Women Drinking Benedictine (16 page)

“We could watch TV at my house,” Pete says. “There might be a movie.”

“That sounds good,” I say, because it does. I would like to avoid my apartment, avoid being alone as long as possible. And just as if he has the same idea, Pete passes his house and we drive downtown. The streets are heavy with traffic. It's the high school kids cruising around the diamond, the park in the center of downtown. They circle the diamond every night in their parents' cars and trucks. If it's a nice night like it is right now, the kids from the farming community drive in and join the townies. We drive around and around the diamond honking at one another, drinking beer, and calling out to one another. They always drive in the same direction, clockwise, as if following some predetermined pattern. Like all rituals, the customs are complicated, some not even apparent.

Pete cuts over on North Street and we get into the cruising line and follow the traffic around the gazebo, past the bronze statue of Crawford, the man who founded the county and who some say was eaten by Indians. Others insist that no one ever found his body and have no concrete proof that the Indians even touched him. We circle past the Meadville Public Library and the fifteen-foot American flag dedicated to the town by the Daughters of the American Revolution, even though there is no chapter in Meadville. We pass the funeral home where the clay point setter stands by the front door. The dog is frozen in motion. His ears stick straight up, his right paw is bent as if wounded. His face is illuminated by the small yellow spotlight. He looks almost alive. Denying all town rumors, Bradford, the owner and mortician of the funeral home, insists that it was never a real dog. He claims the statue is not his own dog killed, stuffed, and set on display. He thinks it makes the funeral home less frightening—more inviting—especially for the kids in town.

Pete turns down the radio and we lower our windows and listen to the noise and music coming from the other cars. The air is still damp from the afternoon rain. It smells of spring—of warmer days to come.

After two turns around the diamond, Pete pats the edge of the seat and asks me if I want to sit closer. I think about Evan before I make a move. Evan has made it clear that he wants out of my life. He didn't even discuss it with me. He never gave me an option or cared to hear my opinion on the matter. Our relationship doesn't seem a reason not to get close to someone else, so I do. Pete puts his arm around my shoulders. He rubs my upper arm and I cross my left hand to my chest and hold his hand so he will know I like what he is doing. We circle the diamond four more times, not saying anything important, just commenting on the trucks and the kids. Pete turns off the diamond and we drive to the west end of town where the dark streets eventually wind into Cleveland.

Pete slows the car and pulls onto the graveled shoulder in front of a farmhouse. The inside lights flicker, and the shadows bounce off the ceiling, telling us that the family is inside watching TV. They won't be paying attention to a car parked on their property. We're making out even before Pete's turned off the engine. He's holding me on the back of the neck, his grip firm on my skin, his hands warm. He pulls me into him. His kiss is strong. He seems sure that this is what he wants, and I kiss him back to tell him that I want it, too. What I'm doing no longer feels small-town. All over the world, people are called upon to replace love. It happens everywhere, even when we don't expect it. Meadville's not the exception this time. Not on this.

 

V
OLCANOES ON UNINHABITED ISLANDS
erupt without fanfare. Like a tree falling in a forest, Hawaiians ask, Is there sound if no one is there to hear it? What about fear, if no one is there to feel it? Perhaps there is only the brilliant flash of light as the fiery liquids pour down the mountainside. Maybe this is all there is.

Barney's mother warned us that the sky over our house was an odd shade of blue. My mother believed only in the Bible. She read between the lines and found good truths in these words. Superstitions were not part of her religion. She paid Barney's mother to do our wash and to iron my father's shirts, but she would not listen to her predictions of doom and despair.

Barney's mother saw dark clouds everywhere. She bowed her head and told us to chant, “I give my heart to the sky,” three times over. In this way we could be saved from the volcanic ash carried in with the evil winds.

“I give my heart to God,” my mother cried. She had fallen in love with the sound of her own voice and liked to pitch it so that it rang in that sing-song way evangelists have now made an art.

