“Buddy Nurt,” she spat contemptuously. “If you know what I did to deserve that asshole, I wish you’d tell me. It must have been in another life, that’s all I can say.”
Outside, the brothers had finished tying off the tippy springs and mattresses with an old clothesline. “Yeah, right, that’s secure,” Nancy muttered, then looked at me. “You don’t have no brothers, do you.”
She knew full well I didn’t but seemed to be waiting for an answer, so I admitted to being an only child.
“Lucky you,” she said, and left.
Where Karen was during all this I have no idea. I kept watch out Ikey’s front window, expecting her to appear, but she never did. Since I was by myself in the store, I figured she’d come in and say goodbye, maybe con me out of one last pack of cigarettes. But she probably felt guilty about Buddy and decided to let me off the hook. Around midafternoon, the brothers piled back into their pickup armada and sped off. The last truck took the corner too sharply, and the clothesline broke, allowing the box spring to tumble out right in front of our house. Our Ford was parked at the curb, and the cartwheeling box spring sheared off its side-view mirror, neat as could be, then came to rest up against the front bumper. When my father returned, I told him what had happened, and we waited the rest of the afternoon for the brothers to come back for it, so we could demand that they pay for the damage to our car, but they never did. When it began to rain, my father said, “Good,” and we let the box spring soak the rest of the afternoon. By evening it was so waterlogged we had all we could do to carry it around to the back of the house, where we decided to leave it until garbage day. The next morning, to our amazement, it was gone. “West End,” was all my mother had to say on the subject.
Later that day, she and I went up to inspect the apartment, none too sure what we’d find. Evidence of another fire? Another full, black toilet? My mother had said barely two words since breakfast. After sleeping on her decision, she seemed to be having second thoughts about throwing herself into Ikey Lubin’s. But things in the apartment were better than she feared. Buddy may have been a slob, but Nancy had kept the place clean, and there was no evidence of further damage, so I was surprised when my mother’s dark mood didn’t improve. Maybe she was just feeling bad for her old friend, who’d now have to move back to the Gut. Once you knew something better, my mother always said, it was hard to go backward in life because even if you’d once been happy with less, more—the knowledge of more—was always with you.
Or perhaps she was contemplating the possibility of her own diminished future. By tearing down the financial and psychological firewall she’d erected between herself and the store, she now realized just how vulnerable we all were. She was determined to keep as many of her book-keeping clients as she could, so we’d always have that income to fall back on. But she’d now committed herself to making Ikey’s succeed, even though she’d told me long ago that it couldn’t, that the best we could hope for was that the market would fail slowly, providing us with a marginal living until the inevitable time we’d be put out of our misery by the A&P or whatever came next.
Her reasoning must have been that by becoming a fully vested partner she could forestall that fate awhile, maybe until I finished college. If she was in the store, seeing things firsthand, she’d have more influence. She could watch our inventory, making sure we were ordering the right quantities and that slick salesmen weren’t talking my father into anything, that we weren’t being given what was left over on the back of the truck. She’d often voiced her suspicion that his fear of women discouraged female customers from returning to Ikey’s once they saw how flustered they made him. Her presence would alleviate that problem and also give him some much needed time away. The clincher, though, was her belief that for Ikey’s to succeed, we had to be special, to give people something they couldn’t get at either the A&P or other corner stores. Like a good crown roast.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that in order to expand Ikey’s along these lines, my parents not only took out a loan from Thomaston Savings but also put a second mortgage on our house. Had I known, of course, I would have applauded their decision, because I loved and believed in Ikey’s as much as my father did and wanted my mother’s complicity in the venture. I wanted for us to be a family and to be devoted to the same cause. I was even willing to expand my definition of “family” to include Uncle Dec, if that’s what it took, especially since, as my parents agreed, he likely wouldn’t last.
That the cause we were now to be united in might be the wrong one didn’t really register with me. Despite my mother’s palpable fears, and even after witnessing in the person of Nancy Salvatore how swiftly reversals of fortune could happen, it never occurred to me that we wouldn’t succeed in the end. After all, no Buddy Nurt was dragging us down. Our move from Berman Court to the East End had seemed only natural, progress that one day might carry us all the way to the Borough, if we were fortunate. Sure, there’d be setbacks. But ultimately we would prevail.
Despite her innate caution, my mother must have shared this desperate conviction, this blind faith, at least long enough to sign for the expansion loan and the second mortgage. I doubt she seriously feared we’d ever have to return to the West End like her old friend. Rather, the fate she feared was the apartment itself, and as we stood there in its small, dark, empty rooms, I think now that my mother may have had a premonition, envisioning the day when our luck would fail utterly and the little house she’d purchased with money borrowed at such a heavy cost from my grandparents would be lost, as well as her argument with them. They’d not wanted her to marry my father or, for that matter, anyone from Thomaston. They intended for her to go away to school and meet a better class of boy, a more suitable mate who’d take her to live in a place where the streams and rivers were the color of water, not blood. But she’d sided with my father, and in doing so had broken their hearts. Now here she was, years later, reaffirming that decision, siding with him yet again in a venture she’d once believed to be foolish, this time risking everything.
