CHAPTER SEVEN
I WAS SEVENTEEN, JUST ABOUT TO GRADUATE AND TRYING TO decide what to do after Andover. Ma wanted me to organize migrant workers. I wanted to go to Brown with my friends.
“Friends! Hah!” Ma shrieked. “What friends? You don’t have any real friends. They’re all a bunch of vacuous social climbers, and you’re the worst of the lot. Just once I’d like you to express a single unconventional thought. I’m surprised you weren’t born wearing a tie.”
“You get that from your grandmother McMullen,” Pop said to me after the long weekend at home. He was talking about my conservatism, a family preoccupation generally referred to as if it were a disease or chronic condition, like syphilis of the soul.
“How I detest conservatism in a man,” Ma said as she lit the gas stove.
What passed for conservatism in our household, however, could get you arrested anywhere else.
Pop was more accepting of my flaws than Ma, since in his quixotic but definite view of things, you were the preordained sum of all your parts. My mother was simpleminded over Bing, but according to Pop, it was in the DNA.
“She gets it from her mother. The Buntings are fixated on good-looking people to the exclusion of all other considerations.” He paused for a sip of spiked coffee, the full cup raised to his lips. Lovingly, he inhaled the steam. I intuitively took two steps back. You could have gotten drunk on the fumes from his coffee.
“When it comes to looks you’ve got nothing to apologize for, Collie. You’re a fine-looking lad, Jesus, you look like an Irish prince, and more important, you wear the clever pants in this family, and that comes right from your cousins the Hanrahan twins—”
“I know, Pop. You’ve told me about those idiots a million times. . . .” But it didn’t stop him. His chin hit the floor.
“Idiots?” he thundered. “They graduated from the university when they were only fifteen years old. They were the smartest boys who ever lived. The only thing is they weren’t practical, and it cost them their lives. They hadn’t a clue about water and electricity. Who would ever have thought a plugged kitchen sink and an old toaster could wreak such havoc? Always be practical, Collie. To paraphrase the great Mr. O’Brien, pragmatism’s your only man.”
Probably because he was so hopelessly inept, Pop viewed practicality as if it were the mother lode, a treasure as elusive and fulfilling as the Holy Grail. This was a guy with an unreasonable reverence for duct tape, which he deemed a discovery of enormous cultural significance surpassed only by fire and archery. He once backed Ma’s car out of the garage in a drunken stupor with the passenger door wide open, nearly tearing it off the hinge. The next day, he proudly showed me how he’d fixed it using miles of duct tape.
“Now that’s pragmatism,” he said.
I’d never seen so much tape. The whole side of the car was sealed up so tight you could have used it to safely transport the plague. Ma drove around for months with the car door sealed shut. I don’t think she ever noticed—all that money, and we were some can of piss.
Ma and Pop used to stay up all night and sleep all day, stumbling into the kitchen to make coffee, her hair wild as the wind, sleeping mask worn like a necklace, his eyes watery and red.
“It’s the circadian rhythms,” Pop would say. “Each man is a prisoner of his internal clock. God help the man who won’t make peace with his circadian cycle.”
“What are you doing up? Washed and dressed. Have you already eaten?” my mother asked. I was teetering back and forth on a swivel chair in the corner near the window, the bad-humored ocean bubbling and hissing in the background.
“Ma, I’ve been up since seven. You were supposed to take me back to school, remember? I should have known. Next time I’ll get to the ferry myself.”
“Oh, I know. In bed by eleven, be up at seven. The drivel they espouse at that school of yours. You know, of course, nothing interesting ever happens before one o’clock in the afternoon. You and your pasty face and your banker’s hours.”
“What am I supposed to do? I’ve got school! I need to get back.”
“And God knows we wouldn’t ever want to miss a day of school. Aren’t you the good little comptroller.”
Her conversation was turning into one long protracted sneer. I could feel something warm glowing at the base of my skull. The years away at school spent among teachers who liked me for my ordinary urges and common interests had made me bold with Ma. It must have happened somewhere between all those weekend trips from the house to the campus and the campus to the house. I finally had decided I wasn’t going to want her to love me anymore.
“Leave the boy alone, Anais,” Pop said, speaking up from the other side of the room, where I could see him pouring more brandy, like cream, into his coffee. He sighed. “He can’t help himself. It’s right in him.”
I got up and stared out the window; the skyline and the waves were an identical slate color, the greater world a stark monochrome, the frayed white curtain blowing, one of the little dogs standing on all fours, trying to catch the fluttering lacy edges in his teeth.
“Did Tom feed the dogs? Did Bingo get something to eat?” my mother asked me.
“Yes,” I said with no small hint of frustration as I turned away from the window to face her.
“Is that exasperation I detect? The nerve of you.”
Oh, I can still feel the rising tension in my shoulders, my neck tightening, my veins constricting, the flow of blood roiling to a crimson standstill, me silent and growing taller and straighter with every weighted word, vertical with the sheer breadth and scope of her.
And somewhere in the background, a million fleas were hopping from dog to dog to dog and back again, an invisible flea circus, full of the sounds of scratching, heads shaking, collars ringing, and paws thumping. To this day, I’m still coughing up hair from hundreds of dogs. A dog is curled up in every chair my inner eye surveys, every sofa draped in dogs, dogs piled on dogs like firewood from the floor to the ceiling. I drag a dog by my shoelaces across the uneven floor of my daily life; there’s a dog tugging on my pant leg, refusing to let go, pulling me back when all I want to do is go forward.
“Hey, Collie, look smart!” Pop said, grinning as he pulled a coin from behind his ear and tossed it. I caught it between my fingers and nodded. He laughed. Charlie always figured there wasn’t an unhappy moment that couldn’t be redeemed by a flick of the wrist.
“Darling, darling, how is my precious darling?” Mom was diverted from her impending tirade by the sight of Bingo coming through the door after a long, lively day of truancy, feeding chocolate-chip cookies to his favorite dachshund, Jackdaw, looped round his shoulders like an inflated inner tube, ready to burst at the seams.
“Look at him, just look at him, Charlie, standing there as beautiful as if he’d stepped from a bandbox. Look at him, Collie. Isn’t he a picture with the sun in his hair?”
“You’re going to make him conceited as a corpse with white teeth, Anais. Let him be a man. No man worth his salt ever gave a hoot about his appearance. Back me up on this, Collie. When’s the last time you washed your hair?”
“I don’t know . . . a few days ago, I guess. . . .”
“There’s the man. Jesus, I’ve never been more proud,” he said, squeezing my shoulders, as I tried to shake off the implications of being the son so without distinction that his erratic personal hygiene was cause for celebration.
Bingo looked over at me and grinned, opening up like a tulip under the sunshine of Ma’s blinding adoration. Bingo liked everyone, and everyone liked Bingo. He knew Ma was crazy, but so what? She was crazy about him. He sat back and enjoyed her, reveling in her insanity as if she were a recurring character in some sketch comedy. Parody Ma, he sometimes called her.
“Shut your mouth, Coll,” he said. “You’re catching the flies your hair is attracting.”
“Don’t listen to them, darling,” my mother said, pulling Bing into her open arms, hugging him until he begged for air; she was kissing Jackdaw on the top of his head, the other dogs crowding excitedly around them. “What else would you expect a couple of run-of-the-mill fiddles to say in the presence of a gleaming Stradivarius? They’re forever stuck at the barn dance, but you, Bingo, my love, you’re going to the ball.”
And then she swept around the kitchen with him in her arms, loudly singing her dissonant Sondheim tunes, the dogs going crazy.