“That’s like Beverly. You were the best baby. Never a peep. Loved to sleep. You’re lucky Jason’s like that. You don’t know. Your brother—up every night. I didn’t mind, though. You get attached. Wait. You’ll see.”
One day, around the same time I first smelled winter in the air, I sat at the table with my mother and aunt and Jason, who was in his little seat on top of the table. I watched my aunt’s fat fingers roll a cake crumb on her plate and couldn’t take them another minute. I stood up and said, “I’m bringing Jason to the library.”
“You can‘t,” my mother said. “You can’t take a baby in public until he’s had all his shots.”
“You said I could after six weeks. I’m going crazy.”
“Then you go. I’ll watch him.”
“No.”
“You can’t take him, and that’s the end of it.”
“He’s
my baby.”
“It’s awfully breezy,” my aunt said. “Might be hard to catch his breath.” She shrugged and bit her lips.
I ignored her, put a jacket and bonnet on Jason, then made a triangle out of a blanket and wrapped him up.
At the library, I checked out
David Copperfield,
and when I returned, my mother had lost her stand as big chief the baby expert. I invited my girlfriends over every night. Virginia was commuting to college. The rest had jobs, except for Fay, who was pregnant and still living down in New London. I felt sorry for Fay, but I figured it was my duty not to deceive her and to tell her the truth about the horrors of childbirth when she visited. “It hurts like hell,” I said to Fay and Beatrice and Virginia as we drank coffee one night in the kitchen. “That miracle shit is a bunch of propaganda. I’ll never, no matter what, have another one as long as I live. And Jason? He’s all right. I love him, but it’s not what you imagine. It’s more like you’d love an abandoned puppy you found on the street.”
With my friends around, I liked to make fun of Jason. I took off his clothes, strapped him to his changing table, then imitated Diana Ross in my “Love Child” routine. “Started his life in old cold run-down tenement slum … love child, always second best, love child, different from the rest.” I swung my hips, spun around, and pointed at him to the beat.
If we laughed too loud, Raymond called from the living room for us to keep it down.
By winter, Ray was working four to twelve and leaving me alone every night. And just about every night, Virginia came by to keep me company after she’d finished her homework. She gave me all her books to read as soon as she’d finished them, like
The Ego and the Id
, from Psychology 101, and some Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Ford Madox Ford books from a course called “The Jazz Age.” I joined the Literary Guild and got four more books by Hemingway, four by Steinbeck, and four by Faulkner, which I read whenever Jase went down for a nap or I could get him to shut up in his playpen for a while. I was trying to make myself smart to make up for not going to college.
The thing V and I liked to do best, besides talk about her classes, was to play with the Ouija board. Usually, we asked it questions like if I’d ever get divorced; when Raymond would die; if Jason would go to college; when Bobby and Virginia would marry; how many children they’d have; and if Bobby would make it home from Vietnam in one piece. Then one night we contacted a spirit. Her name was Nancy and she told us her history: she’d died at the age of eighteen, had three brothers still alive and one sister dead, lived somewhere in Michigan, and was a B student in high school. We carried on a dialogue with Nancy for a couple of nights before she turned nasty.
It was early spring and one of those moonless nights when little puffs of wind pushed the shades away from the window, leaving a black gap where someone could peek in. We were a little scared to begin with, but then when the magic indicator started jerking around the board spelling out profanities, I thought my heart would beat a hole through my chest. “Nancy, is that you?” I said.
Fuck, bitch, bastard, asshole.
“Why are you swearing?” Virginia asked.
Dirty twat, scum, cunt.
Then we heard a crash behind us. We jerked our hands off the magic indicator. The utensil rack was swinging from one screw in the wall and the utensils were strewn all over the floor.
We walked over to the wall to get a good look. Here’s the thing. The rack was made in such a way that you had to squeeze it together to pull the round holes over the screws. The only way it could be swinging there would be if the other screw had fallen out of the wall or if someone had squeezed the rack together, then pulled it off. Both screws were still in the wall.
V and I looked at each other, screamed, ran up the stairs, and locked ourselves in the bathroom. We sat on the floor with our backs pressed against the door. “What about Jason?” V said.
