Authors: Justin Torres
Seven
I
N THE MORNING,
we stood side by side in the doorway and looked in on Ma, who slept open-mouthed, and we listened to the air struggle to get past the saliva in her throat. Three days ago she had arrived home with both cheeks swollen purple. Paps had carried her into the house and brought her to the bed, where he stroked her hair and whispered in her ear. He told us the dentist had been punching on her after she went under; he said that's how they loosen up the teeth before they rip them out. Ma had been in bed every day since—plastic vials of pain pills, glasses of water, half-drunk mugs of tea, and bloody tissues cluttered the floor around her bed. Paps had forbidden us to set foot in the bedroom, and for three mornings we had heeded, monitoring her breath from the doorway, but today we would not wait any longer.
We tiptoed to her side and traced our fingers over her bruises. Ma murmured at our touch but did not wake.
It was the morning of my seventh birthday, which meant winter, but the light glowed in the curtain like spring. Manny walked to the window, pulled the curtain around him, and covered himself so that only his face was visible. One Sunday, because we had begged her to, Ma took us to a church service, and there we saw a painting of men in hoods with clasped hands and eyes lifted upward.
"Monks," Ma had said. "They study God."
"Monks," Manny whispered now, and we understood. Joel draped himself in the sheet that had been kicked to the floor, and I grabbed the other curtain, and like monks we waited, except it was Ma we were studying, her black tangled hair, her shut eyes, and her bloated jowl. We watched the tiny form of her under the covers, a twitch or kick, and the steady rise and fall of her chest.
When she finally woke, she called us beautiful.
"My beautiful baby boys," she said, the first words out of her busted mouth in three days, and it was too much; we turned from her. I pressed my hand against the glass, suddenly embarrassed, needing the cold. That's how it sometimes was with Ma; I needed to press myself against something cold and hard, or I'd get dizzy.
"It's his birthday," Manny said.
"Happy birthday," Ma said, the words slightly tinged with pain.
"He's seven," Manny said.
Ma nodded her head slowly and shut her eyes. "He'll leave me, now he's seven."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Joel asked.
"When you boys turned seven, you left me. Shut yourselves off from me. That's what big boys do, what seven-year-olds do."
I moved both hands to the glass, caught the cold, and pressed it to my cheeks.
"I won't."
"They changed," Ma said, turning her head to me. "Wriggled away when I tried to cuddle them, wouldn't sit still on my lap. I had to let them go—had to harden my heart—they wanted to smash things, to wrestle."
My brothers looked confused but oddly proud. Manny winked to Joel.
"Aw," he said, "it ain't like that."
"Isn't it?" Ma asked.
"I don't want to smash nothing," I said. "I want to study God and never get married."
"Good," Ma said, "then you'll stay six forever."
"That's just stupid," Joel said.
Ma raised a slow hand for silence on the subject.
"Will you get up today?" I asked.
"How do I look?"
"Purple," I said.
"Crazy," said Joel.
"Tore up," said Manny.
"But it's your birthday," Ma said to me.
"But it's my birthday."
She slid the covers down to her waist and brought her hands up to her face, delicately protecting her cheeks, as if a hand might fly through the air at any moment, then she raised herself up, then her feet were on the floor, then she was standing in her green football jersey, with bare legs thin as anything and painted toes.
A brass-handled mirror lay on the bureau, and as soon as Ma raised it to her face, tears came and sat on her eyelids, waiting to fall. Ma could hold tears on her eyelids longer than anyone; some days she walked around like that for hours, holding them there, not letting them drop. On those days she would trace her finger over the shapes of things or hold the telephone on her lap, silent, and you had to call her name three times before she'd give you her eyes.
Now, Ma held the tears and studied her ugliness. The three of us boys started to back out of the room, but she called for me, said she wanted to talk to me about staying six, but she didn't say much beyond that, just looked and looked in that mirror, turning her jaw at different angles.
"What did he do to me?" she asked.
"He punched you in the face," I said, "to loosen up your teeth."
I jumped at the sound of shattering glass. My brothers' two heads instantly appeared back in the doorway, smiling wide, running their eyes from Ma to me, to the broken pieces of mirror, to the spot on the wall where it had been flung, to Ma, to me.
Ma's hands were up protecting her cheeks again, and her eyes were shut. When she spoke, she said each word slow and clear.
"You think it's funny when men beat on your mother?"
My brothers' smiles dropped to frowns; they disappeared again.
