shut, and I had to strain to keep them open. The soft roar of the heater blowing warm air made me want to curl into myself and sleep. But I knew I had better not do that, even though I did doze off a little for about fifteen seconds or so. I remember the thought of that bum's beautiful voice humming “Stormy Weather” and a tree or two rushing by in a golden-blue, silver-streaked sky that was not the one outside our car window but the one I had seen in Jenny's beautiful farmyard picture and that had somehow gotten into my soft, groggy mind. “Hey,” Jenny shouted. I woke then and looked out at a different sky—still red from evening and drizzling. “That's him. That's Dad.” She was pointing out the back window at a yellow taxicab with a man—it was our father—sticking his head out the back window, his long hair ragged and blowing in the wind. He waved a fist and shouted something I couldn't hear. Then I did hear it. “Stop! Stop! Stop!” I don't know how he had found us, except that our old seaweed green Buick was pretty easy to pick out anywhere.

“Jesus,” my mother said. She didn't slow down. She just kept driving as if he weren't behind us. “How does he know where we are?”

“I called him,” I said. “Somebody had to call him.”

“Oh,” she said. She sat back in her seat and released the gas and came to a gradual stop at the curb. “I guess there's no point in not doing this now. We might as well get it over with.”

“What?” I asked. “Do what now?”

“I'm sorry that you were the one to tell him, Steven. You shouldn't have had to do that. I should have done that.” There was something chilly in her voice, something I didn't like the sound of at all. “You two might want to stay in the car.”