Larry Beukes had always maintained his property with the diligence and energy of a Prussian field marshal. He was out there twice a week in a muscle shirt, pushing a powerless hand mower, his delts tanned and rippling, his cleft chin lifted dramatically (he had great fuckin’ posture). Other lawns were green and tidy. His was meticulous.
Of course, I was only thirteen when all this happened, and I understand now what I didn’t at the time: It was all getting away from Lawrence Beukes. His ability to manage, to keep up with even the mild demands of suburban living, was being overwhelmed, a little at a time, as he wore down under the strain of looking after a woman who could no longer look after herself. I suppose it was only his inherent sense of optimism and conditioning—his sense of personal fitness, if you will—that allowed him to go on, kidding himself that he could handle it all.
I was beginning to think I might have to walk Shelly back to my house and wait with her there when Mr. Beukes’s ten-year-old burgundy Town Car swerved into the driveway. He was driving it like an outlaw on the run from Starsky and Hutch and bumped one tire up over the curb as he swung in. He got out in a sweat and almost stumbled and fell coming into the yard.
“Oh, Jesus, dere you are! I hoff been looging all over to hell and gone! You almost giff me a heart attack.” Larry’s accent just naturally made you think of apartheid, torture, and dictators sitting on gilt thrones in marble palaces with salamanders scampering along the walls. Which was too bad. He had made his money hauling around iron, not blood diamonds. He had his flaws—he’d voted for Reagan, he believed that Carl Weathers was a great thespian, and he grew emotional listening to ABBA—but he revered and adored his wife, and balanced against that, his personal blemishes were no matter at all. He went on, “What did you do? I go next door to ask Mr. Bannerman if he hoff detergent, I come bagg, you are gone like a girl in a David Cobberfelt trick!”
He grabbed her in his arms, seemed like he might be about to give her a hard shake, then hugged her instead. He looked over her shoulder at me, his eyes glittering with tears.
“It’s okay, Mr. Beukes,” I said. “She’s fine. She was just kind of . . . lost.”
“I wasn’t lost,” she said, and she showed him a small, knowing smile. “I was hiding from the Polaroid Man.”
He shook his head. “Hush. Hush yourself, woman. Let’s ged you out of the sun and— Oh, Lord, your feet. I should make you take your feet off before you go inside. You will track your filth everywhere.”
All this sounds kind of savage and cruel, but his eyes were wet and he spoke with a gruff, wounded affection, talking to her the way you might speak to a beloved old cat that had gotten itself into a fight and come home missing an ear.
He marched her past me, up the brick steps, and into the house. I was about to go, thought I had already been forgotten, when he turned back to jab a trembling finger at my nose.
“I hoff something for you,” he said. “Do not float off, Michael Figlione.”
And he banged the door shut.
2
FROM A CERTAIN POINT OF view, his choice of words was almost funny. There was really no danger I was going to float off on him. We have not yet touched upon the elephant in the room, which is that at the age of thirteen I was the elephant in any room I stepped into. I was fat. Not “big-boned.” Not “sturdy.” Certainly not merely “husky.” When I walked across the kitchen, glasses rattled in the cupboard. When I stood among the other kids of my eighth-grade class, I looked like a buffalo wandering among the prairie dogs.
In this modern age of social media and sensitivity to bullying, if you call someone a fat-ass, you’ll likely find yourself on the receiving end of some abuse yourself, for body shaming. But in 1988 “twitter” was a verb used only to describe what sparrows and gossiping biddies did. I was fat, and I was lonely; in those days if you were the former, the latter was a given. I had plenty of time for walking old ladies home. I wasn’t neglecting my buddies. I didn’t have any. None who were my age anyway. My father sometimes drove me to the Bay to attend monthly meetings of a club called S.F. GRUE (the San Francisco Gathering of Robotics Users and Enthusiasts), but most of the others at those get-togethers were much older than I. Older and already stereotypes. I don’t even need to describe them, because you can already see them in your mind’s eye: the bad complexions, the thick-lensed glasses, the unzipped flies. When I dropped in on this crew, I wasn’t just learning about circuit boards. I believed I was looking at my future: depressing late-night arguments about Star Trek and a life of celibacy.
It didn’t help, of course, that my last name was Figlione, which, when translated into 1980s elementary-school English, became Fats-Baloney or Fag-Alone or just plain old Fags, monikers that stuck to me like gum on my sneaker until I was in my twenties. Even my beloved fifth-grade science teacher, Mr. Kent, once accidentally called me Fag-Alone, to uproarious laughter. He at least had the decency to blush and look sick and apologize.
My existence could’ve been much worse. I was clean, and I was neat, and by never studying French I was able to avoid honor roll: that list of smug know-it-alls and teacher’s pets who were just begging for a wedgie. I never faced anything worse than the occasional low-grade humiliation, and when I was teased, I always smiled indulgently, as if I were getting ragged by a dear friend. Shelly Beukes couldn’t remember what had happened yesterday. As a rule, I never wanted to.
The door was flung open again, and Larry Beukes was back. I turned to see him wiping one enormous callused hand across his wet cheek. I was embarrassed and looked away, out toward the street. I had no experience with weeping adults. My father was not a particularly emotional man, and I doubt that my mother was much for tears, although I couldn’t say for sure. I only ever saw her two or three months out of every year. Larry Beukes had come from Africa, whereas my mother had gone there for an anthropological study and, in a sense, never really came back. Even when she was home, a part of her remained six thousand miles away, beyond reach. At the time I was not angry about this. For children, anger usually requires proximity. That changes.
“I droff all around dis neighborhood looging for her, the goddem simple old thing. Dis is the third time. I thought dis time, dis time she will walg into traffig! The silly goddem—thang you for bringing her bagg to me. Bless you, Michael Figlione. Gott bless your heart.” He pulled a pocket inside out, and money sprayed everywhere, crumpled bills and loose silver scattering across the walk and the grass. I realized, with something like alarm, that he meant to tip me.