“Mmmm, good,” I said, biting my toast and realizing I had no appetite. I had a picture in my mind of Raymond standing in the hospital room looking afraid, holding the ceramic rabbit. The ivy plant had died almost immediately. I had no idea what I’d done with the bunny vase. Then I had another picture of Jason the week before, standing on the rocker in front of the window looking down the street for his father, who never showed. Jason’s father was a liar and a junkie.
I handed Jason his plastic cup of juice. He took a sip, his eyes watering, and handed the cup back. It became crystal clear. Raymond was going to Vietnam for the heroin, the abundant, pure, and cheap heroin. He wasn’t going to Vietnam to defend his country and avenge Bobby’s death. He was going there because it was easier than staying here. Besides, who knew with Raymond. It could’ve all been a ploy to get me feeling sorry for him, to get me to open my arms and say, Don’t go. Come back. I called Raymond up.
“Raymond,” I said. “I’ve been thinking. If you go to Vietnam, Jason’ll be almost three when you return. He won’t remember you.”
“That’s true.”
“What if I said to you I decided to go live in California for a year and a half, and just assumed you’d take care of Jason?”
“That’s different.”
“No it’s not. You can’t just leave him for me to take care of.”
“I’m going to defend my country.”
“Bullshit. You’re going so you can afford to be a junkie.”
There was silence on the line.
Jason crammed the last strip of toast in his mouth and said, “More.” I gave him mine. “Raymond, you have a son. I’ve been thinking. Either you stay and make up your mind that you’re taking responsibility for Jason, or you give him up. Don’t come back after Vietnam.”
“He’d probably be better off.”
I didn’t disagree.
“You know me. I’m a fuck-up. I’m as bad as my old man.”
“So you’re giving him up.”
“He’ll be better off.”
“I got to go.”
I wiped Jason’s face and his sticky fingers with a washcloth, then released him from the high chair. He went to the cardboard box filled with toys in the living room. I watched him as he dug through the box and came up with a golf ball, which he rolled to me.
I’d read up on kids of divorced parents and how they tended to think they drove the deserting parent away. I would be sure to tell Jason it wasn’t his fault. I’d tell him his father and I had fights and didn’t get along. I would not make Raymond into a bad person. I’d tell Jason his father wanted to go fight for his country. I’d tell him his father was brave. I could even tell him his father died and that’s why he never came back. But that would definitely be a mistake. Jason may have inherited his father’s lying genes, and I’d better set a good example. Raymond’s mother had told me that Raymond’s father was the same as Raymond, lying for the pleasure of it. I’d rather have Jason turn into a drooling idiot. I’d tell Jason the truth about all things. I’d tell Jason his father was a drug addict who couldn’t help himself. I’d tell Jason the way things really are, so life wouldn’t slap him in the face when he grew up. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if I’d even let him believe in Santa Claus.
Jason was quiet by the toy box for a minute, then I got a whiff and knew it was time to change his diaper. That made me picture a scene. It was from when Jason was an infant. Every evening when Raymond came home, the three of us would eat dinner, then Raymond would take off Jason’s clothes and dip him in the kitchen sink for a bath. Sometimes I’d sit at the table, smoke a cigarette, and watch. I was mesmerized by the gentleness of Raymond’s hands as they cupped water and released it over Jason’s shining wet body. Sometimes I’d wonder what it must be like for Jason to feel the largeness of his father’s hands and the sureness as they supported his back.
My mother walked in then. I hadn’t even heard her car pull up. “P.U.,” she said. “Somebody stinks.”
Jason laughed and made a game of running away.
“Oh no you don‘t,” she said, dropping her pocketbook onto the couch and grabbing him. She rinsed out the washcloth, with Jason on her hip, soaped it up, then laid Jason down on the floor for a diaper change.
“So, what were you doing?” my mother said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking.”
“Better not think too much,” she said. “Your hair’ll turn gray.”
CHAPTER 8
RAYMOND wrote me letters that I threw away without reading, until the one that made an even dozen. In it he’d enclosed a snapshot of himself passed out on a bed, with a hundred beer cans and empty liquor bottles jumbled on the shelves above him. His shirt was bunched up at his armpits, and his arm, displaying a tattoo of a devil holding a pitchfork, was draped across his bare belly. I guess this was his idea of sexy. He wrote, “I just saw
Love Story.
