“You can’t trust men,” he said.
“I thought you couldn’t trust women.”
“You can’t trust anybody. Even the good ones.”
“And my father’s one of the good ones?”
“Your father, Ezra, is one of the great ones. You can’t see it, but he is. Deep down, he really can love people, really and truly.”
I thought of what Richard had said about his own parents, that he knew they loved him in their hearts. I thought that would be a terrible way of having to go through life, having to imagine everyone’s love for you locked away someplace just out of sight, and it wasn’t the way I wanted to live my life, but also I was jealous of how easy it was for Richard to accept things this way, and I wished I could love my father in that uncomplicated, easy way, to take his love on faith.
I spent a lot of time the next few days thinking of my mother locked away and me locked away and how we were both in asylums of sorts. I wondered if she was making puppets or spilling her guts. I wondered if they’d gotten her to cry. I thought of Mr. and Mrs. Pichard as little puppets in my hands and how I could learn to talk for them, Richard, too, his puppet in a boa. I imagined my father as a puppet, just my hand with a tissue over it, my father, the ghost.
When he finally did show up one morning a little after eleven, he was wearing a Phillies baseball cap. It was new, the white still white, the red stitching still tight and bold. We were all huddled around the TV watching Oprah, a reunion show, a real tearjerker. When he walked in the door, everyone started to get up, Mr. Pichard to be polite, Mrs. Pichard to start fixing up dinner, and Richard to look annoyed with his hands on his hips.
“No, no,” he said. “Don’t get up. Ezra and I have to head back to Delaware. We’ll take the train.”
“Oh, pish posh,” Mrs. Pichard said. “You can stay another night, surely. It’s getting dark.” It wasn’t close to dark.
“No, I’ve talked to Ezra’s stepfather. He just needs to get his bag. Sorry it’s so abrupt.”
“Oh, no,” Richard said, “don’t worry about me. Just leave me here again.”
“If they’ve got to go, they’ve got to go,” Mr. Pichard said. “I’ll give them a ride to the station.”
“No,” Richard said. “I’ll give them a ride. It’s the only thing I can do.”
“And thank you,” my father said to Mr. and Mrs. Pichard. “Really, one day I’ll repay you when you least expect it. That’s a promise.”
“Oh, you’re very welcome,” Mrs. Pichard said. Mr. Pichard grunted, probably not too convinced by my father’s promise.
I went and got my bag from the bedroom. It was sitting already zipped up on the white fringed bedspread as it had been for days, waiting for my father to pop in and haul me out of here. I didn’t want to stay, but I didn’t want to go either.
When I walked back into the living room, Richard and my father were already out the door. Mr. Pichard slapped me on the back. “What shoe size do you wear?”
“Excuse me?”
“What’s your shoe size?”
“Nine and a half,” I said.
“Get him some shoes from the closet, Hester,” he said, and she scurried back into the kitchen where I imagined there was a pantry filled with shoe boxes. She came back with a dusty box.
“Try these on when you get home,” Mr. Pichard said.
“They’ll never wear out,” Mrs. Pichard added.
“Thanks, for everything,” I said. I held on to the shoe box. There was something enticing about the idea that the shoes would never wear out, that some things could last forever and never change, like the Pichards’ whole world, nothing like mine.
They smiled and walked me to the door.
Richard beeped the horn. “We’ll miss the train!” he shouted out.
My father was in the passenger’s seat now, looking up into the porch light. His face looked slack, tired. I figured things hadn’t gone well, that the big ship hadn’t docked.
I ran down the steps and slouched in the backseat.
Richard put the car in gear and pulled a U-turn in the middle of the street. “They gave you shoes,” he said.
“Yep.”
“I bet they’ve got buckles,” my father said.
I opened up the box and there they were, navy blue with a big buckle on top. But I didn’t want to give my father the satisfaction of thinking he knew them so well. “Nope,” I lied. “They’re lace-ups.”