What was I doing while my mother contemplated our future? Brooding over the past. Hers. Or rather Nancy Salvatore’s version of it. Could it be true what Nancy had said, about how wild she’d been? I remember trying to square all this with the woman I’d known only as my mother, with my own very different version of my parents’ history. I’d never thought about their courtship before. Somehow I’d always imagined my father’s asking her to marry him as the beginning. He’d simply shown up, a stranger on her doorstep, and asked her, and of course she’d said yes, just as any other Thomaston girl would’ve done if she’d been lucky enough to be asked by a man everyone knew and liked. She was the one who hadn’t known what hit her.
This was what I was mulling over when I heard footsteps on the back stairs, and as my uncle appeared in the doorway I knew who our new renter would be. Maybe it was the surprise, especially since I should’ve seen it coming, that made me aware of the aura—the fuzziness at the perimeter of my vision, the tingling of my extremities—I’d been ignoring since yesterday. This was no new phenomenon, of course, nor was the fact that when I saw my uncle standing there, I again had the irrational thought that he was the same man I’d heard when I awoke in the trunk so long ago. What was new this time was the sudden certainty that the woman who’d been with him, who’d opened the trunk and stared in at me, was my mother.
Even now I marvel at our ability, at certain odd moments, to embrace the most contradictory logic, as if truth and falsehood were not the opposites we know them to be but rather sly brothers under the skin. In my mind’s eye I could still see the woman who opened the trunk that night and gazed in at me with such innocent, drunken astonishment: “It’s a little boy!” I’m sure I needn’t state here, though I do, emphatically, that this woman was not my mother. Though backlit, she had been large and pale and fleshy and blond, and their voices had nothing in common. Why, then, when my uncle appeared, did a tiny door open in my brain and allow
so bizarre a notion to enter? And why, in view of conclusive evidence to the contrary, was it so difficult to dispel?
“What’s the matter, Bub?” my uncle wanted to know. For some reason he wasn’t standing in the doorway anymore but next to my mother, both of them staring at me curiously. I guess I must have been staring at them, too, or perhaps at nothing at all. Realizing that I’d just suffered one of my spells, I tried to say something, but as was so often the case when I “awakened,” my disorientation was too profound, and I couldn’t find the right words. Sometimes, if I tried to speak too soon, unable to form the right combination of sounds to make familiar words, I’d spout gibberish. Less severe episodes would leave me in possession of the right words but no sense of how to arrange them in the right order, which was almost as frightening. Usually I was able to gauge the severity of a spell by studying the people who’d witnessed it, and I was pretty sure this one hadn’t lasted very long because Uncle Dec was standing just a few feet away from where he’d been before and my mother’s posture suggested she’d only this moment become aware that something was wrong. She squatted in front of me and took my hand, saying, “Lou? Are you back?”
I nodded, unwilling to trust language just yet, not with Uncle Dec there. He’d never witnessed one of my spells, and he now regarded me suspiciously, as you might if someone pronounced dead at the scene of an accident suddenly sat up and started looking around.
“You’re cold,” my mother said, rubbing my hands together in her own. “You want to go downstairs and see Dad?”
This was what I always wanted after a spell, so she wasn’t surprised when I nodded again. As usual I was exhausted and thirsty, as if I’d been walking along a dusty road for days, so tired I wasn’t sure I could make it down the stairs, but I didn’t want to be carried or even helped, especially by Uncle Dec. “This is pretty weird, Bub,” he remarked as we descended. “You know that, don’t you.”
“He’ll be all right,” my mother assured him. “He hasn’t had one of these in a while.”
In the air outside I could feel the vagueness begin to dissipate, though I still felt stupid and uncertain. My father knew what had happened as soon as we entered the store. “You have a spell, Louie?” he said, more an acknowledgment than a question. I closed my eyes, allowing the sound of his voice to soothe it all away. Not much remained now but the tingling in my fingertips and toes, that and the thirst. He got me settled on the stool next to the register. “You want a soda?”
“Me,” I said, the word “yes” not yet where I needed it to be.
“Shouldn’t—” Uncle Dec began. I knew how he would’ve finished, too. Shouldn’t I see the doctor?
“No, he just needs to sit quiet a minute, don’t you, Louie?”
I was determined to say “yes” and tried hard to do so, but again all that came out was “me.”
“Me, right,” Uncle Dec repeated, rolling his eyes.
Unwilling to speak again, I focused on my father’s white shirt as he went over to the cooler, returning with a bottle of grape soda. I drank half of it down in one huge gulp, then closed my eyes and concentrated on the big, gentle hand my father had placed on my shoulder. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that it was over. My uncle was just my uncle, not the man outside the trunk, and my mother was just my mother. And I was myself again: Louis Charles Lynch.
CROSSING THE LINE
THAT’S PITIFUL, really. He shouldn’t even be on the street,” Sarah says when I tell her about our encounter with Buddy Nurt. I wouldn’t even have mentioned it except she’s already observed that I seem out of sorts, and I’d rather have her blame Buddy than my mother, whom she’ll now question about it, though I wish she wouldn’t. Saturday is Sarah’s day to look in on her, to gauge what she’ll need for the week. She’ll pick up the few things we don’t stock at Ikey’s, plus whatever she needs from the drugstore and Kmart, a bigger list than usual tomorrow because by next Friday we’ll be on a plane for Italy and my mother won’t want to trouble Owen.
