Authors: Dale Peck
My mother had come home from the hospital the day he died—he’d been in six months—and I knew what had happened because she was in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and drinking a rum-and-Coke when I came home from school.
The knob on the front door nearly came off in my hand as I entered the trailer; it had broken more than a week before. My mother didn’t really greet me when I walked through the door, just called out, “Come on in here.” Her words weren’t slurred, but they came out in two uneven bursts. I walked in the kitchen and sat down at the table. A package of Kents lay on the table, a few of the cigarettes scattered about like the crooked spokes of a bicycle tire, and two open bottles—a plastic one, half filled with Coke, and a glass one, nearly emptied of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum—were on the table next to her. She’d pushed the placemat away, and the formica tabletop was scarred with scattered water rings near where she sat, as if she’d been not just drinking but moving the glass around for hours. She didn’t say anything so I unpacked my lunch box, pulling out the empty sandwich bag, apple core, and half a Twinkie, and set them all on the table. My thermos sloshed when I lifted it, and I remembered that I hadn’t drunk it all at lunch that day. I unscrewed the lid cup and the inner plug, and filled the cup with flat pop. Then we sat at the table for a few minutes, each of us drinking and refilling our cups, me with just Coke, she with Coke and the last of the rum. “So,” she said finally. “It’s over.” I nodded my head; I knew that. “Okay?” she asked me. What did she mean, okay? Was it okay with me that my father was dead? Was I okay? “He’s dead,” I said. “Yeah, he’s dead,” she said, and started crying. “Oh, my baby,” she said through her tears, and I didn’t know if she meant me or him. She came over and
squeezed herself in the chair with me, wrapped both arms around my shoulders, and shook me with her sobs. Then I started crying too and soon the tears rolled off my nose and cheeks and splashed in the forgotten cup I half held in my lap.
We’d been expecting his death for a while but still we cried a lot. Too much, perhaps: for two or three days we didn’t stop. We were new there, and we had no relatives within a thousand miles, nor any close friends in town. With no one to share our grief and measure it out, we expended it in one great, incomplete burst of tears, and it seemed we stopped feeling when we couldn’t cry anymore. Later, she’d sometimes ask me to be with her until she fell asleep. “Come stay with me,” she’d say, always waiting until I’d gotten ready for bed. I’d just go to the door at first and stand there to see if perhaps she’d already passed out. There was always a glass beside her bed; on bad nights there were the rum and Coke bottles as well. “Come right here,” she’d say if she was still awake, and pat the side of her bed. I would go over and kneel beside her, facing the picture of my father on her bed table. In the winter I’d be in my pajamas, in the summer just a T-shirt and underwear. I can still taste the toothpaste, feel my face tingling from the washcloth, see in the glass protecting my father’s picture my own hair, damp and combed straight back. The long ends tickled my shoulders and dripped water down my back. My mother would put one hand on my father’s empty space beside her, the other on my head, and leave them there except for when she needed a drink. Then her hand kind of slid off
my head to the table and grabbed the glass. At some point she usually knocked over my father’s picture, and during the course of a night, each time her hand returned to my head it fell a little harder: a tap, a thump, a slap, her hand scattering the strands like a wild rake through grass, until, late at night, she would miss completely, and then I knew she was almost asleep. Quietly I would stand my father’s picture up and smooth my hair, using the glass as a mirror.
In the distance, somewhere in the depths of the house, a fan belt would kick in and squeak arrhythmically, and dry air would wheeze from floor vents. When my mother’s breathing came in time with the fan’s gasps I went to my own bedroom, though once I moved my father’s picture to his bed table so my mother wouldn’t knock it over again. On the day my stepfather and I slept together it was the clanking of the window air conditioner that signaled the presence of the house. At the noise, my stepfather eased out from me and dressed. As he left he turned to me and said, “I know I can trust you to keep this a secret.” Then he pulled the door softly closed behind him, like a lover or a thief. I was thirteen then.