I am Oliver and you are my Jenny. I’ve lost you.” Did he think we had this great love fit for books and movies, a tragedy to make millions weep, when I, the heroine, hadn’t shed a tear since the night I pictured him floun dering in a rice paddy? I ended his illusion by writing to him a few hateful words: “I don’t now, never did, and never could love you, so do me a favor and forget I ever existed.” Then I marched to the middle of the driveway and in a gouge in the asphalt made a pyre of his picture and letter.
The only thing I thought about marriage after that was, Never in a million years, not for a billion dollars, and never again if it kills me.
Then it was a year since Raymond deserted us, the close of the summer of 1971. Jason was about to be three, and a few days later I’d be twenty-one, drinking age, voting age, and a legal adult. I was at a picnic in Beatrice’s backyard with Jason and Fay, her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Amelia, and a bunch of Beatrice’s friends from work. Fay and I’d had a plan. We’d split a hit of acid, then once we got to Beatrice’s all-girls picnic, all the girls would take care of our two kids. Problem was, we didn’t let Beatrice and her friends in on the plan and they were too dense to pick up on it. First of all, they had no idea we were tripping, because they’d never tripped themselves and wouldn’t know a tripping person from a lunatic, which is probably what they thought we were. And second of all, they just didn’t understand. This was our logic: Fay and I had gotten knocked up, which made us the scapegoats or fall guys. In other words, if it hadn’t been us it would’ve been them, so the least they could do was take up some slack by easing our kids off our backs during one measly picnic. No such luck.
So I’m lying on my back in Beatrice’s parents’ aluminum pool and I’m tripping peacefully, listening to the trees talk to me in a language I’m sure I’d understand if only I could concentrate harder. But then here comes somebody handing me my son. By the blinding orange of her bikini, I know it’s Beatrice. She says, “Somebody wants to swim with his mommy.”
Couldn’t she tell somebody didn’t want to swim with her son? But she’s dangling him over the water, so I reach out to get him and he slips through my fingers and underwater. I catch him just after his face goes under, but he starts crying hysterically anyway, spitting and coughing and making me feel awful. Now I understand every word from the trees. They’re saying: You’re a terrible mother. You almost drowned your son. He’ll remember this moment forever.
I hugged Jason and bounced him around the pool to distract him. When we climbed out, I lay on my back and Jason sat on my stomach. His head was ringed by the sun, and for a minute I thought it was a halo, but then a cloud obscured the vision and I concentrated on his face. He had three freckles on his nose and blue-gray eyes that were shaped like almonds. Did Raymond have eyes shaped like almonds too? I closed my eyes to change the subject, and what I saw was the Blessed Virgin standing on a world with the infant Jesus perched in the crook of her arm, like on a plastic card, and that’s when I remembered about my mother. She said she almost drowned when she was little, even went down for the third time, but then she saw the Virgin Mary holding out her arms, and the next thing she knew she was lying in the sand, saved.
Jason had had a vision too, of an old lady floating outside his window, trying to get in. He was afraid of her. I told him she was probably a fairy.
“She’s too old,” he said.
“Not for a guardian angel. It’s probably my great-grandmother Irene dropping by to give you good luck.”
“You think so?”
“Sure.”
My great-grandmother Irene was on my mind a lot these days, because every time I turned around, my mother was saying, “I don’t know who you take after. Not
my
family. It must be your father’s grandmother Irene.” Personally, I took this as a compliment, but although my mother liked Irene, she meant it as an insult, because Irene had committed the cardinal sin of Neglecting Her Children. Irene, too, escaped from her house every chance she got. She liked to walk around the neighborhood stopping here for a cup of coffee or there to check out some other Italian immigrant who’d just landed on her block. Her favorite thing in the world was the movies, and she went every chance she got. This made her husband—who traveled around the country shooting off fireworks—furious, especially since she left her house a mess and her kids running wild. So, the story goes, one day he loaded the dirty dishes into his wheelbarrow, then pushed it straight down the center aisle of Wilkinson’s Theater, to shame her. My story goes that when she saw him, she burst out laughing.
