My cheek stung at first, and then it was a hot burn. “You want to kill me, Dilworth?” I said. “You want to try to kill me, you one-armed fuck?”
But he didn’t say anything. The anger drained from his face. He looked into my eyes like he might kiss me, he was looking at me that deep. He said, “It isn’t good to have a gun in the house. It’s too dangerous. I hid it in the punch bowl on top of the china closet. Guns are horrible things.” He put his good hand, his left, up to his heart. He said, “She kills me. She’s done me in, son.” His eyes teared, spilled over onto his cheeks. And he turned then and went back to his chair, his TV. He shoved the chair back to recline, the footrest popping up.
I walked into the kitchen to the key ring and pulled his set off its hook, my body shaking. I said, “I’m not your son.” I almost felt as sorry for Dilworth as I felt for myself, but I decided that I was nothing like him. I was nothing like any of them, Mr. Pichard or Mr. Worthington or even my real dad. I slammed out the back door, got in Dilworth’s car, revved it, and tore out of the driveway, leaving a trail of rising gravel dust for Dilworth to watch settle from his seat by the window.
I knocked lightly on the door to my grandmother’s room, and I could hear her shuffling to stand before she said, “Come in,” so that when I opened the door she was upright, barely touching the walker in front of her, a show of her toughness; she’s that type of old person. Her hair was tied back tightly. She had on no makeup, and she looked tall again, too tall for her walker.
“Well, Ezra, I’ve survived it. My brain clicking again. Still too much clicking, an overload, but here I am. A walking short circuit.”
“You look healthy,” I said, antsy to get out of there.
She leaned forward, whispered, “It’s an awful thing, Ezra, to have to swim in your head, the backed-up blood of your swollen heart.” She shook her head. “I sound crazy, but it’s only now that I’m making any sense.”
I didn’t want to understand her. I wanted just to do my job, deliver the old lady home to her crazy daughter. I just wanted for the summer to be over, to seal up my eyes and ears until I got back to school, its stone buildings, perfect playing fields, its sun-swathed classrooms. But I did understand her, the way Miss Abernathy always wants us to understand things: deeply. I knew what she was saying about her swollen heart, about sounding crazy, too, when you were finally making sense.
An orderly wheeled her down to the elevator through the revolving door and helped her into the passenger’s side of Dilworth’s car. We drove home in near silence, my grandmother still leaking words, milk, maybe, stain, and open it, open it, like she wanted someone to unlock a door. My mother must have been watching for us from the square window in the building’s front door. It swung open as soon as we pulled up, and there she was, so much the same that I was shocked by her. She was wearing a sleeveless linen suit, different from the one she wore the last time I saw her. This one was cream-colored. I stepped out of the car. “You look the same,” I said.
“What did you expect? A monster?”
I opened my grandmother’s door. “No, not at all,” I said, but I had expected some change, something to be different. Maybe I’d expected frazzled hair, slippers, and sweat pants, but instead she seemed more herself, an expanded version, more real, like for years she’d been stuck in the film of herself on the reel-to-reel so newly colorized that none of the pinks are quite pink, and only now for the first time was she in real-life color. I’d been thinking of her as ill, but maybe I had it backward, maybe she’d been ill before but was finally all better.
She touched my arm. “I’ve been sleeping, Ezra, finally after all of these years. Real sleep.” She stepped back, looking me up and down. “You seem taller,” she said, “but you can’t be. It’s only been a little while. I must have an image of you as younger, but you’re not so young anymore.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not.” I felt old. I thought maybe when I was my grandma’s age, I’d feel young because I’d already been old. I’d been Mr. Pichard’s drinking buddy, for god’s sake.
“You could stay here with us, you know.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s a small place, and I’ve got all my stuff in the pool bungalow. It’s easier to just stay out there.”
My grandmother stepped out of the car, one sturdy shoe at a time. I pulled the walker out of the backseat on the other side and set it down in front of her, lifting her up to it under her arm.