I went and wrapped myself back up in the curtain, leaned my forehead against the windowpane. The light reflected back and forth from the white sky to the snow; the light caught in the frost on the window. Outside, it was too bright to focus on any one spot. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, and they burned with light, and I thought about going blind, about how everyone said if you looked right up into the sun, full on, and held your gaze, you'd go blind—but when I tried, I could not blind myself.
Ma sat on the edge of the bed, breathing loud and slow, forgiving me. She called for me to sit on her lap, and I came, and we breathed together. Then Ma started in on my favorite song, about a woman with feathers and oranges, and Jesus Christ walking on the water. My head stretched all the way up to her shoulder, but she rocked me, rocked me, and hummed the words she had forgotten.
"Promise me," she said, "promise me you'll stay six forever."
"How?"
"Simple. You're not seven; you're six plus one. And next year you'll be six plus two. Like that, forever."
"Why?"
"When they ask how old you are, and you say 'I'm six plus one, or two, or more,' you'll be telling them that no matter how old you are, you are your Ma's baby boy. And if you stay my baby boy, then I'll always have you, and you won't shy away from me, won't get slick and tough, and I won't have to harden my heart."
"You stopped loving them when they turned seven?"
"Don't be simple," Ma said. She brushed my hair back from my forehead. "Loving big boys is different from loving little boys—you've got to meet tough with tough. It makes me tired sometimes, that's all, and you, I don't want you to leave me, I'm not ready."
Then Ma leaned in and whispered more in my ear, told me more, about why she needed me six. She whispered it all to me, her need so big, no softness anywhere, only Paps and boys turning into Paps. It wasn't just the cooing words, but the damp of her voice, the tinge of pain—it was the warm closeness of her bruises—that sparked me.
I turned into her, saw the swollen mounds on either side of her face, the muddied purple skin ringed in yellow. Those bruises looked so sensitive, so soft, so capable of hurt, and this thrill, this spark, surged from my gut, spread through my chest, this wicked tingle, down the length of my arms and into my hands. I grabbed hold of both of her cheeks and pulled her toward me for a kiss.
The pain traveled sharp and fast to her eyes, pain opened up her pupils into big black disks. She ripped her face from mine and shoved me away from her, to the floor. She cussed me and Jesus, and the tears dropped, and I was seven.
The Lake
O
NE UNBEARABLE NIGHT,
in the midst of a heat wave, Paps drove us all to the lake. No one wore anything more than a bathing suit, and Ma had us drape towels over the seatbacks to keep our skin from sticking to the vinyl. We drove the long road in silence, as if we were all together in front of the TV, except what we were listening to and watching was the heat.
Ma and I didn't know how to swim, so she grabbed onto Paps's back and I grabbed onto hers, and he took us on a little tour, spreading his arms before him and kicking his legs underneath us, our own legs trailing through the water, relaxed and still, our toes curled backward.
Every once in a while Ma would point out some happening for me to look at, a duck touching down onto the water, his head pulled back on his neck, beating his wings before him, or a water bug with spindly legs that dimpled the lake's surface.
"Not so far," she would say to Paps, but he'd push on, smooth and slow, and the shore behind would stretch and thin and curve, until it was a wooded crescent impossibly dark and remote.
In the middle of the lake the water felt blacker and cooler, and Paps swam right into a clump of slimy tar black leaves. Ma and I tried to splash the leaves away from us, but we had to keep one arm holding on, so they ended up curling around in our jetty and sticking to our ribs and thighs like leeches. Paps lifted a fistful into the air, and the leaf clump melted through the cracks in his fingers and disintegrated into speckles in the water, and cigarette-size fish appeared and nibbled at the leaf bits.
"We've come too far," Ma said. "Take us back."
"Soon," Paps said.
Ma started talking about how unnatural it was that Paps knew how to swim, as if he was born up here in this hillbilly country, and not six hours south, in Brooklyn. She said that no one swam in Brooklyn. The most water she ever saw in one place was when one of the men from the block would open up the johnny pump and water would rush and pour forth. She said that she never jumped through the spray like the other kids—too hard and mean and shocking—but instead she liked to stand farther down, where the sidewalk met the street, and let the water pool around her ankles.
"I had already been married and pushed out three boys before I ever stepped into anything deeper than a puddle," she said.
Paps didn't say when or where he had learned to swim, but he generally made it his business to learn everything that had to do with survival. He had all the muscles and the will. He was on his way to becoming indestructible.
