Skylark (5 page)

Mom tries not to hurry to the computer, but she's eager to check Gmail. She hears from Dad a few times a week. She is in a whole other world, a happier one, when she reads his letters. It's like she forgets where she is. That evening, as we're settling in to sleep, she'll announce, “Dad says his new apartment is over an ice-cream shop. The freezers hum all night,” or, “He's putting a check in the mail for clothes for you two.”

Dad and Mom always seemed to start in the middle of a conversation. Mom could say out of the blue, “No, I don't think we should do it,” and Dad would answer, “Remember that guy in Austin? He'd say that we should go for it,” and she'd say, “Yeah, but look how long that guy's beard was.” And then the two of them would burst out laughing. From start to finish, Clem and I would have no idea what they were talking about. They had their storehouse of experiences and could talk in shorthand. Sure, sometimes they argued, mostly over how they parented us—Mom thought Dad was too soft, and Dad thought Mom worried too much.

But during the last few months in the apartment, they'd fought all the time. Mom couldn't say anything without Dad getting mad. Mom would say, “My back hurts from cleaning,” and Dad would answer sarcastically, “Yeah, too bad your husband can't bring home the bacon.”

“That's not what I meant,” Mom would say.

“No?”

“No,” Mom would say firmly. “Liam. I love you.”

At first, that would be enough. Dad would say, “Yeah. Sorry. I just wish I could find some work.” Then they'd hug.

Dad would be patient for a while, but then he would start reacting again. He'd say things like, “I guess I'm not good enough for you.” Or, “You must regret marrying a loser like me.” Once, he called himself a “depressed laid-off bricklayer,” which was a little over the top.

Mom finally lost her patience. “Look,” she said once. “Maybe you need to try a different line of work.”

Dad didn't like that. “I knew you never believed in me,” he barked.

Mom sighed. “Stop making it about yourself. It's not your fault there aren't any jobs right now.”

“I know where there's work.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” Dad said. He gave Mom a hard look. “Yes, Rebecca. I do.”

They were the same words he'd said when they got married. But this time when he said them, Mom burst into tears.

We wash at Auntie Evie's on Wednesdays after school. Auntie Evie isn't really our aunt. Mom has no siblings, and Dad has two brothers who fish up in Alaska, but that's it for family. Aunt Evie is one of Mom's oldest friends. We lived with her and her husband, Mitch, for a week after we lost the apartment, but Evie finally had to tell us that it wasn't working out. She sat us down in the living room one afternoon and poured us glasses of pineapple juice. Why do I remember that so well? “I don't know how to tell you this…” she began. “I could have you live here for a long time, but Mitch is different. He needs his quiet. It's why we never had kids.”

After she told us, we just sat there, drinking our juice in the quiet living room, getting a grip on the terror that
we had nowhere to go
.

We sneak into Auntie Evie's place. She washes our clothes in her building's laundry room and makes an early supper for us. It's nearly always spaghetti, but that's fine. We have to clear out before Mitch comes home from work, but usually our laundry isn't dry yet. Auntie Evie folds it all, puts it in a garbage bag and leaves it around the back door. We're always nervous that we're going to run into Mitch when we go back to get it. We aren't nervous that Mitch will be mad that we're at the apartment. We just don't want him to feel guilty about needing his quiet. We know he likes us because he got his friend, who lives near the BMX track, to let us store our bikes in his garage. Uncle Mitch also found us the Skylark.

Skylark

For Sale, 1982 Buick Skylark.
Immaculate 2.8L V6—2nd Owner,
Garage Kept—Clean Interior—Low
miles—Original Owners' Manual
and Floor Mats—Full Spare Tire,
and a Few Extras!—Full Service and
Maintenance Records for Over 10
Years. $2500.

Uncle Mitch paid for the Skylark. A couple grand is nothing to sneeze at, Mom said. She was able to accept Mitch's paying for the car, since Dad had helped Mitch and Evie lots of times. He even helped Mitch get his job.