Irene’s story does not have a happy ending, though. By the time I met her, her husband was dead and she’d squandered all her money, had no house, no teeth, and was a pauper. She lived with various nieces and nephews but refused to live with her own kids—maybe because she didn’t like them, maybe because they tried to boss her around and trap her behind four walls. Meanwhile, my father had just become a cop, driving in his cruiser, and never did a week go by without his seeing his grandmother, dressed in black, her white hair darting from her head like dandelion spores, looking like a witch wandering on the edge of town near some cornfield or cow pasture. He’d stop to ask her if she wanted a ride, but she always refused it. Now, this was his grandmother, so he couldn’t order, “Get in,” like he could with me. So what he did instead—the day after he spied her at Woolworth’s trying on glasses and squinting at a popcorn sign—was order a powwow with his mother and his aunts and uncles, who decided the only thing was a nursing home. When they checked her in, she refused to give up her shoes. When she died three months later, they found them hidden beneath her pillow.
I sometimes wondered, given the authority, if my father would stick me in an institution too. Especially since he’d reverted to his old trick of stalking me. Like I said, this was 1971. I was a hippie. I wore no bra, walked barefoot, had sex indiscriminately, plus I hitchhiked and went shoplifting with Jason. My son was the prefect lure for rides (who could refuse a white-haired three-year-old standing in a gutter next to his mother and sticking out his thumb?) and the best decoy for shoplifting (all I had to do was let him run wild in a store and the ladies were so riveted on his grubby little hands they never even noticed me, except to shoot dirty looks that meant, Will you please control your child, you stupid hippie). Probably, there were times my father and his buddies saw me sitting on the lawn of Robert Early Junior High staring at a fluorescent light thinking it was a television. Certainly, they kept track of the multitude of cars that spent the night in my driveway, not to mention the various men who drove them. I wonder if they could distinguish which guy was for Fay and which for me.
Fay and I had no problem keeping track, because we had a list stuck behind a picture of an onion skin Fay had painted and hung on the wall. Fay and Amelia had moved in with me and Jase in the springtime, after Fay had found a pair of bikini underpants in the backseat of her car and surmised, correctly, that her husband was an adulterer. So she drove up from Pennsylvania in her yellow Dodge, dragging half her furniture behind her, and moved in. We’d thrown my old Flintstone furniture out and moved her beautiful furniture in before she’d painted the picture of the onion skin. We didn’t know yet that we’d have a list to hang behind it. That started about a month after she’d moved in.
We’d been driving around town with our kids, really happy. True, we both had failed marriages. True, we were both on welfare. True, we had little kids keeping us from hitchhiking to California or through Europe, joining a commune, and about a million other things we could be doing in the world, but here we were, best girlfriends living together with our kids. It was like a dream come true. One of my fantasies as a kid was that my best friend Donna and I and our Betsy Wetsies were living together because it was wartime and our husands were off fighting. Then we’d get a telegram saying our husbands had been blown to smithereens, which meant the two of us could live together forever if we wanted. Well, that’s what it felt like now. We cruised around town, Jase and Amelia singing the ABC song over and over till we finally yelled, “Shut up, you little rodents!” then they bounced around the car laughing and bumping their heads on the ceiling, until they settled into their customary positions: heads out windows like dogs. Meanwhile, Fay and I hunted for wildflowers, which we picked by the bucketful, and cute guys, mostly in sports cars. When we saw one of them approaching, we’d say, “Wave, kids!” which they did like windup dolls.
Then it was dusk of a paralyzingly hot day. We’d just gotten ice cream cones for the kids and were driving around a part of town that was strange to us, the part of town where great aluminum sheds loomed near factories with smokestacks, at ends of streets with old shingled houses and forlorn-looking bushes. And there, in the distance, we saw a cluster of those same sports cars parked by a ballpark.
We recognized a couple of guys. They were on the Italian Club team, which was playing the Elks team. The Italian Club guys wore jeans. Bandanna headbands dammed the sweat on their foreheads and kept their long hair out of their faces. They smoked cigarettes in the outfield and clenched them between their teeth to make catches. They pranced around the bases instead of running when they hit homers. Some of these guys were the same boys who drove by me and Donna when we had sat under the tree, sticking our chins in the air, waiting for Denny Winters. I knew their names from my brother’s yearbooks. They were older than us by three or four years. They were the type of gone-by hoods who stole hubcaps and had fights with chains and bricks in high school. Only now they were hippies. “Far out,” I said to Fay. “Groovy,” Fay said to me.