7.
You’ve Got to Stay Inside the Napkin
At seven the next morning, my father was perched on the edge of my bed, shaking me awake.
“How about you take the day off from school and come on a little trip to the dacha with me?” he proposed. “I tacked up a sign on a bulletin board downtown, and these people called. People who talk like gentle rednecks. We’re going to move our shit out so some nice rednecks with a truck can move their shit in. I’ve never met these people, but they say they’ll help us get our furniture in some mammoth pickup they’ve got and help us load it into storage. Would you care to participate?”
In the agreement he and my mother had composed in the study, he explained, it was written that my mother would keep the house and he would keep our cabin in the Berkshires, the dacha to which he referred. His plan was to rent it to the rednecks for a year and ease our new state of scarcity. It was not clear to me how he was going to fund both new residences: the New York apartment and the Wattsbury apartment, in which Rachel and I would see him on weekends.
I was tired of my room by that time, and it was almost spring. I said yes. Leaving what was now my mother’s house at 7:30 in his green Subaru, we went west toward the hills.
“What have you been doing with yourself besides playing guitar, Joshy?” he asked as he drove. “These past four days have been no good fun for anyone, I know.”
“I’m also listening to music.” I was glad to have an unimpeachably cool response.
He stroked his beard for a while. “You want an electric?”
“Yes.”
“You need an amp?”
“Yes. And two effect pedals, and three patch cords.”
“How much you think that’s going to set back your old man?”
I had walked to WATTSbury Music the previous afternoon, to ogle, and while there had calculated the answer to this very question. “Six hundred fifty bucks.”
He drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Money is weird right now.”
I was silent. I knew I was owed.
“Cost be damned,” he said. “I’ll have the cash tomorrow.”
“Thanks, man.” I felt that, because of his fallen state and his congeniality, we were rockers together now, and man was a fit term of endearment. “That’s the shit.”
His eyes grew moist. “There’s a Richard Thompson show at Smith next week. I was thinking of going myself, but I’ll get you a ticket. You should watch some up-close finger action, right?”
“That would be really helpful. Thank you.”
“Resolved.” He thumped the wheel with his fist. “I hate to lose the cabin, but I’m going to use that money to be a father,” he said as he pushed the Subaru’s 4WD into gear. “To pay for a Wattsbury apartment, be here for you and your sister.” The Subaru growled earnestly. “I’m going to be riding the train or taking a plane just about every weekend. Essentially, I’m hocking the dacha to buy us some familial glue.”
Despite his loss of moral authority, these words excited me. So he was imperfect, as a husband. Were we not both rebels, in our way, nonconformists? I hoped we would go on long walks and talk about which drugs I should try, what I should say to women, whether I should hang a certain poster on my wall. I’d been thinking about the poster, ever since Khadijah and I had gotten in trouble. It was on display in the back room of a head shop in Northampton: a black-and-white photograph of a young Parisian in a long wool coat, a radical of ’68, his arm cranked back to throw a rock. On the cobblestones, his shadow was watery and vast.
“What do you want to write essays about?” I asked. “Or, like, poem-essays?”
“The first one I’ve conceptualized is called ‘How Do We Make a Kid?’ The idea is that when we, members of my generation, were young, the iconography was all war versus children. The posters that said ‘War Is Bad for Children and Other Living Things,’ ‘Teach Your Children Well,’ imagery from Joni Mitchell songs, like ‘Ladies of the Canyon,’ say, where you’ve got these nurturing, peaceful women with children at their feet, flower children, the key motif being children . . . The idea was that war was destructive, and having babies, raising a brood, was a generative, positive act. I remember looking at your mother, thinking, We will be virtuous people, with our children and our garden. I mean, War and Peace, it’s an old dichotomy, isn’t it? But pretty shortly after we had children evidence began to accumulate that suggested having kids and raising them as comfortable Westerners was—is—an act of violence, consuming more of our limited natural resources than anyone should be allowed, and now . . . I’m curious, what is your sense of global warming? You’ve heard of it?”