“I’ve got it from here, Ezra,” my mother said. “I can take care of her.” My grandmother started to walk toward the door with the slow clink and tap of her walker. My mother was at her side and they tilted toward each other, their need like a magnet now between them, as they walked up the cracked and buckling sidewalk.
Pixie
When my mother had just come home from the hospital, she’d stopped talking in that incessant stream of words, for the most part, but sometimes I could still hear her say coal, consumption—the two ways her parents had died—and sometimes when a light came on, she’d whisper Cliff, in a questioning voice, as if someone had just walked into the room and she’d been expecting it to be her son. There was still a certain strangeness to the way she talked. I could follow along, but she was always saying something just a little off, the way poets never really say what they mean, but seem, sometimes, to be saying things the most clearly you’ve ever heard them.
That first evening home, she asked me to help her take a bath. I knelt on the fuzzy yellow bath mat in her bathroom to help her, and she said, “I’m a child again, Pixie. They say that happens when you get old. It all comes around, doesn’t it? You’re the mother, now.” She was sitting in the tub, her knees bent, poking up above the water’s edge. I handed her the soap, and she turned it in her thick-knuckled hands.
“I guess so,” I said.
“I don’t mind going to the coal-crusted honey of my childhood, dipping back into that pot. I loved then the way a child does and I can love again like that now.” I assumed she meant that she loved me that way, finally, after all these years. “I could go all the way back, couldn’t I? Back to the beginning, a fish, an egg glistening in a sac, the only memory us half fish have of heaven. Remember that we are half fish? I’ve told you that.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s one of your famous speeches. That and how Mary should have said no to Gabriel, that she should have refused to have the son of God.”
“I was right,” she said. “Wasn’t I? Mary should have stuck up for us women.”
“We’ve done okay in that department, sticking up for ourselves.” We need each other and that need is like water being poured from one cup to another, the two never really becoming even, one always tipping to the next to fill it and then that one pouring some back.
“Yes,” she said. “We’re allies, aren’t we? With our shared secrets?”
I nodded and squeezed a sponge at the base of her neck. She curled forward, letting the water pour down the knots of her bare back. I’ve come to the conclusion that my mother saved me twice: once when she gave me a lie and once when she gave me the truth. It was what I was thinking at the time, and she must have known it.
She said, “You’d have done it too. You’d have done it.”
And I knew that she was talking not only about the bat that she drove down on my father’s head and the lie about the man, but also about handing over the whole story to me, finally, the truth. “I guess so,” I said. “Yes. I guess I would have.”
“You would have.” And she looked up at me, her eyes filled with tears, spilling onto her cheeks, one still stiff with its slight sag.
I said, “You know it wasn’t your fault. None of it. You know that, don’t you? It’s almost vain to think that you made the bad things happen just because you were happy once. Can’t you see it’s a crazy way to go around thinking?”
She sniffed, tightening her chin, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
“Do you forgive him?” I asked, but I d
idn’t give her a chance to answer. “I forgive him,” I said. It was true at that moment that I could forgive my father. But even as I said it, I knew that it wasn’t something that I would be able to hold on to, that I would spend the rest of my life forgiving him and then not and then forgiving him again, that for the rest of my life my heart would expand and contract. I only hope that maybe, one day, when I least expect it, my heart will open and stay open and forgiveness will be the only thing left: my father just a kid, the tattooed Hula dancer fresh on his arm, his two free fists raised above his head, my father, shaking water from his hair.
“Look at us,” she said. “We’re crazy, aren’t we? You and me. We’d have to be for having come this far.”
“Yes,” I said. “We’re quite a pair. Crazy, yes, absolutely.”
Ezra
When I got home, Mitzie was sitting on the front step. I didn’t pull the car all the way in back, just up to the walkway. It was after seven. I remembered it was Tuesday, one of her nights to have dinner with Dilworth. It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun was beginning to be pulled from the air, like the dark coming on was a hollowness, the wind kicking up at the tops of the trees. She was sitting there, her back straight, her head to one side.
I said, “Mitz, what are you doing?”
