Say That To My Face

RORY HAD A kid sister named Kerri who was in my grade. To me, the most interesting thing about Kerri was that she had a sister named Rory. Kerri only waited a week to come back to school after her mother died and right off the bat there was an incident. I walked by her and accidentally bumped into her desk. Her crayon slipped out of the lines and she lost it.

“Look what you did! You ruined my picture! I’m sick of this! First my brothers and now you! I’m sick of it! Do you hear me? I’m sick of it!”

It was like I had accidentally knocked a knife off a table and didn’t catch it for fear of getting cut. I jumped out of the way and let it fall. I had a feeling it wasn’t about her picture, but I didn’t know what else to do. Mrs. Johnson said, “OK, Kerri that’s enough. Why don’t you sit down now.”

She didn’t even wipe her nose or her eyes until a drop landed on her picture.

Outbursts weren’t Kerri’s only form of grieving. A few times she just got really quiet and said she wasn’t feeling well. She’d go to the school nurse and her father got called at work to come pick her up. Mrs. Johnson explained to us that she thought Kerri wasn’t sick, but rather she was upset about her mom. That I understood.

The thing that didn’t make sense was the water fountain.

The class was silently staring into workbooks, trying to solve three-digit subtraction problems, when I went to get a drink. Bent over with my mouth near the faucet, I felt someone come up behind me. I turned around; it was Kerri. She was standing uncomfortably close but wasn’t looking at me. She had her eyes on the fountain. I wiped my mouth and stepped around her cautiously, not sure if she was done throwing tantrums.

Two days later, same thing again. Got up right behind me, stood close and still didn’t look at me.

I couldn’t see why the girl who, weeks before, chewed me out in front of everyone now needed to stand so close and put her mouth to the same faucet right after mine.

The third time I wasn’t even thirsty. I only wanted to see if it would happen again. By the time I had my face over the faucet, Kerri was behind me. Mrs. Johnson announced—so everyone could hear—how she’d noticed that every time Joseph got up for a drink, Kerri did also. When all the heads and giggles pointed in Kerri’s direction, Mrs. Johnson asked if Kerri was really thirsty. Kerri answered her question by sitting down.

In the second grade, we didn’t expect to have to deal with adults who couldn’t see it was uncool to publicly embarrass a kid who lost her mother a month ago. Nor did we expect in the summer ahead of us there would be a citywide blackout, that Elvis Presley would die so young, that a bomb threat would evacuate thirty-five thousand people from the World Trade Center or that the Son of Sam would turn out to be a twenty-four-year-old guy named David who lived in our neighborhood a few blocks from where we played. How could we have conceptualized evil as a quiet guy who worked at the post office, rented the studio apartment down the street and lived among us? Fifteen years earlier he attended our elementary school, was taught by the same teachers, sat at our desks and drank out of the same water fountain. As grade school children, we had no idea that we were months away from those kinds of thoughts.

WE THOUGHT IT was him.

Kerri and I tried to play as if the water fountain incidents never happened. Catherine and I pushed our curfew. The sun was setting. We stopped the game for the car coming down the street. When it got close, we saw it was cream-colored, then we saw there was one guy in it.

Some kids took off and ran through front yards, between houses. Some screamed. I couldn’t run. I fell backward, put my forearms in front of my face, not wanting to see or be seen. When I peeked out from behind my arms, he was halfway down the block; my sister was through our front door. It was time to run home, but not without my ball. I ran to Kerri, who was on the sidewalk, her whole body wrapped around the kickball.

I said, “Give me the ball,” and tried to pry it from her. She rolled over and wouldn’t let me grab it.

“Come on!” I said.

She wasn’t giving it up. On top of her, I tried to get my hands between her stomach and the ball. She was fighting me. I rolled her on her back—she was laughing. Not a good time for a game of keep-away, I thought. I tried to punch the ball loose but never meant to knock the wind out of her. She held her ribs and cried. I said I was sorry, but she didn’t even look back as she ran to her house. Someone had been yelling for her to get the hell inside. The screen door slammed behind her, then Rory appeared behind it. Her hair was gone, cut straggly, close to her head; it looked like she’d done it herself. She yelled at me, “Get out of here! Go home!”

My mother grabbed me by the back of my shirt and didn’t let go until we were in our house. She yelled at me for not running home like my sister and wanted to know if I knew how to listen.

Nowhere. From now on, after dinner, we were to go nowhere.

I went into my room, closed the door and slammed the ball against my dresser; my lamp fell. I thought about the smile on Kerri’s face while she wrestled me for the ball. Kerri Gallagher likes me? I grabbed the windowpane, tried to look up the block and only saw the streetlights come on. Kerri Gallagher likes me.