I had, so I nodded. But I didn’t know what it was.
“Ah well,” he said. “Scientists have been sure for a long time, but no one’s hardly ever a hundred percent on anything in science, so journalists ask if they’re sure, and the scientists say, well, pretty sure, so journalists say it’s not sure. Anyway, we’re making the climatic conditions under which civilization has been constructed permanently defunct, by building houses and driving cars and having children who will do the same. If my ancestors had stayed in Ireland, with luck we’d all be living in a farmhouse and dying young and lamenting our wasted promise over glasses of whiskey, and thereby living less destructively, better preserving the planet, contributing less to drought and starvation. Creating drought and starvation is what we’re doing, you know, right now. It might as well be the blood of third-world children powering this Subaru, which is designed for the portage of first-world children. I mean, I’m just saying. It’s not your fault. What do we do when the way we always thought we were building a peaceful future turns out to be another kind of killing?”
I tried to think of a countercultural response. What was the radical thing to say? “We have to compensate for existing, basically,” I said.
He wrinkled his nose, as if I had mentioned a vulgar activity, such as Jet Skiing, or skiing. “Nah. Too Protestant.”
We were silent again, for a quarter of an hour. The strangeness of the silence grew and grew, until finally he punched me in the arm, experimentally, a comradely gesture he’d never tried before.
“You know me and Nancy are in love with each other, don’t you? We wouldn’t do this, make all these changes happen, if we weren’t in love. But I suspect we’re the love of each other’s lives.”
“I understand.” I apologized to my mother in my head as I said it.
“Sometimes things just become very clear, and there’s not much you can do about it when it happens to you. God kind of taps you on the shoulder and says, ‘Sorry, buddy, your life isn’t over there, where you’ve been headed, it’s over here, you have to change, or you won’t be fully awake anymore.’”
“Are you and Nancy going to live together?”
He shook his head. “Nancy and Khadijah are moving to Cambridge.” He spoke slowly and precisely. “Nancy’s been courted pretty avidly by a couple schools around Boston for years. It’s late in the hiring season, so she’s taking meetings next week.”
“But what about Khadijah? There’s two more months of school.”
“She’s going to do her last quarter at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Nancy’s going to commute to Wattsbury. Those two can’t be running into each other at the grocery store, Nancy and Arty. Things in that family aren’t as polite as they are in this one, right now. Fact is, things have been hard between Nancy and Arty for some time. She said it’d be better if he and I didn’t wind up in the same room. But you and Khadijah should stay in touch.”
“Oh, we will.”
He looked at me. “I don’t know if I’d talk about it to your mother too much, if you two actually get to be close friends or something. Might be weird. On the other hand, your mother’s kept her cool.” His eyes went shiny again. “She’s really been quite cool.”
Now, with the sun high in the pines, we turned right onto the long gravel driveway, and the cabin bumped into view. My father had built it ten years ago, with bearded friends. A Monopoly house, a perfect cube, unpainted sides, pine green roof. Outside, a circular clearing in miles of woods. Within, a potbellied woodstove, a loft with foam mattresses, a steel ladder in lieu of stairs.
A man and a woman waited at the end of the driveway, leaning on the hood of a red Toyota pickup.
“We can’t call it the dacha anymore today,” my father said. “If we do, these people will think we’re a*sholes.”
He killed the engine, jangled the keys. “Shit, I was promised a big truck. That pickup is supposed to take all our furniture to the storage space in Stockbridge. If that dinky-ass motherf*cker is supposed to be the Big Truck, I will shit my brain.”
He flicked off his sunglasses and waved to the couple. They waved back, struggled into motion. The man was fat and slow, the woman thin and slower. With every step, she dumped her weight on her left leg, forcing it to drag her right. Her lame right foot scraped the ground at a diagonal, like a peeler skinning a potato.
“Look at them move, Son. These people are poor. The businessman in me says, Don’t touch this shit. But I’m an old lefty. I think you give people a chance.”
We got out of the car, made introductions. The renters were named Steven and Alexis.