“I left my heart in San Francisco,” I cried.

Barney and his mother chanted their prayer, but the ash fell on our house and two weeks later my father died of a twisted liver.

The driver from the funeral home had to stop twice to wipe the ash off the windshield of the hearse. “Can't see a thing,” he complained. His shirt cuffs were black with the soot that clung to everything it touched. We were an hour late to the cemetery. The funeral director and his sons were already busy with another circle of bereaved. My father and his coffin had been moved to the gazebo, where it sat in the cool shade of the coconut trees. My mother knelt on the stone steps, made the sign of the cross, and bowed her head. A few minutes later, she stood and ushered her prayer people up the paved path to the crest of the hill where they could be closer to God.

My brothers and I drank scotch from a silver flask we found in the pocket of my father's only formal dinner jacket. He probably hid it there—afraid my mother would have tossed it out with the morning trash. My mother kept a clean house. Clutter was a sign of a wandering mind; a wandering mind, the sign of a sinning body. Nothing to her had sentimental value—nothing should be saved except the soul.

My brothers only shared their stash with me because it was a special occasion. “Don't get hooked on this stuff,” they warned. I was fifteen and had already been drunk more times than I could count. The hearse driver joined us in a toast to long life. To mention death in a graveyard would have been redundant.

I blacked out before the service started and don't remember burying my father. I have seen photographs of the afternoon. My blue blazer and white shirt had been pressed carefully by Barney's mother, but the expression on my face was one of impatience, as if the bus I was waiting for was late. My brother Rob, front row center, was fast asleep. Dave had wandered off by that time and was found puking in the bushes. I puked with him once we were back in the hearse. The driver shouted that we were worse than pigs. My mother said we had ruined our father's funeral. She said she did not have it in her heart to forgive us.

Barney was my best friend back then. I was not popular. He might have been my only friend. Mr. Matthews, the science teacher, once asked Barney if I had been drinking whiskey. “He reeks,” the teacher said. “That's the way he always smells,” Barney said. Barney was not bright. That's why he liked me.

Barney was HBC—Hawaiian-born-Chinese. His hair was black and his eyes were thick. His mother and father washed and ironed the clothes for all the families in our neighborhood, but Barney screamed in protest if you called him Chinese.

“I am western,” he said. “I am from this island. I am just like you.”

My parents were from a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania, where everyone complained about the good old days when there were jobs to be had. They moved to Hawaii hoping to find a financial paradise. I was born on the island of Oahu.

Not one to argue, I told Barney he was right. “We're Hawaiian-born. Natives. We'll make the tourists take pictures of us. We will ask for money, and when they won't give it to us we'll steal their expensive cameras and expose their film. Later we'll hang out in the Sheraton and Marriott parking lots and jump in front of slow-moving tourist cars. When they think we're hurt, we'll play on their fear and their pity and extort cash from the poor out-of-towners.”

My father was promoted to desk manager of the Oahu Marriott after twelve years of working the midnight shift. He could say, “Here is your safety deposit box key. There is no charge for the box, but there's only one key, so if you lose or misplace it there will be a sixty dollar drilling fee,” in several languages, including Japanese, Malay, Tagalog, French, German, and Spanish. He had access to the bar of the Banana-Boat-and-Moon restaurant and brought home red, white, and blue bottles of liquor, which he drank all at once.

“Let me make you a Stars-and-Stripes,” he'd offer and pour the trio of liquors into a tall glass with lots of ice. It tasted like a sweet watery milk shake. I drank it as fast as I could, hoping he would give me another.

“Here's to our new country,” he'd say. We'd salute each other, then break into a chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” or “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”

“The neighbors,” my mother would yell from the bedroom. We shouted out cocktail invitations in loud, clear voices, but none of our neighbors ever joined our predawn patriotic celebrations.