THE NEXT MORNING we ate our cereal without talking as the radio played the news in the background. When it was time to go to school, we were handed our lunch boxes.

We stepped outside. It felt as if an overnight snowfall had covered the entire neighborhood in three feet of silence.

When we pulled up to school, Catherine and I leaned over the front seat to kiss our mom goodbye. She waited until we walked in the front door to drive away.

Kerri spoke to no one. During lunch hour she was sitting on a bench next to two other girls who were making finger puppets out of lined paper. I didn’t have it in me to go over to her. Only when we were all making our way back into the school was I able to walk up next to her and ask if she was OK. She didn’t even answer me.

We all sat at our desks and were told to get our math workbooks out.

I didn’t want to do anything Mrs. Johnson said. It made no sense why she had embarrassed Kerri yesterday. It made no sense why the cops couldn’t catch the .44-Caliber Killer or why parents yell at their children when they’re trying to protect them or why we had to solve three-digit subtraction problems again.

While they all had their heads down, I went for the fountain. I drank, then turned back around. No one was standing close to me. Everyone still had their heads in their books. I went to the closet and poked through my lunch box. Mrs. Johnson asked me what I was doing. I told her I broke my pencil; I was just getting a new one. I opened my lunch box and took off the top of my thermos—the part that doubles as a cup. I went to the water fountain and filled it up. Walking toward Kerri, I was terrified that Mrs. Johnson was going to embarrass the hell out of me, too. I fought the urge to look to the front of the room to see if she was watching. Kerri was hunched over her desk, intent on her arithmetic. It happened so fast. I don’t remember walking back to my desk. Kerri never looked up to see if anyone saw it. She only slid the cup closer to her with her left hand and kept writing with the other. She kept it near her like she was going to save it for when she really needed it. I never noticed it before, but when she leaned over like that her hair was long enough to reach her desk.

THE BIGGEST, MOST SILENT THING

I can’t cook yet, she says. I hang out in the kitchen because I like food and because my mother always asks me to keep her company. I’m eight; I know how to cook. Maybe it’s an Italian thing. She turns the radio on to an oldies station and some guy is singing about taking his girl away into the moonlight, throwing her eyes into the sky, loving her in some deep moment of bliss forever and ever. Maybe it’s a fifties thing. She says, now I can cook, rubs her palms together and grabs me by the waist. Let me show you how we used to dance when I was a kid. You put your hands here like you’re leading, ’cause that’s how the guys did it, but really you’re gonna follow. Just follow me. You just kind of rock back and forth, that’s right. She sings along and hums when she can’t remember the words. She says, you know what I want for Christmas this year? I want a special gift. What? I ask. I want you to write a poem about me. A poem just about me. Then she says, oops, we can’t let this burn. She reaches to the stove and pushes the escarole around in the pan, her right hand still around my waist.

THE NEXT NIGHT, my mother asks me to go with her to pick up my sister from religious instruction class. I say it’s too early to go and she says she wants to drive slowly because the roads may be icy. On our way out the door we run into our neighbor Gloria, and my mother asks her if she had a nice Thanksgiving. Gloria went to her sister’s in Philadelphia and, she says, she’ll be going there for Christmas as well. My mother says, that’s nice. Three years ago, Gloria’s husband took off without notice and wrote her a letter explaining where he was and who he was with and served her with papers two weeks later. I am quiet. She says, hi, Joey. Hi, Gloria. Mom tells Gloria to stop by if she needs anything.

Mom says, give me your arm, Joey, there’s ice on these steps. They need salt on them. I told your stepfather to do it, she says, but who knows with him. She asks me if I’ll put some salt down when we get back and I say, yes. As we walk down the stairs, she sticks to my arm and tells me how sorry she feels for Gloria being alone during the holidays. I can relate to her very well, she says. Of course I can. She’s had two last names and I’ve already had three.

During the drive, she asks me if I’m excited to go to my father’s house for Christmas Eve. I say, yeah, and she wants to know what Patty, my stepmother, cooks for Christmas Eve dinner. I say, fish and things. Is it good? she wants to know. I say it is.

We pull up to the Catholic school twenty minutes early. We sit quietly in the car. My breath turns to vapor out the window. Mom tells me she’s cold and can I roll the window up a little. I leave it open a crack. She says the church looks like the one in the Bronx she and my father went to when they were still married. And that was the beginning of the history lesson. It dated back before I was born, when Mom and Dad weren’t having a good time. When, my mother tells me, my father wasn’t always nice. When he wasn’t nice to her. She tells me how he used to yell at her and hit her and how he started dating Patty while they were still married. I always figured it was that way. There had been many innuendos and opinions thrown around the house that weren’t intended to land in my ears. This is the first formal sit-down on the subject. I feel like the kid in class who’s terrified to get called on. I just take notes, ask no questions and try to be invisible.