“Listen, friends,” my father said. “With all due respect. This is not the truck that is going to haul my furniture.”
Steven made a face that said I am a beacon of positivity. “One and the same,” he chimed, as if to confirm good news.
My father looked at the truck, acclimating. “May I have the deposit, then, please?”
Steven took a pale blue document from his pocket and presented it to my father. My father examined it.
“I stated explicitly: a certified check.”
“That’s the closest we could do.” Steven wedged his thumbs through the belt loops of his soft, strained jeans.
“You guys don’t have a bank?”
Alexis shook her head. She drew close, her foot scraping the earth. “If you don’t like it, that’s fine. We can call this whole thing off.”
“Oh God,” said my father. “F*ck me, man.”
“If you don’t want to take it,” said Steven, “we can go our separate ways right now.”
My father closed his eyes. It occurred to me he might need money, more urgently than I’d realized. He was going to New York City, not just to write essays but to do something called consulting. What did this mean?
“No, no, it’s fine,” he said, twisting the hairs of one sideburn between his fingers. “It’s cool.” He took the money order—I could see that was what it was—folded it, and slid it into the pocket of his checked blue shirt.
The four of us emptied the cabin, to make way for the couple’s things. We carried out our two couches, our dining room table, our foam mattresses, a record player, Candy Land, Chinese checkers. Framed posters from political theory conferences my father had organized when I was a small boy: Helsinki, Stockholm, Budapest. We unhooked the pans from the wall and threw them in a garbage bag. After we packed the fans, we learned each other’s scents. The weather had turned suddenly warm, and the windows opened only four or five inches, hinging outward on cranks. The water and electricity had been turned off for the winter, and wouldn’t come back on until the lease began. We made trips to the woods and returned with our hands smelling like pee.
While Steven and my father wrestled the couches into the bed of the pickup, Alexis and I did women’s work, bubble-wrapping the breakables. I dropped a framed letter, and the glass shattered. She picked up the letter to see if it was important.
“That’s from the United Nations,” I said casually. “Before my dad was a professor he was one of the executives in a pacifist organization. They won international praise during the Cold War.”
I felt some wincing awe would have been appropriate. She only brushed the shards off the frame.
“He met Gorbachev,” I said. “Pretty f*cking cool.”
She looked down at the letter and back up at me.
“The leader of Russia.” I jabbed my forehead. “With the thing.”
“You think I’m stupid,” she said. “I think you should tell your dad you broke the glass. He wouldn’t want this letter to get messed up.”
“He won’t care,” I explained. “That’s not the point of these things, everything being just so, or whatever.” I folded a Guatemalan tapestry over the framed letter, hiding the broken glass. I put it back in the box.
Alexis carried the box of breakables to the truck and wedged it between the backs of two armchairs.
“Everything intact?” my father asked.
“Double-checked, sir.” She threw me a wink.
The furniture fit in the truck bed. Steven crossed bungee cords over the dome of wood and upholstery.
“I’ll be damned, partner,” said my father, slapping Steven on the back. “This shit ain’t going nowhere, that’s for damned sure.”
Steven smacked his soft red hand into my father’s. “You ready to hit the road, my man?”
After the handclasp, my father glowed. “Never be a snob, Son,” he said as we rolled backward down the driveway. “You’ll find yourself isolated from the people in this world who will remind you what really matters. These people don’t have shit, they don’t know shit, but they know they don’t know shit. They go about their day and they don’t expect otherwise, and there’s a great wisdom in that. I always planned to raise you working-class until puberty.” He shook his head. “Somehow, it didn’t happen. But you’re a really good guy.”
The sun tore a hole in a dissolving cloud. Light split on the windshield. My father spun out into the wide gravel road, and we flew down the hill. He stuck his hand out the window and thumped a four-four allegro on the door. I did the same thing on my side, but there was something disgusting about our being synchronized, and he withdrew his hand.
With his hands at 10:00 and 2:00, we gained speed. As the tree canopy fell, we could see the other hills, plush lumps against a hard blue sky.