“Really?” Richard said, like he suspected I was lying, but he didn’t push it.
“If I’m going back to Delaware,” I said to my father, “where are you going?”
“On to New York.”
I’d figured as much.
“Is the mother all better now?” Richard asked.
My father answered as if I’d asked the question, looking back at me over his shoulder, with his other hand holding down the brim of his baseball cap. “She’s almost herself, the old tight end told me. I can’t imagine what that could mean. I think your mother is unknowable, a beautiful mystery, always.”
My father filled me in on his conversation with Dilworth. It was a given that it was “impractical,” as my father put it, for me to go with him to New York and then back to California, and, he said, Dilworth didn’t seem too keen on the idea either. He said the word keen, which, not being the type of word he’d use, led me to believe that it was a direct quote from Dilworth, which made me picture Dilworth again as that happy stewardess. Mitzie was at the Worthingtons and my grandmother was recovering.
“Ezra should stay here,” Richard said. “Look at me! I’m perfectly prepared to take over the helm of motherhood.”
“You’re a regular captain of motherhood,” my father said.
“I’m Captain Motherhood!” Richard said in a deeply cartoonish voice. He zipped around potholes and flew into the station. “All aboard!” he said. “You better run.”
“Thanks, Richard,” my father said, both of us hopping out of the car.
“For what? The freak show that is my parents?” he said. He turned to me. “Your father’s a good man,” he said. “He’s a son of a bitch, but the good kind.”
“Thank your parents again for the shoes,” I said.
“Watch out,” he warned. “If you put them on and click your heels together, you’ll end up at their dinner table, in hell, forever.”
On the train, my father and I found two seats together. I settled in next to the window. We each shoved our bags under our feet.
My father said, “You must want to ask me something. You know you can ask me anything.”
“I don’t have anything to ask,” I said.
“Sure, you must have something,” he said.
I was pretty sure he wanted me to inquire about his lifestyle, a heart-to-heart, a father-son heart-to-heart bonding, the kind you read about in books, as if he were capable of that sort of thing. But really, when you come right down to it, I don’t care that my dad’s gay. I couldn’t give a shit. What I couldn’t stand about him was that he was a child, he was childish. He was supposedly the father, but I could have taught him a thing or two about how you show someone that you love them, the kind of commitment a real relationship takes, that you can’t go around being squeamish about it all, disappearing the first chance you get. “You go to a ball game?” I asked.
He paused and then laughed, “Oh, this,” he said, tightening the curved bill with his big hand. “Yeah, there was a game. A business acquaintance had an extra ticket. Work-related.” There was a pause. “But that’s not what I meant. I thought you might have a question about me.”
“If you have an answer you can tell me, but I’m not going to ask a question.”
“Okay,” he said, “let me think. It goes something like this: a history of my life,” he said. “I’ve been scared to do what I wanted. I’ve done what I’ve wanted. And now I try not to want.”
It almost sounded like a rule to live by, but I hated it. I hated it for what it was on th
e surface: it could never include passion or Janie Pinkering. And I hated it because it was a lie. I was sure that my father still did whatever he wanted. “I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Well, you’re a smart boy,” he said. “Anyway, I didn’t say I was succeeding.”
There was a long pause, and I had the feeling that he was thinking, working something through. Then he said, “You know, you were born because of our repressed society. You’re a direct result, if you know what I mean. And when I think of the things that I hate about repressed societies—hate crimes and rows and rows of identical tract housing—my mind doesn’t whir for long before I think of the good you. My relationship with your mother was something of a miracle of repressed society. What I’m saying is that if I’d been raised in a pure environment to be who I am, I wouldn’t have married your perfect mother and I wouldn’t have had you, and you are the best thing that I could have ever created.” He paused. “And so you should feel lucky. That’s the way to look at it, Ezra. Good fortune. There are worse things than repressed societies to be born because of.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just such a lucky kid.” I thought of all of those speeches I’d been given my whole life, the ones on starving kids in China and what it must have been like to have been Anne Frank, and how I was supposed to be happy all the time or I was a spoiled jerk. All that crap. “What were you born out of?”