“I’m not sure I’d bring it up,” I tell Sarah. “I think the whole thing upset her.”
Another untruth, or half-truth. I don’t think the episode upset her; I know it did. Upstairs in her flat, she collapsed into her reading chair without taking off her coat and just sat there staring at the dark smudge on her wall as if it had suddenly taken on new meaning, leaving me to make tea, a task I’m usually not allowed. My mother doesn’t like anyone in her kitchen, which is why it took me longer than it should have to find what I needed. By the time I returned to the front room, she’d taken off her coat and composed herself. “I was going to throw this away unless you want it,” she said, handing me a photograph.
I set her cup down and took the photo, immediately perplexed. In it, my mother’s seated playfully on the counter of Ikey Lubin’s, my father and Uncle Dec standing behind her. All three are smiling at the camera, and I’m struck by how different their smiles are. Uncle Dec has his usual, knowing smirk, entirely in character. My father’s in character also, his smile too broad, too unguarded—a smile that reveals the fact that he has everything he’s ever dreamed of and is at a total loss to explain how he got so lucky. The smile that unkind people so often described as “goofy,” and one I’m said to have inherited. My mother’s smile is the most intriguing. The fact that the three of them were together in the store dates the photo as being taken shortly after she’d broken her vow and joined my father in his venture. I remember it as a happy time, but I have no idea what, specifically, would have provoked such a playful attitude. Who talked her into climbing up on the counter and posing like a calendar girl, with one knee over the other? Her smile suggests not only that she’d laid down some burden but also that she’d just been told she was beautiful and believed it. Out of character, in other words. Usually my mother refused to be photographed at all, and on those rare occasions when she did agree she seemed to be trying to make herself disappear and mostly succeeding.
And where was I? Holding the camera? That would make sense, but I don’t recollect the incident, even though my memories of the period, as my little history suggests, are encyclopedic. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before,” I told her. “Of course I want it.”
“I was going through an old album,” she said.
“I hope you wouldn’t ever throw anything like this out without asking me,” I said, to which she replied, “I did ask you. Didn’t I.”
This gifting process troubles me. It began a couple of years ago, my mother producing some item that belonged to my father and asking if I had “any interest” in it. Some of this I could understand. My father was a pack rat. For thirty years he brought stuff home from flea markets and yard sales, even the dump. “Wonderful. More crap,” my mother would say when he arrived home, telling her to come look at what somebody was going to throw out if he hadn’t happened by. But eventually even she admitted he had a good eye for the kind of thing somebody’d pay money for, maybe not today, but someday: the right baseball card, an old campaign button. And later, when he was ill and it looked like we’d lose everything, we sold many of his treasures to help with costs, which left only the junk he’d been wrong about, that cost a quarter or fifty cents twenty years ago and was still worth a quarter or fifty cents. After he died, I put box after box of flea market bric-a-brac in storage, unable to part with it, especially if I recalled the day he brought it home or his explanation of why it would one day be valuable. I still go through this stuff from time to time. Now it’s boxed up in our cellar, where, one day, Owen will find it.
It’s hard to know what my son will make of items like the frogs. My father had little use for dirty jokes or anything pornographic, but one evening when I came into Ikey’s to relieve him on his supper break, he asked if I could tell the difference between a male and a female frog, and pushed two ceramic figures across the counter at me. I was at the age when any question having to do with sex made me apprehensive, not wanting to appear stupid on so important a subject,
and I remember looking at the identical frogs with genuine misgiving. “It ain’t that hard,” he said when I confessed I had no idea, then turned them over to reveal their pale undersides, one of which sported a penis, the other breasts and a tiny vagina that looked like a grain of barley. The frogs had been a gift, I later learned, from Uncle Dec, who’d gotten a lot of mileage out of my father’s inability to tell the difference either. Owen, no doubt, will toss it all, but better him than me.
I understand why my mother might want to divest herself of such dubious possessions. I do. Still, it occurred to me one day last year how little was left in her apartment to remind her of him, or even their marriage. Was she trying to erase him? Many times over the last eighteen months she has offered me something with the excuse of having no room for it but which, like this photograph, takes up no room at all. It’s as if the dark smudge over the sofa is full and sufficient reminder of their lives together, and this possibility, I admit, has made me increasingly bitter.
Which may be why, when she asked if I had “any interest” in the photo of her and my father and Uncle Dec, I felt my resentment rise up, like bile. I told myself to swallow it as I always do, today of all days, so soon after the upset of Buddy Nurt and less than a week before Sarah and I leave for Italy. My mother is old and frail and she has her reasons, not all of which can be known to me or, for that matter, even to herself. Maybe it has less to do with my father than her own mortality, and this gifting is her grim acknowledgment that we don’t in the end get to take anything with us. Still, I heard myself say, “Mom, does it ever seem to you that no matter what we’re discussing, we’re always arguing about Dad?”