“Did you know working-class people growing up?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “I caddied. That was a way of creating my own diverse environment.”
“Were you already a socialist back then?”
“Let me put it this way: Your grandmother’s cocktail party world? I wanted to blow it up. But hold on a minute,” he said, “we’re losing Steven.” He slowed down, waiting for the truck to catch up. “Got a little carried away here. There’s a dumb-ass ecstasy in driving downhill, you know.”
Steven’s large, red, shaggy head popped Muppet-like from the cab. His hand made a stop sign. My father pulled the Subaru over and set the parking brake. In the rearview mirror, I could see the truck shudder to a halt, the furniture still in the bed, the bungees still in place.
Steven climbed out. My father revived his allegro on the door.
“Hola,” my father said. “How’s that old machine getting along?”
Steven hustled to the open window, bent, and caught his breath.
“Dude, I have got your furniture back there, and you are driving one hundred f*cking miles per hour down this motherf*cking hill. This may never have occurred to you, but when you’ve got a payload on a truck, when you’re driving and carrying something, you drive a little slower than if you’re in a Subaru, taking a family vacation.”
My father stared straight ahead.
“Slow down,” suggested Steven, his hands on his knees. “Slow . . . the . . . f*ck . . . down.”
Crickets. My father took the blue money order from his shirt pocket and unfolded it. In two precise and deliberate motions, he ripped it into four pieces. He threw the quadrants in Steven’s face. The Subaru spit gravel through the air. My father yanked down the parking brake as Steven kicked at the rear door.
I stuck my head out the window, my hair blowing into a veil around my face. I saw Alexis slip down from the truck and scrape after us.
“Hey, buddy!” She coned her hands in front of her mouth. “We’ve got your furniture back here!” She toppled over to one knee, and her hand landed hard on the gravel road. Steven circled back to the place where she had fallen. The two of them shrank into action figures.
I stared at my father.
“I don’t need it,” he said. “Furniture’s old, not worth much.”
Clearly, this was a lapse in understanding. I worked up the courage to open my mouth. “They’re poor people.”
“If he’s telling me to f*ck off already, Son, that’s not the beginning of a good business relationship. I’d lose money.”
My father was not alive to the implications of his behavior. My duty was clear.
“We’re privileged,” I said. “We should lose money.”
He ran a hand through his beard. “Dear Saint Josh. This is your close friend God. You don’t know what the f*ck you’re talking about.”
I made a cry of righteous anguish. “The least we can do is help them with our stuff.”
“Too late now.”
I listened to the wind rush through the windows. I remembered Khadijah in her anarchist ensemble and got an instant, nearly painful erection, coupled with a lovelier, heart-based yearning, thinking of her chipped black nail polish, her unponytailed hair thick against the back of her gray sweatshirt, and immediately knew what I would do. I would continue to transgress as she had shown me how. I would be worthy of her, so that someday we would have sex many times, married in our apartment with cacti in the windows near downtown Northampton. “Let me out,” I said.
“You going Dances with Wolves on me, Son?”
“I’m utterly serious.”
He thumped the wheel with the palm of his hand. “Right away, young massah.” The brakes squealed. He jerked the wheel to the right and the car slid halfway onto the blowing grass. We didn’t look at each other.
“Another thing,” he said. “You think working-class kids like people who say ‘f*ck’ to their fathers?”
“As far as you know,” I said, performing for my memory of Khadijah, as if she were sitting in the backseat, listening, “maybe they do.” I got out of the car and slammed the door.
I started up the hill. The engine growled. I turned and watched the Subaru sink away. When it finally slipped out of sight, I chased it. I swam with my arms, lifted my knees high. An insect flew into my mouth, and I ran even as I coughed and wiped my tongue. I wanted to throw my arms around my father’s neck and smell the sweat on him, fall asleep in the passenger seat as a crackly oldies station read the weather. I went full-sprint downhill. Soon I doubled over in pain. As mosquitoes swarmed, I paced on the grass.
