One Amazing Thing (10 page)

I
n the boy’s earliest memories, his mother is always asleep, like Sleeping Beauty in the picture book she bought for him at a garage sale. And even though the boy loves his mother—loves her so much that sometimes he feels breathless, as when he’s trying to blow up a stiff, new balloon—already he realizes she isn’t that kind of pretty. She sleeps stretched out on the nubbly salt-and-pepper couch with a phone book wedged under the corner where one of its legs used to be. Her own legs are propped up on the frayed armrest because they tend to swell by the end of her shift, and when the boy is sure she’s fast asleep he sometimes presses down on her shinbone with a finger and watches the dip that forms. Her mouth is slightly open, its corners pulled down as though she’s just been handed a surprise of the less-than-pleasant variety. She snores softly. The sound comforts the boy, partly because it’s soothing and familiar, and partly because it’s so much better than those moments when she stops breathing and he’s afraid she’s died and left him alone.

Sometimes there’s a bottle of Hires Root Beer on the floor beside her outflung arm. Sometimes (but rarely, because this is before the days of serious drinking that are waiting around the corner) there’s a bottle of real beer, which smells and tastes so awful that he
wonders why anyone would want it. But mostly there’s nothing, because by the time his mother gets home from Mickey’s Diner and Take Out she’s too tired even to make it to the fridge. She shucks off the uniform right there, by the couch—she has only two uniforms, and the washateria is too far away and too expensive for more than one trip per week. Besides, she doesn’t like doing laundry and waits until the last possible moment, a fact that will earn him certain unpleasant nicknames when he begins kindergarten next year. It’s his job to pick up the brown pants and tunic and hang them over the back of the couch. If the night is warm, she sleeps in her underwear. If not, he fetches her nightie for her. She wrestles with the worn cotton shift, which is getting tight under the arms. (His mother is involved in a long-drawn-out, losing battle with her weight.) Once it’s on, she thanks him with a hug for being her sweet boy. At those moments, her voice never fails to send a thrill through him. It’s the one part of his mother that’s more beautiful than Sleeping Beauty. Sometimes on the weekends, when she’s in a good mood, she sings to him about a lady with green sleeves, a song that she says is hundreds of years old. And, best of all, she reads to him.

The boy knows how to dress and undress himself, how to brush his teeth (which he does in the bathtub because he can’t reach the sink yet). He gets his own dinner, mostly cereal, which he has learned to eat dry on the days when they’re out of milk. If he feels ambitious, he’ll fix himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but he’s not too good at spreading the peanut butter and usually ends up tearing the bread. His mother eats at Mickey’s—one of the perks of working there—and sometimes she’s able to sneak home a hamburger or French fries or a bit of leftover pasta for him in the oversize tote she carries for that purpose.

The boy eats and watches his sleeping mother—the way her chest rises and falls with each breath, the line of hair that runs from
her bra line, down her stomach, to the wavy elastic of her faded pink panties. Her body twitches from time to time like that of the animals he watches on the wildlife shows on TV. Those are his favorite shows, even more than
Howdy Doody,
and sometimes he and his friend Jimmy get into a fight about this. Should anyone ask him what he wants most in life, the boy wouldn’t hesitate. A dog, he would say—though this is not completely true. He would prefer a tiger. But already he has learned that some desires must be held unspoken in the dark core of one’s being.

When he is sure his mother has sunk into sleep, the boy will turn off the TV. Mostly she watches
I Love Lucy,
with its baffling jokes. (As he grows older, he will recognize this about himself: most things that people find funny fail to amuse him.) He’ll go to the old tape player with reels as big as his head and carefully rewind the tape that’s on it. He’ll curl up on the floor with his blanket and listen to
Lassie Come Home,
which his mother recorded for him one week when she hurt her foot and couldn’t go to work. There’s a bed in the other room, but he’d rather lie here so that he can keep an eye on that undependable breath of hers while he follows Lassie over a thousand dangerous miles, determined to find her little boy. In the middle, he’ll fall asleep, secure in the knowledge that before he wakes she would have concluded her quest.

Is the boy unhappy? No. When you’ve known only one thing all your life, you accept it as natural. It isn’t until Mary Lou brings them the stolen math workbook that he will figure out that happiness is a whole different feeling.