MY MOTHER BROUGHT him home from a bar one night; what I thought I’d heard was confirmed when, in the morning, I went to awaken her for a telephone call. I opened her door quietly and saw her curled on the bed without clothes or sheets, her head at a lopsided angle on the naked sternum of
a man I’d never seen, a man with a handsome body and a face that, in repose, looked sad. A breeze blew through the half-open slats of the Venetian blinds and moved her hair. I looked at her face: it was red and puffy, but underneath that, content. She lay on my father’s side of the bed, and that picture, an image of a very young man rugged in fishing gear, no more than twenty, and smiling victoriously at his catch, shone over her shoulder. The stranger slept soundly, his hand interposed—but only slightly—between my mother’s shoulder and my father’s smile, and his penis lay harmlessly like a small white fish a few inches from my mother’s mouth. I let them both sleep, unable to break the fragile harmony of the scene: the odor of sex, new to me, mingling with spring; my father and the man lying side by side with my mother; her own, obvious security in their combined presence.
Back in the living room I hung up the phone without taking a message. I turned on the TV and stared through it. My stomach seemed filled with liquid, and as I sat there it boiled out of my guts and into my veins, and my skin turned red with the angry heat of its passage. I felt betrayed, and suddenly my father’s picture on the bedside table flashed in my mind. But my mother’s stranger was, almost immediately, kind to me. He came in the living room around noon and acknowledged to me what he’d done with a silent shrug of his shoulders. It was a mature shrug, the kind one adult gives to another, and, as a child, I was flattered. The shrug wrecked my resolve, which had risen with the heat of the day: I’d wanted to assault my
mother—and him—with my knowledge of their hideous infidelity to my father’s memory, but my anger, sourceless from the beginning, retreated into the blazing pit from which it had sprung. His shrug simply said, It happened. There was an apology there if I wanted it, but it was superfluous. Then my glare softened, became a stare, and I found my eyes wandering his body, which was covered now by a loose pair of jeans. “I’m Martin,” he said then. I opened my mouth to tell him my name, but the word flew from my tongue before I could voice it. I said, “Did my mother tell you who I was?” He said, “Yes.” “Good,” I said, for if she’d told him my name, then she must have told him she had a child in the first place. And if there was a child, he must have realized, there would be a father as well, and I believed that my mother had explained what had happened to him. So this man, Martin, knew everything, yet still he’d come. I don’t know why I thought this, nor why I took comfort in it, but secure in that knowledge—unaware that none of it was true—I turned back to the television. Martin went in the kitchen.
Later he slipped back in the bedroom with the breakfast I’d heard him making. He took time to stop and tell me there were eggs and bacon on the stove, and plenty of coffee. “Thank you,” I made sure I said, pleased he’d considered me mature enough to drink coffee. I ate all the food he’d cooked, though I’d already had both breakfast and lunch, and I drank two cups of coffee, though it raised the gall in my throat. When I finished eating I put on the long apron that hung in
the cupboard and started washing dishes. The dishwashing apron, my father had called it, because it was waterproof, and from a long time before I remembered laughing at him encased in its yellow ruffles. After a few minutes Martin entered the kitchen behind me and tousled my hair. His fingers were still greasy from the bacon and I could feel his fingerprints on my scalp after he took his hand away. “Thanks,” he said. He grabbed a towel and dried the dishes that I washed and handed to him. I started to explain where everything went, sensing he would need to know this for the future, but he interrupted me. “I know,” he said. “I found it all before I cooked.” “Right,” I said, and turned back to the sink. Martin worked beside me and behind me, and I took as long as I could with the dishes but said nothing more to him, thinking anything that could come out of my mouth would sound childish. When I finished I helped him put away the last of the dishes, and then we pulled a fresh towel from the drawer and dried our hands simultaneously, our skin touching together sometimes within the towel’s folds. Then he put his hands on my shoulders and pulled the long apron over my head. “These look ridiculous,” he said. “I splash.” “Don’t be afraid to get wet,” he said, then tossed the apron on a counter and went back to my mother’s room. The apron had looked old and silly in his hands, and quickly, before I could change my mind, I threw it in the trash. In this way, Martin fitted himself into our lives; sitting on the lid of the trash can, I found it easy to imagine that he’d climbed in
my mother’s bed while she slept, and for a brief second I felt he could just as easily slip into mine.