I renewed my resolve to fight my father by summoning Khadijah to mind again. Khadijah would have been able to see the truth: My father, an unfeeling person, had made a handicapped woman drag herself after his car. He had made her plant her hand in the road. He had left her with an important piece of paper torn in four, and a truckload of hippie furniture.
On the other hand, could I expect to find Steven and Alexis in the spot where we’d left them, meditating on their circumstances, waiting for my help? If we did cross paths, what would happen? I imagined Steven’s red truck bearing down on me, Steven leaping from the driver’s seat and chasing me into the woods. Was it possible he might carry a rifle in his truck, like the rednecks who took out Peter Fonda at the end of Easy Rider? There was nothing to do but make for the dacha. My father would have to look for me there, eventually. I began to walk uphill.
Soon, I passed the spot where we’d left Steven and Alexis. I could make out the loop where they’d turned around. In another half hour, I reached our driveway, and found the cabin half obscured by a Berkshire of furniture. Our couches and chairs had been dumped off the truck, onto the grass. The big red couch and the blue love seat with the polka dots were on the bottom, supporting the chairs, which made a latticework with their legs that stretched half as high as the cabin itself. Between the chair legs, the upper reaches glinted with glass squares; the framed conference posters reflected the sun. Steven and Alexis could have dumped it all in a ditch. But they’d given it back.
I sat on the grass and waited. In ten minutes, the Subaru rolled up the driveway. My father slammed the door behind him and helped me up. I beamed involuntarily as I grasped his hand.
“I must say I’m relieved,” he said. “I was worried you were going to return to find them burning it down.”
“Where were you?” I asked, clapping him on the shoulder, to make sure he didn’t leave my side.
“Got a seltzer and a coffee at a great old train-car diner down the road,” he said. “New England Monthly used to rave about it.” He put his hand on mine. “I’m glad we’re doing this together, Son.”
As it grew dark, we dragged the furniture inside, so it wouldn’t molder in the dew and rain.
“Don’t worry about making it pretty,” he said. He tossed a chair bouncer-style through the door. “Your mother’s never going to see the inside of this place again. And Nancy’s different from her, she doesn’t want me sweating the small shit while I make a life for myself as a creative person. I can’t tell you how important that is to me. It feels like I have access to oxygen for the first time since I started a family. It’s been a hard thing for me to be a parent, I’ve put so much aside, waiting for you and your sister to grow older. I’ve often thought that as soon as you’re both in college I’m going to get on a plane to the South of France, write in a stone cottage, come back every now and again to hang out in New York, be around Jews and black people.” He caught a moth in his hand and cast it out the window. “It’s for the best, Son. You’ll be fine seeing me on weekends for the next two years, won’t you? I hate to say ‘when I was your age,’ but when I was your age I was in boarding school, I saw my father less than that.”
“As long as I have the amp,” I said, “I’m cool.”
When we were done, the living room wasn’t the way it’d been before. The posters were stacked in a corner, but the UN letter was restored to its place next to the photo of the shirtless Havana street trombonist.
My father stepped back and looked at the letter. “I like it battle-scarred,” he said. “We’re lucky glass is the only thing that got broken, buddy.”
We coasted back down the hill. Salamanders fled before us, neon orange in our headlights.
“I bet you’re hungry, young man.”
I was. I had never labored before; I could feel an unfamiliar hardening in my shoulders.
We pulled into the lot behind the train-car diner after dinner rush. We took a booth in the back with a view of the waitress’s circuit: down the counter, back up the tables along the wall.
She looked about five years older than I was, maybe a few more. The corners of moist dollar bills peeked from the pockets of her tight black jeans. Waves of dark brown hair were stuck to her cheeks with sweat. But her work was mostly over; the diner was empty. She leaned against the side of our booth as she flipped open her pad and took us in.
“Give my boy here a cheeseburger and a chocolate milk shake, please,” my father said. He punched my arm and gave his head a solicitous tilt. “Am I right?”
I nodded. I blushed and tucked my smile into my neck.
The waitress laughed. “It’s your lucky day, young man.” She said it to me, but I knew her face was for him.