“Ezra? I didn’t know you’d come. I didn’t know who would come, but I’m happy it’s you.”
“Come for what?”
“He’s dead.”
“Who?”
“He’s lying in blood. There’s a gun on the floor, but I didn’t touch the gun. I didn’t touch anything, but I must have stepped in the blood. It’s on my shoe.” She showed me her shoe, the rubber tip of a white sneaker smeared red, and there was a little footprint trail across the bricks. “He looks like a baby, Ezra. He looks like a little baby, his eyes wide open, like a picture of a baby, frozen like that. His mouth is open, too, like he died singing his favorite song.”
I walked past her into the house. Dilworth was slumped on the floor, just as Mitzie had described him, his eyes and mouth open, the pool of blood, the gun. His body was slightly turned on his side, his legs apart, knees bent, like he’d been running, about to jump, and I thought of him skipping along, singing, like Mitzie had put it, but lying down. He’d shot himself, I assumed, in his heart that he’d touched earlier with his good left hand. His shirt was blood-soaked, the floor wet with what seemed like a bucket of blood that had flowed from the curl of his body to the window. The blood was still inching out wider and wider.
I went to the phone, dialed 911. I was calm. My hands were steady, but I could feel something tightening in my chest. I said, “My stepdad shot himself,” and my voice sounded like someone else’s voice. I called up the Worthingtons. I told Mrs. Worthington to come over and take Mitzie home. I said, “Take her home,” because already the Worthingtons’ house was her home.
I went back to Dilworth. I sat on the dry floor at his back. His hair still had the fine-tooth-comb lines running through it, but puffed like a bird’s feathers when it puffs up for winter. I touched his hair. I pressed it back with my hand, smoothing it. I patted his arm, lightly, his back, like he was just sick, coughing a little. My hand was red with blood. The yard, the house, the walls were stained with red and blue swirling lights. “I didn’t kill you,” I said, because that was the thing tightening in my chest. I thought of my mother, how she knew that men were fragile. I imagined us walking around, our bones made of glass, my own bones made of glass. I thought about all of the men I knew, my father, Richard, Mr. Pichard, the minister at school, the headmaster. I thought about Mr. Worthington and Dr. Pinkering. I thought about my grandfather who died underwater. I thought of Cliff, his body being blown up in a field. I loved them. I started crying because I loved them all so much. I loved Dilworth. I said it out loud, “I love you.” I wiped my bloody hand on my shirt and I said it again and again.
Mrs. Worthington tapped at the screen door. I walked up to the door, and she stepped back. She must have seen the blood on my shirt. The blood on my hand had already started to get sticky, like the juice of a plum. The yard was swimming red and blue. It was raining, a soft solid rain. I stepped out in it.
Mrs. Worthington followed me off the stoop. She had a yellow umbrella, and I wondered how she’d been so prepared. It was as if she’d known that Dilworth was going to shoot himself, and that when he did, it would be raining, and she’d carry a cheery umbrella, something bright and happy, a yellow one. And I imagined how she’d opened it on her front step—not in the house, that would be dangerous—but on the front stoop, how each pleated flap suddenly filled with a snap until the umbrella was tight and rounded. I thought of my heart, how I thought it was just one shape and now it seemed to have opened up like the yellow umbrella, for the first time filling my too-tight chest.
“Mitzie’s with us,” Mrs. Worthington said. I walked down the steps, and she reached out to steady me, but I ignored her hand. I looked up at the sky, the moon clouded over. I walked out into the middle of the yard, a police car and an ambulance already out front, sirens, far off, still coming. I tried not to think of Dilworth’s heart, the bullet that I thought he’d buried deep inside of it. I wanted to know who I was. I wanted to know if I was a murderer. I opened my arms, let the rain wash down on me, let it wet the blood on my hand till my fingers were slick, passing over each other like small fish.
I answered the policemen’s questions. I watched Dilworth come out on a stretcher, the blood seeping through the white in small round, widening dots, like red mold, spores growing furiously in the dark. But the sheet wasn’t covering his face, and they were working on him, a bunch of white shirts hovering over him, moving quickly. I asked one of the cops what they were doing. “Isn’t he dead?”