“Catholic duty and, probably, a love of the Yankees. It was baseball season. And drunkenness, too much glogg.” He laughed. “See? We’re getting to know each other better already.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”
I got off in Wilmington. My backpack already over my shoulder, my shoe box under my arm, I stood up in the aisle, and my father did too. He gave me a hug, a firm hug, with two strong thuds on the back, but I just stood there. He said, “You’re such a good kid. But you show too much, you know? You’ve got to remember that sometimes it’s better to send in the lamb. You’ll know what I mean. I forget sometimes how young you are.”
It was easy to hate him, to think he was saying that I should learn to fake it, to make his life easier. He might as well have told me that life was bullshit, that I had to grow up and learn to bullshit and be more like him. He walked me to the steps leading to the platform as if the train was his house and he was walking me to the door. I stepped down and walked into the glass enclosure toward the escalator. When I looked back, my father was still standing there, leaning in the opening. He was warped by the glass. He looked tired, but as soon as he saw me he waved, just his hand in the air. I wished it was an old train, one with steam, one just about to set off into a fog. I wanted to lose my father in a cloud, but he was standing there, with his heart beating in his chest, blood running through his veins, his lungs pulling and pushing air. I preferred the ghost. There was a gust of wind, a hot breeze, and the Phillies baseball cap flipped off my father’s head, backward, behind him, into the train and he turned around to go after it.
Pixie
How to Shoot Your Husband
I’d been at the hospital long enough. There was no need to keep me any longer, what with certain insurance concerns, and I’d passed every test. I needed no medication. I’d have to keep up regular sessions with a counselor of some sort, but I was free to go. This was what the little psychiatrist told me. It was our last session. She said, “You’re well on your way to recovery.”
I looked around the wood-paneled room, the diplomas hung on the wall.
She said, “Do you want to tell me?”
And I knew what she was asking for, the real story, the one she could sense always lying just beneath the surface of everything else.
I told her.
I didn’t want to shoot Dilworth. I wanted to shoot the stranger in my bed. But, you can say to yourself, Aren’t we all strangers? And I would agree. Yes, even to ourselves. For me, there’s always been a stranger in my bed, a man always coming for me, a secret so old that the man has become an ordinary shape, something as common as my husband’s broad back, one shoulder dug into the mattress, the pillow pressed flat beneath his giant, squarish head. It’s something every day, a noise you know but that’s also out of place, like the birds that night. I remember them, twittering in the dark. And sometimes someone says something, and it’s immediately true; although you fight it, some part of you knows it’s the truth. And you’ve always known it without knowing it. It’s like finding something that you didn’t know you were looking for, a covered button years after you’ve thrown the dress away. My mother had pulled back a sheet in my mind, a bed she’d made years before, and there was Dilworth’s body, the length of it, naked, down to his thick ankles and wide stumped toes. It was not Dilworth but a stranger, and then it was not a stranger at all but my father, a slick lock of hair on his forehead, wet and black. And I remembered that my father had become a stranger in my house before that night, like the men on the street who watched me, the press of their eyes on my body, and how my mother knew, said, “She’s too old to sit on your lap.” And to my father, “You’re too old, too.” She hated him and stirred the beans at the stove, the ash of her cigarette growing long. Wasn’t my mother’s lie almost the truth, a stranger in the house? That night was hot, too. There was no air-conditioning, just the thick breeze from the window screen and then the body on top of me, heavy and hot, wet with sweat. I’m not really there, but above, circling the ceiling of my room like that old saint who flew around church rafters, my arms flapping against the ceiling looking down on the struggling bodies. There’s screaming down the hall, and muffled in my own throat. And, yes, there’s a figure back-lit in the doorway, tall and thin, arms raised and the bat, too. My mother. Cliff standing behind her, his hands shaking like two alarm clocks at his sides, and then the heavy blow, the deep drum of wood and skull, my father’s body limp on mine. My mouth fills with blood, the rustiness of it. It’s easy to mistake one thing for another. The shot rings in my ears. The gun’s recoil stings my hands. Dilworth rears from bed. The blood is real, the sheet bright with it. Ezra this time, not my mother, shouting out across the yard. Mitzie now the one in the doorway, her little white nightgown showing her red knees, not Cliff. The room is filled with white moths, blurry, so thick with wings that I can barely breathe. I would whisper to my brother now, if I could, that my father was not the enemy, that I was not a country to be saved. Stop here, I’d tell him, with everyone as they are. And I try to stop, too, looking at my kids, my husband, stumbling down the hall. We are all real, suddenly obviously ourselves in a room. The moths escape through open windows. And it’s like looking through the curve of clear water in a glass jar. I slip into my body, the tight fit of being stitched into this skin.