“The kid did good,” my father said. “Moved the biggest pile of furniture I’ve ever seen.”
“I bet he got some help from his pops.”
“I’m used to it. For him it was a big first, doing a day’s work.”
“Just how big was this pile of furniture?”
“Let me see that pen for a second, will you?” She drew it slowly from the pocket of her apron and held it out like she was going to knight him with it. “Thank you,” he said, “you’re a peach.”
She pressed her lower lip against the edge of her teeth. He took a napkin from the dispenser and drew an Egyptian pyramid. He drew a tiny stick figure next to it. “For a sense of the size of this thing,” he said.
She looked around. “Let me see that.” She slid onto the vinyl seat beside him. “That’s a pretty significant pile of furniture, but I’d say the pile of dishes I brought out to people here about an hour ago was like this.” She snatched the napkin from him and drew a second pyramid, twice as large as his.
“Now that I consider it, I forgot just how big that pile of furniture was,” he said. He drew the bottom of a pyramid so enormous only the corner of it fit on the napkin.
“No fair.” She slapped at his hand. “Respect the rules, you’ve got to stay inside the napkin, man.”
Their shoulders were touching. Arm slipped against arm. I saw two children pulling a blanket over their heads, making a fortress of darkness. They were hiding in a place where everything was believed. The warmth of it was something I could feel from the other side of the table. I knew I couldn’t make them come out, no matter what I said.
Sick of watching them, I took off my sneakers and rubbed my bare feet together. I stared out the window. There was a rattling outside, barely audible. A red pickup bumped around the corner.
As soon as the truck reached the black asphalt of the parking lot, it slowed to a crawl. There were familiar auras of rust around the wheels. I could make out Steven alone in the cab. He turned into the space next to the Subaru as a tall man in a hairnet and a cook’s apron walked out the back door of the train car. Steven jumped down from the cab and gave the cook a high five. Wild blond curls snuck out from under the hairnet, white in the evening sunlight. With the cook looking around to see if anyone was in the parking lot, Steven knelt beside the Subaru’s tires, out of sight.
“Dad,” I said. I pointed. We could see the cook, and Steven’s truck. Steven stood, brushed dust off his jeans.
My father cursed. The waitress slid out of the booth and went behind the counter.
My father pushed down on my shoulders. “You do not move,” he said.
He jogged out the door, down the three concrete steps to the parking lot. He could have stayed inside, I thought, and called the police. That’s what Mom would have done. But he believed in giving these people a chance to hurt him. The way he went through war books—that was part of it.
The door sighed shut behind him. The waitress and I were alone inside, watching. My father and Steven shouted a little while, before they reached for each other. Later, for professional reasons, I would spend a lot of time in bars, and realize in retrospect that this verbose buildup to fighting meant that both my father and Steven were inept brawlers. If one of them had been any good, he would have tried to be the first to pop the other in the face, no prelude. That or tackled the other guy, straddled him, punched his head. There would have been no throat clearing. But at the time I thought they were talking and shoving because conversation was a necessary part of the process, that they were working themselves into a godlike furor. My father twisted Steven’s shirt and yelled in his face undaunted. But the cook walked around my father and took one of his arms in both of his hands. Steven did the same with the other arm. They leaned him against the back of the Subaru, gripping him by the elbow and the shoulder on each side. My father writhed against the hood; they labored to hold him down, two hands on each of his arms.
The waitress touched my elbow and pointed outside with her chin. I looked around to see what I could use. I took a serrated steak knife off a dirty plate on the counter. It looked funny in my hand; it made my wrist look even thinner than it was. She hoisted a coffeepot off the Bunn Pour-O-Matic. It was the decaf pot, with a smudged orange lip.
“Take this.” She pushed it toward me across the counter. “It’ll hurt. It hurts my fingers all the time.”
