“Don’t,” she heard Susan say. “Don’t give it to him, he’ll eat it.”
“Kids?” Mary called. “Everything okay in there?”
A silence fell. She called, “Billy? Can you hear me?”
He appeared immediately in the doorway, his face red. “Chucky wants my Easter chick,” he said.
Mary glanced at Eleanor. Eleanor called out, “Chuck, what are you doing in there?”
“Nothing,” Chuck answered peevishly. “Playing.”
Billy looked at the floor as if something enigmatic was stitched into the carpet. “He put my lamb in his mouth,” he said.
“You can share with your cousin, can’t you?” she said.
“Chuck,” Eleanor said. “Are you behaving yourself?”
“Yeah, Ma,” he answered.
Billy raised his eyes from the carpet and looked at Mary with an expression of mingled hope and terror. He wore the litle yellow jacket she’d saved for, the paisley bow tie. “Come here, honey,” she said. Her voice was louder than she’d meant it to be. “I want you to help me with the dessert.”
He trotted to her side. “He was going to eat it,” he said.
“Well, you have to share your things,” Mary told him. “Come on, I need you to help me get out the ice cream.” She touched his hair. It put out a faint electrical crackle, the tiny hum of his being.
“Mary, you spoil that kid,” Joey said.
She shrugged. She remembered to smile.
Her little brother, Eddie, said, “Bill, why don’t you go back out there and tell Chuck what you’ll do to him if he eats your candy?”
Billy’s eyes filled. Constantine smiled, and Mary kept her hand on top of Billy’s head. She suffered an urge to take his hair in her fingers and yank on it.
“I need his help,” she told Eddie sharply. “Come on, honey. We’ve got troops to feed.”
She herded him into the kitchen, where Sophia was running dishwater. “Oh, leave everything,” Mary told her. Sophia and Eddie had been trying for years to have children. Sophia was a hefty, sweet-natured woman who walked through her life in an attitude of hearty, optimistic defeat. The babies would grow to a certain point, then dissolve in her womb.
“I just thought I’d get things started,” Sophia said.
“You know what you could do?” Mary said. “You could take out the dessert forks and plates. They’re right over there, see?”
“Yes. Sure. I’d be happy to.”
Mary went into the pantry for the cake. Billy followed her, his miniature black shoes making their clean rubber sounds on the floor. Her heart ached.
“Here it is,” she said. “My masterpiece.”
“Momma, I’m tired,” Billy said.
“I know, honey.” She lifted the cake platter. Her chest felt as if it was tied with iron bands.
“I hate Chucky,” Billy said.
“They’ll all be gone soon,” Mary said. Billy looked at her with an expression of mute fear that was like a fist in her belly. She stood in the middle of the kitchen, holding the cake. Its icing was flawless as new snow. She felt the windy chaos of the world, its endless dangers, and she wanted to tell her son, ‘I’m tired, too. I hate Chucky, too.’ She wanted to give the cake only to Billy and, at the same time, she wanted to hold it out of his reach.
“When is he going?” Billy asked.
“Soon, honey,” she said. “After we’ve had our cake. Come on now.”
She took the cake into the dining room. Billy followed her. “Tadaaa,” she said, flourishing the plate. Constantine said, “Wait till you see this. She coulda been a baker, my wife.”
Mary set the cake in the middle of the table, and modesdy received her praise. The cake did in fact look perfect. The gouge she’d cut in the ear was undetectable. Susan and Chuck and Al, the baby, had reseated themselves at the table.
“Here goes,” Mary said, taking up the cake knife. The rabbit cake was jaunty and whimsical, with just the right expression of benign surprise. She had done wonders with gumdrops and licorice. The air around her was dense, spangled with odd moments of light. Billy huddled beside her.
“So cut it,” Joey said. “We’re waiting. You got our mouths watering.”
“Mary?” Constantine said. “Mary?”
“Hmm? Oh, sorry.” She raised the knife and, with a firm smile, cut into the cake.