“No,” he said. “If it was his heart he was aiming for, he missed. And by the looks of his other shoulder, he’s not the best shot.” And so Dilworth failed to kill himself and I was relieved, not completely, but a little. I wondered how I’d thought it possible that he could kill himself, that Dilworth was capable of something so bold and tragic as death. I still felt guilty, but I was relieved that it wasn’t as easy as I thought to die, that maybe men weren’t as fragile, at least not as physically fragile, as my mother had told me. Stupid, yes, but maybe not always on the verge of breaking. I imagined Dilworth standing on a chair to get the gun out of the punch bowl on top of the china closet where he’d hidden it from my mother. I imagined him thinking almost poetically, as poetically as Dilworth is capable, about his heart, that it was the route of the problem, and how then maybe he tried to use his right hand to cross his chest and take aim. But it was a stupid plan, wasn’t it? What with the nerve damage? How could he get it right, and, if he didn’t, if he was just enough off, couldn’t he blame that on his wife, on his bum arm? And so the gun didn’t quite shoot straight. The bullet snagged his other shoulder, and he just fell down and lay there, letting all his red-blooded American blood spill across the floor.
I don’t remember everything. One of the cops gave me a pullover, one of my own from the hall closet. Another offered to give me a lift somewhere. “You got some family?” he asked.
He took me to my grandmother’s. I remember the cruiser’s wide seat, the dull banter over the CB radio. The cop walked me to the door, but I said I was fine from there. The hallway smelled the same, dank and heavy, something frying, piss. I didn’t knock at the apartment door. I turned the knob and it opened. It was dark, except I could see my grandmother awake, struggling now to stand up by her chrome walker. Birds flapped around her, birds fluttered across the room, small bodies darting through the light. She was calm. She’d been dozing.
“Ezra?” she said. “What is it? Something wrong?”
I walked back to my mother’s bedroom, the one lit from the crack under the door. I twisted the knob like pulling fruit from a tree, and my grandmother followed. Her mouth was no longer pouring words, but I could still feel the words, the ones that we all had inside
of us, each word with its glow, its blueness, rooted and heavy, so many that the room felt like it was swelling with things unsaid, like bread rising and pouring over the sides of its tin.
My mother was in bed, her middle covered by white sheets, her legs bare, her whole body striped in light thrown from the streetlight through the blinds. I sat down on the side of the bed, let it sag beneath my weight. I curled my body next to hers, gently. I didn’t want to stir her nightmares, to scare her, but I had to whisper that I didn’t kill him, that Dilworth tried to kill himself, but that it had nothing to do with me. She didn’t wake up. She pulled me to her chest. She whispered my name, sleepily, like she’d been waiting up for me. I felt something like lovesickness, like hunger, heavy lidded, my whole body stone-heavy. My grandmother stood in the door for a while, light from behind her fanning through her hair. She grew quiet, and then I heard the popping of the rubber stoppers of her walker down the hall. My ear cupped to my mother’s chest, I listened to the shush, shush of blood, the purr of her breath. She smelled sweet, powdery. She hummed a song I’d heard before, a light song, but I couldn’t place the words. She stroked my hair. She rocked me on the bed. I could feel the sway of her breasts against my chest. And then my cheeks grew hot. I was embarrassed. I felt a hard swell. I reared away from her.
“What’s wrong, Ezra?”
I must have looked startled. “I don’t know,” I said. She leaned toward me, confused. “I don’t have many choices,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I was thinking about when I’d stepped out in the yard after I thought maybe I was responsible for Dilworth’s death—what turned out to be his botched suicide—that I was a murderer. But now I wondered if I was a faggot, after all, just like my real father, because it suddenly seemed clear that I could only be one of the two, that those were the only two options open for me, for any boy my age, for that matter, Rudy and Pete and all the boys at school, Kermit Willis and Manuel, too. I didn’t answer her.