I put down the knife and picked up the coffeepot. My father didn’t want my help, but he was going to get it. As soon as I had the pot in my hand, I became aware that my body was carrying a white energy that purled in my lungs and brain and turned from fear to determination to fear and back and forth, like a kid was playing with a light switch. My arm trembled. The coffee sloshed as I walked out of the train car into the parking lot, not too fast, careful not to let any of the coffee spill over the lip and burn my fingers. Approaching these men at a steady pace with the coffeepot stable in my hand, I felt uncomfortably like a waitress.
Steven and the cook let my dad go and backed away when they saw me coming with something in my hand. When Steven took in that it was a pot of decaf, he sneered with relief.
“I’ll burn you,” I said.
“What are you going to do?” my father called to Steven. “Beat a kid?”
“I’m going to take that from you,” Steven said to me, “unless you pour it out.”
“I’m not doing that.”
Steven stepped forward, and reached for the pot. I walked backward, and drew the pot close to me, like a football, but Steven got both his hands on it, and we were twisting together, and then my hands were empty and Steven was emptying the pot onto the ground, calmly, as if pouring water on a rosebush.
Three men had come out of the diner, and the one in front, who was shouting obscenities, looked like he might be the manager, a tan and wiry man in metallic math-nerd glasses. I could tell the dishwashers were dishwashers because they were only barely older than I was, one of them in a Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion T-shirt, the other in a Celtics jersey.
The manager was still shouting something. There was Steven—he was jumping in his truck. He revved the engine. I scrambled to get out of his way, and then he was spitting gravel through the parking lot, spinning out onto the road.
I looked down at myself to find I had some coffee splashed on my shirt. It didn’t seem like it was melting my skin. Apparently, a hot plate with an openmouthed pot didn’t maintain coffee at lethal temperatures, like the metal tanks at McDonald’s. I had envisioned the weapon in my hand as boiling pitch, like what you’d pour on a screaming Hun.
Still: I had been in a fight. Khadijah, I thought, my love, my fellow soldier. See what have I become? I felt that Khadijah, if she had seen me, might have been overwhelmed by a desire to kiss me, because the smell of my sweat was mingled with Old Spice, and even without the Old Spice the smell was better than how it had been before—the sweat was earned.
As we waited for the police, I leaned protectively against my father’s Subaru, which was immobilized, its rear tires slashed. My shirt clung to my chest. My triceps, which ached from wrestling with Steven for the pot, looked a little more like real triceps, distinguishable from the rest of my arms.
I have been to war, my love. I mouthed the words as I watched the sunset spill red on the diner’s chrome. Maybe I only needed Khadijah to watch how I was changing, how I was becoming a man, for our bond to be sealed.
? ? ?
The police station in Worthington was not like Wattsbury’s. The room where my father was invited to make a phone call was never referred to as a conference room, and our exchange with the officers couldn’t have been termed a conference. But a progressive, Wattsburian spirit prevailed. The police told us that they would keep Steven off our property as long as we didn’t insist on lodging a criminal complaint; they felt pretty sure they could talk him out of lodging a complaint against us. It was true that my father had torn up his money order, and that I would have inflicted very mild burns upon him if he hadn’t seized the pot, but a young waitress had confessed that she was the one who had armed me, a minor, with coffee. (She was fired immediately.) It was Steven who had slashed our tires and instigated the conflict. As far as the town of Worthington was concerned, we only had to find a ride back to Wattsbury and call Triple A about the Subaru in the morning.
At the little metal table where the white office phone waited for us, my father backed his metal chair against the wall. He leaned his head against a bulletin board and dialed a number from memory.
“Give me a little space, all right?” His eyes softened. “Won’t you, Son?”
I left the room and wandered down the hallway, to the holding cell. I took the bars in my hands. While my father murmured into the phone, I studied the metal bench that ran alongside the wall, the chrome toilet. These were the state’s tools for accommodating citizens who were helpless against themselves. A cage was not a place you would ever put my father, a great cat.
After about five minutes, he came out to the lobby. “It’ll be two hours,” he said to the officers. “A friend of mine is on her way.”
? ? ?