“Oh God,” I said. “We have to get him.” We ran across the hall on our toes, went into his room, locked the door, and peeked in his crib. He was lying on his back. His eyes were wide open with only the whites showing.
We ran back into the bathroom. “He’s possessed,” I said.
“Oh, Mary, Mother of God.” V was my only religious friend. She went to mass every morning—she said it was for the peace and quiet, but I knew she probably prayed for Bobby. Just then we heard banging at the front door. We stopped breathing. Then we heard banging at the back door, next the cellar hatchway being pulled open, then footfalls on the stairs. By the time the door opened from the cellar to the living room, we were weeping. “Bev,” I heard. It was Raymond. He’d lost his keys.
We ran down the stairs and told him everything. He looked at the baby and said his eyes were normal. Then I looked, too, and they were.
Virginia was too spooked to drive home, so she slept on the sofa. The next night, she was back in our kitchen. “Nancy went nuts because of Bobby,” she said. “He’s dead.”
“What?”
“Shrapnel. They said he didn’t feel a thing. His mother called. It’ll take a couple of days for his body to come home.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“Right. I made it up. It’s a big joke.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …” I said.
Virginia started crying. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I wished I could cry too. I hugged her and we rocked, stretched between our seats. When Ray came home, he sat in the rocker to take off his work boots, and we told him the news. He threw a boot across the floor, then flung himself back, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, and said, “My buddy. My buddy.”
The night before the funeral, Ray and I didn’t put Jase to bed at six o‘clock as usual. We sat on our steps, and Jason, eight months old now, pushed a dump truck around our feet. We put the “White Album” on and, one by one, as if they’d been invited, people began to pull into our driveway and park on the road. There were about a dozen of us sitting on our steps and lying on our lawn that night, listening to the Beatles, reminiscing about Bobby. He’d gone to Dag Hammarskjold with me and had been responsible for the rash of bomb scares one freezing fall. The whole school had to stand outside while the cops searched every locker and desk in the building. A guy named Lenny flicked a cigarette into the night and told us how he’d been waiting for his turn outside the vice-principal’s office when Bobby called the vice-principal an ape, then decked him. Bobby was expelled for that one. Rather than face his father, he ran away to Maine and got a severe case of frostbite. But then in high school, he’d joined the football team, and made more touchdowns than anyone. His father was proud of him. Which was Virginia’s theory of why he joined the marines: to keep his father that way.
On leave after boot camp, Bobby’d come over for Sunday dinner. He hardly ate any macaroni, then he drank so much he puked in the living room. After he’d come downstairs from washing his face, I’d asked him if he was scared to go to war.
“Bev,” Ray said.
“What?”
“You don’t ask a guy those questions.”
“Oh,” I’d said, and Bobby turned his face away.
Sitting on the steps, I pictured Bobby the way he’d looked at my wedding, wearing a shirt with huge polka dots and maroon bell-bottoms. Then I pictured him in the photo he’d sent me from Nam. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and his hair cut like a Mohican. He was standing on a hill and looked like a statue. I wondered if I’d still remember Bobby when I was thirty or forty. I’d be an adult, but in my memory he’d still be a kid. I wondered if Bobby would’ve always been wild or if he’d have calmed down, settled in a job somewhere, had a couple of kids, a bald head, a beer belly. I wondered if Bobby was the lucky one. I looked at the back of my son’s neck—he was passed out on the grass. It looked so delicate, so tender. Finally, I wept.
“Blackbird” was playing in the background, and I thought how Bobby would never get the chance to spread his wings and learn to fly. I wondered if any of us would.
CHAPTER 6
A year after that—in June 1970, to be exact—at the tail end of the most glorious spring of my youth, if you can still consider the age of nineteen youth, my heart broke.
The thing that got me, the real kick in the ass, was I was happy. Really happy. Marriage was working, because marijuana had changed our lives. Not only did Ray and I dress differently—we both wore sunglasses (we called them shades) day and night, and bell-bottom jeans that were so long they dragged on the ground and frayed on the bottoms—but we had a dream: to live
Easy Rider.
Raymond had even borrowed a thousand dollars from the credit union to buy a chopped Harley-Davidson, then managed to get laid off so we could hang out together and collect unemployment. He’d also become tight with a bunch of guys from the Animal Pack, the local motorcycle gang. I could take or leave the Animals—obviously, they were nothing like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper—but the important thing was I was dreaming again. There was California, there were communes, there was free love for married people. Not to mention how beautiful the world looked, in the spring, under the influence of drugs. I began to write poems.