When the history lesson is over, she brings us in to the present by talking about my last report card. It left a lot to be desired, she says. The kids start coming out of the Catholic school and Mom says we’ll talk more about it later. She starts up the car and I can see my sister Catherine walking toward us. I think maybe we can talk about the apostles on the ride home. My mother says, Joey, can you roll up that window, please, Mommy’s cold.

Later, I get the talk about the report card. My mother has trouble understanding why my sister does so well in school and I don’t. The thing is, it doesn’t occur to me to be a good student when my sister already is. That’s her calling. Why should I do that? There’s no reason for two people in one family to play the same part.

My mother tells me that no one is going to come along and just give me good grades. Or give me anything else, for that matter. She wants to know how I think the family eats around here and how I get clothes to wear. She says, what do you want to do when you get older? I tell her I want to be a baseball player. And what if that doesn’t work out? she says. Then what? What are you going to do then? I say, I don’t know. She says I have to know because life isn’t a game. I say, I don’t know, OK? I don’t know what I want. Then she explodes. Don’t say that. It just kills me that you could say that. She looks like she’s going to spit. You sound just like your father.

I GO OUTSIDE to throw salt on the front steps. I see Gloria’s TV on and I watch my breath turn to steam again. I wrote a poem once, when I was six. In the first grade I went on a school trip to the Museum of Natural History. The intention for most of the first-graders (at least all the boys) was to see how much trouble they could cause. But something in me didn’t want to. The museum didn’t feel like the kind of place where we should’ve been causing trouble. I thought, Don’t fuck around. See if you can learn something. Go somewhere and learn something. It was the first time a thought like that had ever occurred to me. So I went to the butterfly exhibit and learned how they camouflage themselves. They hold the top part of their wings—the bright, colorful side—together so only the underside of the wings shows. The underside is covered with browns and grays, which allow them to blend in with dirt and branches. They become invisible in their own surroundings. They hide their beauty for safety. This is known as crypsis. I took a Magic Marker and wrote “crypsis” on my arm and covered it with my sleeve.

Then I saw the blue whale they have on the ceiling. It was the biggest and most silent thing I’d seen. All the other big stuff I knew was so damn loud—our house, the school, my parents’ divorce, dinner. Even my mother’s new marriage was loud. My stepfather was a very low-key individual. The longest conversation I ever had with him went like this: What time’s the Yankee game on? Seven o’clock. When my mother would fight him, he would never fight back, so she would have to fight herself. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, yelling at my stepfather through the door. She’d scream about the life he had promised her and how good things were supposed to have been and how it was all bullshit. That’s how she fought him. He never screamed back. The loudest thing I ever heard my stepfather say to my mother was, “No, I’m not like your ex-husband. I don’t beat you.”

That was really loud.

So I wrote a poem about the blue whale on the ceiling at the Museum of Natural History. The poem said that the biggest thing I ever saw was also the quietest. Mom hung it on the refrigerator. Also, I took my blue Magic Marker and I drew a picture of the whale on the bottom of my kitchen chair. Then I would lie on the floor and look up at my picture, so the whale could be over my head, just like they had it at the museum. Also, no one else would see it there.

When I come back in the house, the report card discussion continues. She says, Joseph, I know you’re a smart kid. I know you can do very good in school, that’s the only reason why I get upset, OK? She throws a hug on me and my head lands in her stomach. She plays with my hair and asks me if I’ve locked the side door. I say I have. See, she says, and holds me tighter, poor Gloria, she doesn’t have a man around the house anymore. It’s scary. God forbid someone tries to break into her house at night, what’s she gonna do?

LIKE EVERY SATURDAY morning, our father comes to pick my sister and me up at our mother’s house and then we stay with him for the weekend. I sit in the back and my sister in the front. He drives a Volkswagen Bug and the gears are tight, which makes for a jerky ride every time he shifts. It’s not something that’s happened to me before. I’ve never peed my pants in my mother’s car. But I feel it rising up now as soon as I get into his car. This Saturday morning, I get a tender feeling below my stomach when we stop at the light. It gets worse when he starts to drive, then he throws it into second, the car jerks and it happens. My sister notices first and says, Daddy, Joey needs help.

My father looks at me in the rearview mirror and says, what’s the matter, Joey? You OK?

When he realizes what’s happened, he stops the car, gets a towel out from under the hood and spreads it out on the seat next to me. He says, Joey, it’s OK. You’re not hurt. It’s OK, Joey. Sit on this now and we’ll put on different clothes when we get home. That’s all. It’s OK.