No matter what happens, no matter what comes, you stand up. This is what my mother meant when she said once during an argument, “One day you’ll understand, you’ll know that I never once gave in, not even in the smallest way.” My mother this time takes my arm and leads me to the tub. I can remember that, too, now. The water roaring from the faucet, the red swirl rising up from between my legs. She’s talking, her words pouring over me, the sponge soapy, wrung out in her rough hands, the tub now pink with blood. She says that she’s afraid to love too much, that she knows I’ll be taken away from her, like this, she says, this way. See? She’s always tried not to love too much. She says, “Don’t disappear, Pixie. Don’t disappear on me, girl.” She’s crying. She’s scrubbing me down. She says, “There was a stranger, remember him? There was a man . . .” And she washes it all away.
Part Three
Ezra
Rule #13: Disregard all previous rules. They’re complete bullshit.
Helga was parked in the loading zone down the stairs outside the station. Because of her fear of birds, we had to drive home in 100-degree heat with the windows of her Ford Escort just barely cracked open, so no birds could accidentally fly in.
She said, “It hass only gotten worse. Your grandmother’s birds are green monsters with
sharp beaks.”
The car’s air conditioner, of course, was busted, if it had ever existed in the first place. Helga sat snug in the driver’s seat, her rump squared by the seat’s edges, her belly pressed against the wheel so much so that I wondered how she could make a turn. But if the seat were pushed farther back for breathing room, I supposed her short legs wouldn’t be able to reach the pedals.
“So,” she said, “your father’s okay.”
“He’s gay,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a shame because he’s a handsome man. There wass a boy like that in my hometown in Germany and all the girls were in lof with him and I wass too. Men usually lof me. I have a certain charm, but not with him.”
I leaned my forehead against the window, so hot I wondered if I could die like this, of suffocation with Helga in her Ford Escort, her big mouth sucking in all the oxygen, only miles away from home and Janie. I wasn’t sure if it seemed so hot and stifling because of where I was coming from—the tight confines of life with the Pichards and my father on the train, or where I was going—back to my mother and Dilworth and God-knows-what. I only knew that maybe if I got to Janie’s without dying, I might be able to breathe again. I sighed. “But you can’t love all these men, can you? I mean really fall in love with them?”
Helga turned to me and smiled broadly. She stopped at a red light and folded her short arms across her bosom like a sturdy German Buddha and said, “I am like Jesus. I lof them all.” Helga’s pink dress was stained dark under her fat arms, her face shiny with sweat. It seemed like she meant it. I felt like I knew nothing about love, whether it was real at all or just something that might or might not swim inside each of us deep down, unseen, something Richard had no problem believing in.
The light turned green and she shoved the car into gear. “Your mother,” she said, “iss no longer in the hospital. She iss staying at your grandmother’s apartment and has taken over the birds. Thank Got. She wants to see you, but she’s been sleeping. It wass a bad place to sleep, she told me, and now she iss sleeping in your grandmother’s spare bedroom. She wants you to call.”