1960/ Billy and Kate were playing when the voices started. Kate rolled the die, lost a turn because her boyfriend was late picking her up. She was fat and not nervous and she didn't mind. She only wanted to win. Billy rolled the die and got sent to his father's car to pin up his hem. It was his regular bedroom and it seemed like they were safe.
Then his father's voice, shivering with fresh rage, leaked in under the door. “Where do you think money comes from? Mary? You think I know a secret place where it grows? I don't. I do not know a place like that.”
Kate leaned over the game board and said, “He's gonna murder her.”
“No, he isn't.”
Billy's mother said with furious patience, “Constantine, the money's gone. It's spent. So just get out of my way, all right? I'm trying to work.” Billy could hear his mother in the kitchen, cleaning. The mop handle banged against the kitchen cabinets insistently, like a horse kicking its stall.
Kate said, “If you come home from school one day and she's not around, call the police and tell them to look in the freezer. Don't look yourself. You'll go crazy if you see your mother in there.”
“Shut up,” Billy said. Kate maintained a system of complicated, ever-changing rules. She was Billy's best friend, a year older. She had five brothers in trouble, and she didn't mind about noise,
“That's the way it works, isn't it?” Billy's father shouted. 'That's how it works. You spend the money, you don't talk to me about it, and then after you say, 'The money is spent.' That's the system here. Right?”
“What do you want, Con? Requisition forms? You want me to check with you every time one of the kids needs some new underwear?”
“You can buy 'em all the underwear you want. We're talking here about a goddamn stuffed monkey that cost nine dollars and fifty cents. Am I right? Did I miss something?”
“Of course you're right. You're always right.”
The monkey sat pertly on Billy's bed, staring straight ahead with bright black eyes and a bemused, elderly expression. Its coat was a thick tangle of lush chocolate-colored curls. In the store with his mother Billy had looked at the monkey and she'd bought it without question, as if she herself felt the tidal pull of her son's desires. He wasn't even sure if he'd really wanted it. He wanted a Barbie like Susan's but his mother wanted him to want the stuffed monkey and so he did. He owned it now.
Kate said, “Seeing their mother dead is the one thing people never get over. If you see your mother dead, that's it, you go crazy, and nobody can help you.”
She rolled the die, got a date with Bob, her favorite. Billy preferred Ken and Poindexter, though Poindexter was supposed to be the date nobody wanted. Billy liked the way Poindexter's harmless face looked on the card, his orange hair and his little harmless eyes.
“Yay, Bob,” Kate shouted.
“Shh,” Billy said. When his father was home he was supposed to play other games.
“I love you, Bob,” Kate said. She kissed the card with Bob's face on it.
“Be quiet,” Billy said.
“Mm-mm, Bob,” Kate hollered. She stuck out her sharp pink tongue and licked the card. Billy threw the die at her. She threw it back, hard enough to hurt, and without quite having meant to, he told her she was so fat she'd need Bob and his whole family to take her to the prom. She left, weeping furiously, and Billy sat in his room for the rest of the afternoon, after the fight downstairs had worn itself out and after Kate had called from her house to tell him she'd grow out of being fat but he'd be stupid forever.
Billy was lying on his bed looking at his comic strip when his mother called him to dinner. It was an old st
rip, one his mother had given him, about a cat in love with a mouse who despised her. With every brick the mouse threw at her head the cat fell more deeply in love, until her head was lost in a whirlwind of hearts and exclamation points, the mingled signs of her devotion and her wounds. Billy had so adored the comic strip he'd begged his mother to let him keep it, and he looked at it almost every day, the big-nosed cat stupefied by love for the furious, spindle-armed mouse. His mother had read the words to him until he knew them by heart. “Ignatz my dollink. I loves ya a million times. Wham.” The sequence of panels excited him, stirred around in his chest. He never tired of watching the cat and the mouse go through their unchanging sequence of injury and pure, bottomless affection.