We had long exhausted the game of Twenty Questions by the time Nancy arrived. I had seen my father kiss her, but now, for the first time, I saw the two of them embrace. He collected her in his big arms, her small, rigid body much the same as Khadijah’s, her avian eyes and nose Khadijah’s too, and soon they were sitting at the table near the phone, his head on her shoulder. These cheating old people had what Khadijah and I rightfully deserved.
“Poor baby,” Nancy said. She kissed my father’s hair. “My poor churl.”
“I don’t have any money,” he said as she ran a hand down his sideburn through his beard. When she was with him, holding him, he was unashamed to say it. “What am I going to do?”
“We’ll figure something out, dummy.” She made a dismissive motion with one hand while she continued to pet him with the other, a coordinated movement I thought of as maternal. “You just had a run-in with some bad people, that’s all.” Bad people. The clarity with which a neocon could navigate the world! My mother would never have said “bad people.” She never would have allowed herself the certainty that the people were bad. Nancy’s face, as she cooed the words into his ear, was self-assured. My father closed his eyes.
The Dads left the station with their arms around each other’s shoulders, a battered pair of defectors. I followed, hoping that Khadijah waited for me in Nancy’s car, although I knew it was unlikely. Before we reached the parking lot, the Dads stopped on the paved walk and allowed themselves a luxurious kiss. They performed it in part for me, I think, and for any officers watching from inside. They were having a rite of their own.
April was all but upon us. A lukewarm wind shook pine needles onto the windshields of the cruisers. I could hear them skitter on metal and asphalt, scouring away at winter.
“You didn’t bring Khadijah, by any chance, did you, Nancy?” I asked. It was the first substantial sentence that had ever passed between us.
“You think she’s hiding under the car, Josh?” She laughed. “Khadijah is studying, dear. Or at least she’d better be. She and I will have a dire conversation if I return to find her final Wattsbury French paper unfinished. She lobbied quite hard to come with me, actually. But I would have been a lax mother to say yes, I’m afraid.”
“Elle ne vient pas, c’est ?a?” my father asked. “L’histoire de la débacle allemande?” He was cheering up.
“Non, c’est Wattsbury Regional, mon frère, Afrique du nord. L’histoire du colonialisme et du racisme.”
They kissed again, in the parking lot, the gorgon of money vanquished by culture. I knew they were healing each other by speaking French, reminding each other of what they had and who they were. They were going to build a life on their romance. I thought of Nancy barring Khadijah from the car, Khadijah, who’d only wanted to hang out with me after I’d been in a fight, and I despised the Dads. Perhaps that was the useful trick I learned from what happened with Khadijah: the ability to despise them.
I reflected on the deafening musical equipment I was going to spend my father’s money on. Someday, I thought, I will live in a tour bus, with only my girlfriend. I will walk and talk and dress differently from my father. I will walk and talk and dress in such a way that, as with Kurt Cobain, you take a look at me and think, orphan.
And the girl in the tour bus was the girl who’d torn off her scrunchie, who’d cast her burgundy-trimmed Esprits to the wind. Who sat beneath an oak with a manual for politically motivated crime. She’ll be an activist, I thought, but sometimes she’ll take time off and come with me, and distribute political flyers to the people who come to my shows, bring them into a movement.
But an older, drier voice told me, Whatever sprout you’ve grown with Khadijah, it’s going to wither and die. No one had e-mail. To keep in touch with a girl who lived two hours away, you had to talk to her, while attempting to avoid your mother, on a beige phone whose base was nailed to the kitchen wall. That or write her letters. I knew that even if I could summon the courage to do these things, they wouldn’t carry Khadijah and me through months and years. We’d never had much time together, had never done anything considered something.
If Khadijah had stayed at my school, anything could have happened. But she became a story of what might have been and so became, over the years, a personal celebrity, a cherished memory I felt I knew so well that, when I reminded myself I didn’t actually know her anymore, it felt unfair, an oversimplification. When I needed resolve in times of difficulty, I thought of her walking the March streets of Wattsbury, back straight, sneakers squeaking on the wet pavement, the sleeve of her mother’s sweatshirt nearly concealing the stone in her small, sure hand.