My mother thought I’d gone off the deep end. I’d regained my independence. I was different from her. So what if I was disorganized and a slob, I was imaginative and a thinker. “Jason,” she said when he stuck his finger in his nose at a year and a half. “Get your finger out of your nose.”
“Leave him alone, Ma.”
“What, you’re not going to teach him manners?”
“If everybody picked their nose when they felt like it, everybody would be a lot happier. You pick your nose, I pick my nose, everybody picks their nose, so why hide it? We got ruined from socialization.”
“You’re saying I should’ve let you pick your nose?”
“Yes.”
“Honest to God, Beverly, I don’t know who you take after.”
And my father, never a slouch when it came to detective work, took one look at the cars that ended up in our driveway at all hours and knew exactly what was going on in our house. He refused to set foot in it. Which was fine with us, since he was a cop and we were doing illegal drugs.
Raymond finally had friends, so instead of sitting alone in the living room and not playing Scrabble with my friends in the kitchen because he felt too stupid, he had guys to go out with. Plus, he had long hair and a beard and was handsome. Sometimes when there was company, I’d sit across from him in a miniskirt and I’d catch the way he looked at me and want to leap across the room and land on top of him.
It was almost as though Ray and I were single. Life was blissful. One night I’d go out with my friends, and Raymond would baby-sit. The next night Ray’d go out with his, and I’d baby-sit. My friends and I rode around town smoking superb red marijuana sent from Vietnam. The air through our windows smelled of damp earth. We were awed by each leaf flapping separately on the trees. We peed in cornfields and ran through sprinklers on golf courses.
I even had a crush that spring. His name was Peter Dodd. Raymond had met him at the Crystal Spa and told me about this guy who’d shot off his toe in Vietnam to get discharged, which made him a hero to us because we thought the war was bullshit. Peter wasn’t only missing a toe, he’d been born with only one testicle. I fell in love before I even laid eyes on him, then fixed him up with Beatrice. He was tall and skinny and drove a school bus. He wrote songs. Some mornings he’d pull his yellow bus across my front lawn and we’d sit in the kitchen eating toast and drinking coffee, Jason on Peter’s lap. We talked about people. I read him my poems, which were very short: “Lemon days alone and lost. What will happen in the dark?” That was one. “Swing high. Swing low. Never know. Where to go.” That was another. Sometimes at night with Raymond, Peter sang us his songs and I read them my poems. I felt a little sorry for Raymond because all he did most of the time was listen, but he didn’t seem to mind. He nodded out in the rocker, and I watched Peter fold his long legs this way and that as we passed a joint back and forth and Peter laughed at things I said. We talked until dawn many nights. I looked at Raymond, asleep by then in the rocker, and I felt tender.
That sleeping in the rocker was the beginning of the problem. Or the beginning of my noticing there was a problem at all. Raymond had taken to half sleeping in the rocker for hours and hours, kind of scratching his nose, which was peeling from all the rubbing, and sitting there with his head on his chest nodding out. Since it often happened when we were smoking marijuana, I thought maybe it was giving Raymond brain damage. But since I was so happy, I didn’t pay much attention until one night.
Beatrice and I had gone to the Coleman Brothers’ carnival and I’d left Ray at home baby-sitting and expecting some friends to come over. Ever since I was a little kid, I’d loved the carnival. I had this friend, when I was very little, named Joannie Devon, who lived on top of some rickety ill-lighted stairs in a shabby apartment alone with her mother. Rumor had it that her mother had had an affair with a carnie who left town and her pregnant with Joannie. Joannie was very poor but extremely beautiful. And even as a little child, though I couldn’t put a word to it, I knew Joannie had grace. There was something in the way she looked at you and moved and smiled that I thought saintly. In other words, if the Virgin Mary were going to appear to anybody, it would be Joannie. We moved away from our first house and I lost track of her. But I remembered her every time the Coleman Brothers came to town. Then I’d look at all those carnies in their booths with tattoos on their arms and voices daring you on and I’d wonder which one had fathered Joannie Devon, the angel.