Mitch got the Skylark for five hundred dollars below the asking price. Mom never asked why, but we guessed Mitch pulled a few sympathy strings—spotlight on a woman and two kids huddled on a piece of wet cardboard in a dark alley.

So we were a charity case. Charity is the other side of the pity coin, and we did not like the car at first for that reason. It's a thirty-year-old car, but in brand-new shape. We are careful with the upholstery. We respect the time the owner spent rubbing cream into its leather, vacuuming the car's carpets, oiling its door hinges.

The trunk is its most amazing feature—16.4 cubic feet. A “four-body trunk,” Mitch called it. Our keepsakes are in there in boxes—pictures Clem and I drew in kindergarten, grade-school report cards, Dad's wedding cummerbund. When we left the apartment, we sold most of our stuff on Craigslist, including Mom's wedding dress. She still hasn't sold her wedding ring though—I check her finger nearly every day. The ring is twenty-two-karat gold, and the band is wide. “That is no regular bricklayer's wife's wedding ring,” Dad used to joke.

Mom, Clem and I took the bus to pick up the Skylark. It was the middle of March. The seller lived in a boring neighborhood of small square houses and lawns cut as short as living room carpets. “Call me Graham,” the old man said, leading us through his tidy house to the garage. Mom liked the car immediately. Clem and I saw its potential. “Let's put our allowances together and buy some twenty-two-inch rims for this baby,” Clem deadpanned once Graham was out of earshot. Of course, the car won't ever be pimped, but making jokes about getting sheepskin for the seats, plush dice to dangle from the rearview, a performance muffler and colored headlights has become a game for us.

The car was ours whether we liked it or not. The money had been paid. The deal was done. Mitch and Auntie Evie were going to pay the insurance for four months, and then Mom would be on the hook for it. Graham could have handed us the keys and waved goodbye from inside his garage, but instead he invited us in for tea and biscuits. He had already prepared a tray with cups and the full teapot. We perched on the couch in his neat living room as a clock on the mantel ticked unevenly—tick-TOCK, tick-TOCK, tick-TOCK.

“May I?” Clem gestured toward the piano.

“Be my guest.”

Clem played Pachelbel's
Canon in D
Major,
but something kept going wrong. Clem repeated a phrase, then poked a single key over and over.

“Broken hammer,” Graham said between sips of tea.

“I'll dance around it,” Clem said.

“My wife, Florence, was the pianist,” Graham said. “Don't suppose you're in the market for a piano too? Going cheap.”

“No,” Mom said. “We don't need a piano.”

“Right,” Graham said, clearly remembering why we needed the car. “I don't suppose you do. Sorry.”

“That's all right,” Mom said. “We can't thank you enough. It's a really nice car.”

“I'd polish it up on Sunday mornings, and then Florence and I would go for a long drive,” Graham said. “Set ourselves free.”

“Sure,” Mom said.

Clem cleared the plate of cookies.

Then Graham jangled the keys toward us.

“Here you go,” he said. “You drive carefully.”

Now, when Clem and I are too rambunctious in the car, wrestling or being too loose with our mugs of hot chocolate that Mom makes in the kettle that plugs into the cigarette-lighter socket, Mom says, “Hey, hey, remember Florence.” It works. I think of Florence, who must have been proud of her car. I think of Graham too, vacuuming the seats every Sunday. I imagine the two of them watching us, and I quiet down. I pay Clem five dollars to go to the slam with me. He grumbles, but not as much as I thought he would. When Mom drops us off, I notice Surfer, surrounded by girls and acting cool.

With the extra money, Clem buys soup, a toasted bagel and two kid-size hot chocolates. I hear him ask for extra butter for his bagel, and I hurt inside. Clem needs all the fat he can get.

I say hi to Mercy Girl, and she nods. That's something, at least. The first reader's piece is about washing a cat in the kitchen sink. She uses the verb
claw
a thousand times. She could have used so many others—clutch, scratch, grip, seize, snag, snare. Reading Bronwen Wallace and Amy Lowell in the library, I have learned that every word counts. You have to
wring
your poem after you first get it on the page, squish the extra water out of it—the repetitions and boring words—boil it down, reduce it to its flavorful parts.