MY MOTHER HAD met Martin at a bar; within a month he and I joined together and tried to keep her from returning. We sat on either side of her bed and held a hand apiece, one of hers in two of ours. Martin had moved across the bed since that first day; looking over my mother, I could see my father smiling by his right arm. My mother moaned aloud often, sometimes curses, sometimes pleas for just one drink, sometimes my father’s name; Martin and I looked at each other silently over her sweating body. “Oh, goddammit,” my mother shrieked, eyes closed, face to the ceiling. “Damn it all to hell.” Sometimes I wondered to whom she directed her words, but she never said. And sometimes I wondered what, or whom, she was talking about, but that too was never made clear. “Son of a bitch. Fucking bastard. Stupid little prick.” I tried to stare at Martin’s eyes and ignore what she said. His eyes showed only sorrow, but I felt it was for both me and my mother. And I noticed also self-pity, but the sum of all that sadness didn’t seem to have a dampening effect on him. It was almost as if he were happy to be sad. “Henry,” my mother yelled, pulling my eyes back to her. “Henry, why did you do this to me?” Her face was sticky with sweat, and her tongue poked from her mouth after she finished speaking. I looked back at Martin. He held my mother’s hand and sat poised in
the chair, as if on view, and his glance at me was long and almost dramatic in its empathy. He stared directly in my eyes; I couldn’t break the contact, and felt the struggle register itself on my face as my jaw muscles tightened and my cheek twitched. Martin’s eyes and face were steady and relaxed. My mind wavered: dreams rolled in like black clouds. Like death. I felt it coming for my mother and, perhaps, for me. In my chair, I started crying weakly, silently, expecting at any moment for my mother to heave into convulsions as my father had done that day when we’d had to bring him to the hospital for the last time.
When my mother finally ceased struggling that night I left her room to go to my own, leaving Martin caressing her sleeping body. I sat on the edge of my bed and choked my pillow, angry now, no longer crying, and remembered the convulsive way she had gripped Martin’s manly hand, and the limp hand she let sit in my girlish one. I wanted to believe, as I held my pillow to my chest, that it was I who held my mother from her rum-and-Cokes, but I knew that she had at some point given that task to Martin. I’d been in my room for only a few minutes when he came in without knocking and sat down next to me on the bed. He did the thing with his fingers in my hair, and when I didn’t respond he pried the pillow from my arms and tossed it to the head of the bed. “Pillows are for sleeping,” he said. I threw myself backward and at an angle from him on the bed. My head landed on the pillow but my feet still rested on the floor. I lifted my legs up and over Martin,
but halfway through the action, my legs raised and spread right in front of Martin’s face, I froze, realizing suddenly that I wore only a skimpy pair of underwear. I couldn’t decide whether to put my legs back on the floor or complete the movement: indecisive, my legs stuck up in the air like those of a pregnant woman locked in stirrups, and I felt a hot blush across my cheeks. Martin pushed my legs down on the bed with one hand, then lifted the sheet up and covered me to my waist. “I’m sorry you have to see her like this,” he said, as though nothing had happened. “But we’ll get her through it, don’t worry.” It was a platitude, I knew, but it wasn’t condescension, and I felt his sympathy from his tone, not his words. And I don’t remember the words I used—probably these very ones, since I was an un-subtle child—but I told him how afraid I was of losing her as I’d lost my father. I sat up, put my head on his shoulder, and again I cried, gradually slipping down, curling my legs up and around, until I was like a baby half in his lap. Dimly I realized I cried for myself, not my mother, but I made no effort to clarify this realization, only letting my tears, as they always had, cloud my vision. Martin soothed me with soft, breathy exhalations, saying, “I know, I know,” in such a way that I believed he did know, had always known, just how I felt, and at the last he loosed a sob and I felt the clear delineation of a teardrop falling on my back and soaking through my T-shirt to my skin. My own crying ceased immediately, with a shudder, as I contemplated that soft wet spot on my shoulder. I lay back, exhausted; he gave my head
one more pat good night. The tears in his eyes glistened like golden oil from the glow of the parking lot light outside the window. That night, like all the nights before, he said, “I’m going to sleep with Bea now, to make sure she’s okay.” But that night his voice was heavy—weighed down, I felt, by the tears I’d caused. Martin bent down and kissed me on the cheek before he left; his lingering lips were dry and soft, and I could feel their imprint on my skin. When he stood up the bed creaked, covering the sound of my suddenly twitching legs rustling the sheets. I swallowed my last sobs with an acrid amount of mucus until the door closed and he was gone, and then I resolved never again to bring pain to a man who would cry for me.