THE BOY’S MORNING MEMORIES ARE OF MARY LOU BANGING ON
the door of the apartment, shouting his mother’s name—
Hey Betsy, are you dead or what
—and his mother stumbling bleary-eyed to the
door, still in her underwear and cursing, but under her breath because she doesn’t want her son to pick up any bad words. Jimmy runs in through the crack of the open door, shouting, “LL, look what I got.”

In the background he can hear Mary Lou saying, “Shoot, girl, you look like death warmed over. You better go see the doctor.”

The boy’s chest hurts until his mother says: “Now don’t start, Mary Lou. Nothing wrong with me except too many hours at a crappy job.”

Jimmy pulls at his arm. “Look! look! You ain’t looking.”

Jimmy is here because the boy’s mother and Mary Lou, who lives a few apartments over and works in the cafeteria of their neighborhood elementary school, babysit for each other. The boy likes Jimmy. He’s fun to play with, even though he’s always wanting the boy to look at things the boy doesn’t find particularly interesting. Besides, Mary Lou, at whose apartment he eats dinner when his mother works overtime, is a great cook, and her lasagna (though the boy would never admit this, not even if someone tortured him using a cattle prod, like he once saw on
Gunsmoke
) is way better than anything the boy’s mother cooks. The boy’s mother, who is responsible for lunch, usually serves them canned soup and hot dogs wrapped in slices of white bread. Right after payday, they get real hot-dog buns, along with apples.

When the weather is good, the boy’s mother sends them out to play, warning them to stay where she can see them, to not venture off the sidewalk. Playing cops and robbers, the boy watches her watching them as she talks on the phone, smoking, although she’s told Mary Lou she really wants to quit. “Bang! Bang!” shouts Jimmy. “You’re dead.”

“Am not!”

“Are, too! I shot you in the head. Your brains are splattered all over the ground.”

On days when it’s too cold, they look at the books Mary Lou brings them from the school, claiming they’ve been discarded. “Yeah, right!” her mother says, though not in Mary Lou’s hearing. But she, too, likes the books. Sometimes between phone calls, she sits beside the boys on the couch and exclaims over things she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a lot of things. One day they go through a workbook titled
Fun with Math,
in which a chipmunk uses nuts to teach baby squirrels about addition and subtraction. The boy’s mother loses interest after two pages, Jimmy after five, but the boy is riveted. Inside his head, the numbers fall into place with little clicks. His body buzzes as though it is filled with electricity. The chipmunk fades away. He does not need it to understand what’s going on. He asks to keep the workbook, and that night, instead of listening to
Lassie,
he goes over multiplication and division. Though the terms are unfamiliar, within a few minutes he finds that he can work out the problems in his head long before he turns to the page where the chipmunk has written the answers on a blackboard hanging from a tree.

ON WEEKENDS THEY SLEEP LATE AND WHEN THEY WAKE, THE
boy lying next to his mother in the bed in the back room, the two of them snuggled in a quilt with blue spouting whales on it, she reads to him. If they’ve had time to go to the library, she reads him new books. If not, as is more often the case, she reads to him from their dog-eared
King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table,
a book that with its small print and no illustrations isn’t really for children. But he loves its complicated cat’s cradle of stories, loves how the familiar names roll off her tongue, Guinevere, Parsifal, Gawain, the sword Excalibur, the Questing Beast, the Chapel Dangerous, and, most of all, his own name. When she speaks it, she gives him a kiss.

Later they go to the grocery in Mary Lou’s car, which rattles excitedly when it hits a pothole and sometimes dies at a stoplight. On the way back they stop at the bakery outlet and the boy’s mother buys them powdered doughnuts. Jimmy eats his right away, but the boy takes tiny bites so the doughnut will last until they reach home. In the front seat, his mother and Mary Lou discuss the no-good men they’ve been dating, bursting into such loud laughter that the boy smiles in the back even though he doesn’t understand most of the things they say. He knows about dates, though. That’s when his mother wears a flared skirt and a sleeveless top (his favorite one is black, with lace over the chest). She sprays herself with perfume and swipes bright lipstick across her mouth and squeezes her feet into shoes with tall, dangerous heels, though later she’ll complain that they hurt. But recently she hasn’t been wearing heels because her new boyfriend, Marvin, is shorter than her and sensitive about the issue.