My father was a distracted man. He liked bars and long rambling stories full of interesting characters. My brothers and I were not colorful enough for him. He wanted tough life stories. “Sagas,” he'd beg for when the whiskey pinched his cheeks red. “Give me a long saga and I'll listen to every word.” I bored him more than most people, and he quickly drank blenderfuls of his stars-and-stripes concoction, as if this would make me more fun.

My mother wanted daughters. She thought raising children would mean dresses with white petticoats and patent leather Mary Janes. Pink stuffed animals. Bows. She wanted to braid her daughter's hair into thick French twists and wash it with golden baby shampoo, the kind that doesn't make your eyes tear.

She thought men were wanderers. She did not trust them to be there for the long haul. She wanted daughters who would take care of her when she got old and hard of hearing.

She was never hard of hearing, but she was selective and cheap. She would pretend not to understand when people talked on the phone so that she didn't have to pay long-distance bills. In this way she avoided most conversations with her unemployed Pennsylvanian relatives, who were always looking for an invitation to the Hawaiian Islands.

She liked letters—even from her friends she saw every day. She could not spell and did not write letters herself.

She had three sons.

After the third she gave up and refused to have anything to do with our upbringing.

The way my mother tells it, she was on her way to the loony bin when she discovered God. He embraced her forcefully and fondly placed her on the right road.

We were left on our own after my father died. My mother said, “I'll sign checks for your care, but beyond that don't count on me.”

She liked the church, quoting from the Bible, and raising poodles. Poodles were amazing creatures, she insisted, though before my dad died she had not let a turtle into the house, much less a dog. Poodles, she told us over and over, did not shed. They did not need cleaning up after. She married an animal hairdresser who asked us boys to call him Captain. He was not religious, but said he respected a woman who prayed. The two of them made plans to raise poodle champions. They spent all my father's money buying poodles that won them a roomful of blue ribbons, silver-plated trophies, and shelves and shelves of ceramic poodles.

I liked beer but drank it too fast and pissed most of it away before I got a buzz. I started on Southern Comfort because that's what the G.I.s drank during World War II. The Hawaiian liquor stores had dusty shelves of the sweet-tasting liquor that no one bought. I bargained down the price, telling the shopowner I was buying it for my father.

“He's having a love affair with the bottle,” I told Mr. Wang.

Mr. Wang sold me bottles at half-price until his wife discovered what I was up to. Mrs. Wang, one of my mother's disciples, knew that my father had died in November.

Mr. Wang cursed me with a horrible life because I lied on my father's grave.

I took my business elsewhere.

Tourists would always buy for me.

“Look, the native boy wants some alcohol,” the just-married men would tell their wives. I was tan, dirty, and dark and wore the baggy shorts and mud-stained T-shirts of the islanders.

“How about some Jack?” I liked to stick to business. “J.B. Any of the big boys will do.”

The new husbands would go into the store and the wives would stand on the street with me. I liked their pink freckled skin, the way they wrinkled their noses in the bright sunlight.

I gave the women my telephone number, which they always took but never used, though I always thought one of them might call.

I borrowed money from Barney or stole money from my mother to support my habit. My mother caught me with her wallet in my hands at least once a week. She knew I was drinking. I never lied to her about my alcohol intake.

“One daughter,” she said in her prayer voice, looking at the overhead light fixture. Either God lived there, I told my brothers, or she is scared of wasp's nests.

One afternoon she was particularly whiny, and when she found me with her money in hand, she slapped me across the cheek before turning to the ceiling. “Would it have been so hard to bless me with one girl who would stay with me while my teeth fall out?” she cried.

I went into her bedroom, put on one of her muumuus, and walked around the house in her fruit-salad sandals.

The Captain thought I was funny, but he said that drunks died slow, painful deaths.

He slumped off his chair, clutching his stomach, imitating my father so closely that I wondered if Mom and the Captain hadn't been hanky-pankying before she was a widow.

My mother came in just as the Captain made it to the floor. “He swallowed a chicken bone,” I said and jumped up from my chair.