Listen to the sounds too. Forget what the words mean and just listen for rhymes. A rhyme doesn't have to be at the end of a line. It can be anywhere—it's just a sound repeating.
Dark
and
lark
can rhyme, but so can
darn
and
lark
or
darn
and
dark
or
lark
and
lurk
. Words can rhyme in the middle, or at the start. Alliteration—the two
w
's in Walt Whitman—is a kind of rhyme.
Walt
and
Whit
also rhyme—both short syllables starting with
w
and ending in
t.
Rhyme is everywhere, rhyme is fine, rhyme buffs and shines, it unites and entwines.

Surfer's story is really good this week, but every time he hits a cool line, he shoots me a look, as if he's saying,
So there
. His story is about how he and a friend survived an avalanche when they were skiing, how they swam with the snow and came out of the long rush of white perfectly naked. The avalanche had “skinned” the clothes off him. “Thought I was going to die, but instead, I was reborn,” he finishes, to huge applause.

Mercy Girl is up next. My heart starts pounding as she recites her piece. It's about a new car. What a crazy coincidence. It's about driving away from the car lot, feeling like “the road has just started” and “you've got a whole new body.” Then she says, “but as you travel forward, feeling you could go anywhere, the weight of the car, of engine and glass and oil, starts holding you a little too well, pinning you down.” Her piece ends,

I stepped into that car lot,

money thick in my pockets.

I handed it over only to learn

you can't ever go fast enough,

there's a limit to living—

always some kind of finish line.

Ever since I've started writing slam poems, English class makes sense to me. Mercy Girl was using the car as a metaphor for life. And that finish line? Well, everyone knows what that is.

People like Mercy Girl's poem. They clap and cheer. Meanwhile, Clem shifts in his seat, attentive to the people at the next table, who are reaching for their jackets. As soon as they leave their table, Clem swoops in on their unfinished desserts. Surfer approaches a moment later.

“Trying to get Hep B?” he asks Clem.

“I won't,” Clem snarls between chews.

“That was rude, Clem,” I say once Surfer's gone.

“It isn't his business what I eat,” Clem said. “That guy is stuck up. Yeah, his head's stuck up his butt. Full of himself, get it?”

It's not like Clem. He doesn't go for the crude.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“Did you get a note from Dad?” Clem answers.

I suck in my breath. I don't want to think about today's Facebook message.

“Yeah,” I say. “I got it.”

Dad's words swarm my head, but I've got to press them back. There's only room right now for my slam piece.

“A nice apartment, new friends…” Clem says.

“Yeah, I heard,” I say.

“Sounds like he's got a new home.”

“
Clem
,” I say. I want him to stop. I've got to focus.

Aaron is next up on the stage. He delivers a rant about sharp things—knives and saws and broken glass. The rant slows down and ends as a reluctant love song to knowing the difference between good and bad, “divisions that create things whole, the scalpel cutting away what's diseased, or cutting the cord, making me, making you.”

Suddenly, it's my turn. I'm more nervous than last week. One reason is that Surfer's looking at me sourly and Mercy Girl's staring me down. I'm nervous that my piece will upset her. What were the chances that our poems would both be about new cars? I look to Clem for encouragement. He's in another world. I widen my eyes to say,
Come on!
He gives me a lame thumbs-up. It's something, at least, and I start.

“Broken Hammer.”

“Louder!” someone yells.

Twig adjusts the mic. “Just nerves,” she whispers. “Imagine that you're telling it to just one person. Talking to a friend.”

Dad floats into my mind. That's it. I'll just talk to Dad, as if I'm writing him a Facebook message.

“Broken Hammer,” I repeat, clear and sure.

After Mom and the old man

shake hands in the tidy garage

the old man offers me

the last apple on the apple tree.

“Careful now,” he says,

“last time I bit into an apple

I left a tooth inside.”

I pick the heart-shaped apple

and as I do my toe nudges

another in the grass.

It's Saturday afternoon

we're checking out a ride

a 1982 Buick Skylark

only it's heavy, grounded, not at all