After they laugh for a while, the women get quiet. They turn up the music and talk in whispers, but the boy knows they’re lamenting the fact that they aren’t getting any younger, and that it’s hard to find a man out there who wants a serious relationship with a woman who’s carrying baggage. The boy wants to ask what kind of baggage, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid he knows already.

The boy doesn’t mind so much when he’s dropped off before a date at Mary Lou’s. But when Mary Lou has a date, too, he and Jimmy are deposited at Mrs. Grogan’s apartment, and that’s not so good because Mrs. Grogan doesn’t have a TV, only a radio that she keeps covered with a lace doily. Mrs. Grogan doesn’t have teeth, either. The boys can’t understand much of what she says, and that makes her angry. Besides, her apartment smells like pee, but when he complains of this to his mother, she says, “We’ll all get old like her—if we’re unlucky enough to live that long!”

(The boy’s own mother will not be unlucky, not in that way. When the boy is in fourth grade, she will collapse at work one day, dying of an aneurysm before the ambulance can get her to a hospital. Later the boy will look up the word in the dictionary, but it will still baffle him.)

When the boy is five and a half, Mary Lou and Jimmy abandon them for Memphis, which is clear across the country. They’re going to live with Mary Lou’s mother, although she constantly bitches at Mary Lou, because Mary Lou can’t make it on her own anymore, and she’s just too tired trying. She cries as she tells the boy’s mother this, wiping at her eyes, smearing mascara over apologetic cheekbones. The boy’s mother doesn’t say anything, but he sees something flicker in her eyes. He thinks it’s anger with Mary Lou for quitting on them. But later he wonders if it’s fear, and that makes him afraid, too. Then Mary Lou and Jimmy are gone, and his memories get a lot worse.

IN THIS AFTERNOON MEMORY, THE BOY IS ABOUT EIGHT, WITH
long, untidy hair and clothes that aren’t quite clean. He’s playing by himself in the empty field behind the apartment building that doubles as a junkyard. The junkyard is off-limits—his mother thinks it’s dangerous—but she’s at work and isn’t going to know. Marvin, who lives with them now, is aware of the boy’s disobedience, but Marvin isn’t going to tell his mother. Because then she would insist that the boy stay inside after school, and Marvin wouldn’t like that. In the afternoon, when the boy’s mother is at work, Marvin’s friends come over to the apartment. The boy isn’t sure what they do there, though from the sweetish smoke-smell that lingers after they have left, he can guess at some of it. In any case, he is playing alone in a field overgrown with brambles because there
aren’t any kids his age who live around here. If there were, they probably wouldn’t be friends with him, like the children at school who sometimes make fun of his name or shove him around during recess when the teacher on duty isn’t watching but mostly just ignore him.

The boy pretends he’s Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island except for the cannibals who are after him. From behind an abandoned freezer, he trains his binoculars on them, watching them laugh with their pointy cannibal teeth. But they won’t get him; he knows his way around the entire island, the caves and mountain passes where people must travel single file. He has his M1 semiautomatic and one hundred clips of ammo, and he knows how to move quiet as death. He raises his rifle and takes a step forward, then jumps back with a yelp because something furry has just brushed against his shins. It is a kitten.

The kitten is small and scrawny and meows loudly, opening its mouth wide and displaying tiny cannibal-sharp teeth and a very pink tongue. It skitters away when the boy reaches for it, but then lets itself be picked up. Its claws are sharp, too, but the boy doesn’t mind. He thinks it looks like a miniature tiger, and he holds it and strokes its back while the kitten squirms in an attempt to get away. The boy remembers something he read in a book. He sets it down, breaks off a bramble branch, and bobs it up and down. The kitten swipes at it, entranced. They play like this for a while, but then the kitten starts mewing again—with hunger, the boy is sure. So he tucks it inside his shirt—he is afraid he’ll lose it if he leaves it out here—and goes to the apartment. Inside, Marvin’s friends, who scare him, observe him through a haze of smoke. One of them beckons him, asking if he wants a beer. The boy’s face goes hot. Marvin’s friends laugh. He almost backs out. Then he feels the kitten trying to climb up the inside of his shirt. Its tail tickles his
chest. He tightens his shoulders and strides past their stares to the fridge—it is
his
fridge, he reminds himself.
His
apartment. He pours milk into a bowl. His hand shakes and milk spills on the sticky counter, but only a little. He carries the bowl out to the field.