He went downstairs to dinner and sat at his usual place, watching everything. His father didn't speak. His father ate with a finicky reluctance that was not his ordinary way, cutting each bite precisely, like a tailor. Occasionally as he cut his meat he emitted a low moan, as if the stroke of the knife had touched his own flesh. Billy glanced at his father's hands, red and veined, big enough to palm his head. He reminded himself that he must not stare. He concentrated instead on the other, less dangerous members of the dinner. Zoe sat playing with a spoon that sparked and dimmed and sparked again in the lamplight. Susan sat across from Billy, blank and perfectly behaved, although Billy knew that her whole attention was focused on making sure no food on her plate touched any other food.
Billy's mother ate with cool precision. Eating, for her, was a task to be done methodically and thoroughly. As she ate she kept up a vivid stream of talk. Everything was a subject. It was her job to buy and cook the food and it was her job to take in the world and offer it back to her family as conversation. “I stopped by Widerman's today,” she said, “just to pick up a few things, and what do you think? They had a shelf full of transistor radios with a big sign that said, 'Special, Three Ninety-nine.' I couldn't believe it. I thought there had to be something wrong with them, so I asked Jewel, the one with the son who died at Pearl Harbor. Anyway, I said, 'Jewel, what's the matter with those radios?' And she said, 'Mary, I know what you mean, but there's not a thing wrong with them. They're Japanese.' The Japanese, it seems, will work for practically nothing, so these radios hardly cost more than the parts and the shipping. Can you beat that? These are the people who killed Jewel's only son, and now she's standing there selling their radios at prices no American company could possibly match. Jewel didn't seem to think anything about it, they're just cheap radios as far as she's concerned, but I told her I'd rather buy an American radio even if it cost four times as much. And you know what she did? She looked at me like I was crazy. This poor woman who's ruined her legs working at Widerman's for twenty years, and lost her only son to the Japanese, and she doesn't see anything wrong with people buying these radios. It made me wonder if she really understood about things. I wondered if, you know, she'd lost her mind a little. I think people can go crazy and just keep on about their business, I mean not every crazy person ends up in a strait-jacket. Like the other morning, when I was at the market—”
Billy marveled at his mother. Her inspiration never flagged. Each subject found its way to another. Billy's family lived in his mother's ongoing conversation the way they might have lived with a portable radio that played from early morning until after midnight, pouring out news and music and dramas both high and low. She was divine in the inexhaustible breadth of her interests. She worried over the extinction of nations and over a sparrow's tiny hiccup of death against the picture window.
Billy's father set his knife down on his plate and said, “So what's wrong with a cheap radio?”
His mother had moved on to something else, and was taken by surprise. “What?” she said.
“A cheap radio. A radio that costs three ninety-nine. What's the matter with that? Who cares where it comes from?”
“Con. The Japanese—”
“I know about the Japanese. You think I don't know about the Japanese?” He pointed at her with his fork. “The war is over, right? All over. You could get on an airplane today and fly to Japan. You could take your vacation there. But you”—he shook his fork at her—”you'd rather spend four times as much on a radio because it was made by some stranger in Philadelphia.”
“I'm not buying any radio, Con,” she said. “No one's buying any radio.”
“No. Just toys that knock the hell out of a ten-dollar bill.”
“Con—”
“This is the thinking that gets us into trouble.” He looked at Billy and Susan. “This is the thinking that keeps us broke. We pay triple for things because we don't like the guy who's making them cheap. We're Americans. We don't want a Japanese radio. We want a more expensive American radio. But toys. Hey. We want German stuffed animals. We want Italian shoes that cost five times as much as American. Never mind about Hitler and Mussolini. I want to tell you something.” He shook his fork at Billy now. “Your enemy isn't the Japanese. Your enemy is whoever charges you too much. That's it. That's what you need to know about friends and enemies.”
“Right,” his mother said, so softly she could barely be heard. “That's a fine thing to teach them. Oh, very nice.”
She had switched to her tiny voice. When she spoke in that voice she seemed to be addressing someone who lived inside her, an invisible friend who shared her belief that the world was great and wide but finally too exhausting for anyone to live in it.