"I guess it's opposite with you, isn't it?" Ma called back to me. "You grew up with all these lakes and rivers, and you got two brothers that swim like a couple of goldfish in a bowl—how come you don't swim?"
She asked the question as if she was meeting me for the first time, as if the circumstances of my life—my fumbling, terrifying attempts at the deep end, the one time at the public pool when I had been dragged out by the high school lifeguard and had puked up pool water onto the grass, seven hundred eyes on me, the din of screams and splashes and whistles momentarily silenced as everyone stopped to ponder my bony weakness, to stare and stare waiting for me to cry, which I did—as if it had only just now occurred to Ma how odd it was that I was here, clinging to her and Paps, and not with my brothers, who had run into the water, dunked each other's heads down, tried to drown each other, then ran back out and disappeared into the trees.
Of course, it was impossible for me to answer her, to tell the truth, to say I was scared. The only one who ever got to say that in our family was Ma, and most of the time she wasn't even scared, just too lazy to go down into the crawlspace herself, or else she said it to make Paps smile, to get him to tickle and tease her or pull her close, to let him know she was only really scared of being without him. But me, I would have rather let go and slipped quietly down to the lake's black bottom than to admit fear to either one of them.
But I didn't have to say anything, because Paps answered for me.
"He's going to learn," he said, "you're both going to learn," and no one spoke after that for a long time. I watched the moon break into shards of light across the lake; I watched dark birds circle and caw, the wind lift the tree branches, the pine trees tip. I felt the lake get colder and I smelled the dead leaves.
Later, after the incident, Paps drove us home. He sat behind the wheel, still shirtless, his back and neck and even his face a crosshatch of scratches, some only deep red lines and broken skin, some already scabbing, and some still glistening with fresh blood, and I too was all scratched up—for she had panicked, and when he slipped away she had clawed on top of me. Later, Paps said to her, "How else do you expect to learn?"
And Ma, who had nearly drowned me, who had screamed and cried and dug her nails down into me, who had been more frenzied and wild than I had ever known her to be, Ma, who was so boiling angry that she had made Manny sit up front with Paps and she had taken the middle back, wrapping her arms around us—Ma replied by reaching across me and opening the door as we sped along. I looked down and saw the pavement rushing and blurring beneath, the shoulder dropping away into a gravel pit. Ma held open that door and asked, "What? You want me to teach him how to fly? Should I teach him how to fly?"
Then Paps had to pull over and calm her down. The three of us boys jumped out and walked to the edge and took out our dicks and pissed down into the ditch.
"She really clawed you up like that?" Manny asked.
"She tried to climb onto my head."
"What kind of ..." he started to say but didn't finish. He was two years older than Joel and three years older than me. We waited for his judgment, for the other half of his sentence, but he only picked up a rock and hurled it out away from him as far as he could.
From the car, we heard the noises of their arguing, we heard Ma saying over and over, "You let me go. You let me go," and we watched the big trailers haul past, rumbling the car and the ground underneath our feet.
Then Manny laughed and said, "Shit, I thought she was gonna throw you out of the car."
And Joel laughed too; he said, "Shit. I thought you were gonna
fly.
"
When we finally returned to the car, Ma sat up front again, and Paps drove with one hand on the back of her neck. He waited until the perfect moment, until we'd settled into silence and peace and we were thinking ahead to the beds waiting for us at home, and then he turned his head to the side, glancing at me over his shoulder, and asked, all curious and friendly, "So, how'd you like your first flying lesson?" And the whole car erupted in laughter.
But the incident itself played and played in my mind, and at night, in bed, I could not sleep for remembering. How Paps had slipped away from us, how he looked on as we flailed and struggled, how I needed to escape Ma's clutch and grip, how I let myself slide down and down, and when I opened my eyes what I discovered there: black-green murkiness, an underwater world, terror. I sank down for a long time, disoriented and writhing, and then suddenly I was swimming—kicking my legs and spreading my arms just like Paps had shown me long before, and rising up to the light and exploding into air, and then that first breath, sucking air all the way down into my lungs, and when I looked up the sky had never been so vaulted, so sparkling and magnificent. I remembered the urgency in my parents' voices, Ma wrapped around Paps once again, and both of them calling my name. I swam toward their bobbing mass, and there under the stars, I was wanted. They had never been so happy to see me, they had never looked at me with such intensity and hope, they had never before spoken my name so softly.
I remembered how Ma burst into tears and Paps celebrated, shouting as if he was a mad scientist and I a marvel of his creation:
"He's alive!"
"He's alive!"
"He's alive!"