After dinner, Billy lingered near his father. He didn't let himself get too close. His father sat in his chair, watching television. Billy played with his farm animals along the rug's opposite edge. He slipped away into the nowhere that hummed around the edges of everything. He arranged his pigs inside the plastic corral. He placed the pigs nose to nose and brought in the rust-colored horse that refused to stand straight on its plastic hooves.
In the kitchen, his mother rang the plates and glasses on the drainboard. With a rag she made squeakings that were the sound of cleanliness itself. She moved cleanly through the world; his father scattered spoor. Wherever he went he left hairs behind, threads of tobacco, limp pungent socks. In hot weather he stripped, massively hairy, to his undershorts and left his sweaty silhouette on the upholstery. Although Billy's mother mopped and vacuumed and nearly rubbed the skin off the furniture with her dustcloth, she couldn't expunge his father's intense, all-pervasive ownership.
The plastic horse fell again and again. It refused to stand, though Billy could not stop trying to force it. If he tried just a little harder, if he refused to give up, the little horse would finally straighten from the sheer size of his will. He bent and bent the legs until suddenly, with a crisply final sound, one snapped off at the knee. He held the severed leg, disbelievingly, in one hand and the crippled horse in the other. The leg was thin and articulate, its hoof edged in a ragged seam.
He set the leg down, carefully, as if it could feel pain. Still holding the three-legged horse, he walked to his father's chair and stood nervously until his father looked over at him.
“Uh-huh?” he said.
Billy couldn't speak. His father's knees showed a hint of their knobbed complexity through his thin gray slacks. His thighs, big as the hulls of boats, reflected light along their upper surfaces and, on their undersides, carried ragged shadows into the green depths of the chair. Billy stood inside his father's circle, breathing the sour particles of sweat and tobacco, the sweet underlayer of after-shave. “What is it?” his father asked.
Billy shrugged, and his father frowned in annoyance. “Speak up.”
“I need a new horse,” Billy said finally.
“Huh?”
“This horse is broken.” Billy was surprised by the sound of tears in his voice. “Its leg broke off.”
“You need something else?” his father said.
“It broke,” Billy said.
His father nodded, gathering his calm and his kindness. “The horse is still good,” he said. “This guy has just got hurt in a fight. He's basicall
y okay. Three legs is plenty for a horse.”
“No it isn't,” Billy said. He realized he would cry soon. He was mortified, but helpless to prevent it.
His father sucked in a breath. “What if I got you a football instead?” he said. “What if you and me went down to Ike's tomorrow and got a football? How would that be?”
Billy hesitated. He wanted to go to Ike's with his father in the morning, to try out different footballs and select the best one. But he also wanted what he'd asked for—a small, muscular horse that had no defect, that would stand as it was meant to.
“I don't want a football,” he said, though in fact he did want one. He wanted everything.
His father shook his head. “Forget it, then,” he said. He looked back at the television, where a happy blond woman sang a song about something that was like cheese, but better.
Billy would have traded anything to be able to keep from crying, but his sorrow and outrage were too much for him and the crying won, as it usually did. Crying pulled him down. He turned away from his father, uncertain about where to go. He wanted to go someplace where his crying wasn't. He wanted to step outside of it and sit watching television with his father, both of them disgrunded and annoyed as the crying swarmed around them.
His mother came into the room. “'What's going on?” She carried a limp dish towel, and her black hair crackled. Billy looked at her, helplessly, from the middle of his own noise.
“Your son wants a new horse,” Billy's father said. “He don't want a football. I told him I'd buy him a football, he don't want it. He wants a new toy horse.”
Billy could feel himself as a spoiled, greedy, ungrateful little boy. The louder he cried, the more firmly he became that, but the feeling of becoming it only made him cry harder. If he could have managed it he'd have slipped underground like a gopher and burrowed his way to Germany or Japan, someplace where he hadn't yet affected the air with his little desires.