When we get back to his place, my stepmother cleans me up. I wear my pajama bottoms while I wait for my jeans to dry. I walk out of the bathroom to the living room, where Dad’s sitting in an armchair.

Come here. Sit with me, Joey. Sit with your old man.

He lifts me up. My father has hands that feel solid as two pieces of teak furniture. My butt lands on one arm of the chair and my feet on the other. He goes, sit here on the big chair like a man. There we go. You feel better?

Yeah, I say.

See, no big deal. He drags his thumb across my neck. It feels as big as the barrel end of a baseball bat. What happened to your neck? he wants to know. You wrestling with someone?

No.

Then who grabbed you?

I say, someone in class. I was hoping he would drop it there.

Who? he asks.

Kerri.

Kerri? Oh, yeah? This, he is very interested in. Kerri who?

Gallagher.

Huh. An Irish girl. Is she nice?

Yeah.

He says, you like her? I smile. He pokes me in the ribs with a finger. I’m sure she’s very nice. She cute?

I think I’m not supposed to tell my dad how cute I think girls are. So I keep it shut and hope he puts this subject to sleep.

Aaaah, Joey, he says. Girls … they’re different than guys. If only women understood that, less marriages would go into retirement. Patty, she understands. I’ll tell you something, it’s like this—you like this girl Kerri, and maybe there’s another girl that you like also. Right?

Um … no.

No? No one? I shake my head. Well, someday there will be. And you’ll find yourself trying to understand why you like them both, you’ll start to feel a lot of things and you’ll get confused, but let me tell you, it’s simple. There are some things that guys need that ladies do not. And this is the whole difference between them. A guy needs the kind of thing he can keep his feelings out of. And this is the thing that your stepmother understands what many women—I don’t mention names—don’t understand, and that is why a lot of marriages go south. You know what I mean?

He continued.

Look, a guy needs the kind of thing that he can keep his feelings out of. And I don’t think women can do that, they’re too emotional. A woman can’t fall down an elevator shaft, for instance, dust herself off, then have sex with you ten seconds later. If they don’t feel it, it’s not gonna happen. Period. But guys can get into a plane wreck and lose limbs. Two hundred fifty dead bodies floating in the ocean, sharks are eating the survivors and in the life raft as the helicopters are coming, the guy will hit on the stewardess. And this is true. Some women don’t understand how we could do a thing at a time like that. If the stewardess is hot, then we can do it. It’s simple. So what, she may have lost a limb. We’d still do it. Even in the face of death. They think we’re just pigs. Let ’em do their claptrappin’. I’ll tell you the truth, son, we’re not pigs, we’re just different.

The only thing I’m sure of is that his lips are moving and sound is coming out of them. Sharks? Helicopters? Pigs with no arms? He could be conjugating Cantonese verbs into Sanskrit, for all I know.

He goes on.

And this is what Patty understands that many women do not. She doesn’t judge. And who should? Who should be able to judge a thing like that? It’s not the kind of thing … Your Grandfather used to say, “He who casts the first stone who lives in glass houses … you shouldn’t do it.” Your stepmother understands that we’re different. You understand, Joey?

What if you like only one girl? I ask. Then what?

Then that’s OK. It’s OK if you like only one girl for now. I mean, you’ll see. There will be plenty, is all I’m saying. Someday you’ll have your own place, you’ll have your own stuff …

My father gets introspective. It’s unfamiliar to me. When he comes out of it, it’s hard for him to look me in the eye. He speaks slower and deeper than he has been. Joey, he says, when you get older—sometimes I think, probably, you might think of me and you’ll say, “You know, my dad was a real jerk-off when it came to certain things, but then other things he was OK with.” I hope.

Now he tries to lighten himself up.

Don’t tell your mother this, he says, but secretly I can’t wait for you to get older so we can get dressed up and go out—you’re gonna look sharp. Always look sharp, Joey. It’s important. You see, my father, your grandpa … he used to go out alone. And I think we can do better than that.

There is a heavy pause.

We all work with what we have, he says.

Another one.

You know how to listen, Joey. It’s a good thing to know how to do.

He grabs my arm and pulls at what little muscle is there and says, Jesus, look at you. When did you get so big?

I try to figure out how to break away from those hands. It seems he wants to be friends, something I think parents aren’t supposed to be. I understand the way dogs feel when they want to walk one way and their leash is getting pulled the other.

I say, I’m hungry. Can we have lunch now?

Sure we can. He calls to the kitchen, Patty, can you fix the kids something?

She says, I got ham sandwiches.

He says to me, you like that, right?

Happy to have a destination, I say, I love ham.

He kisses me on the top of my head, lifts me off the chair and as I head for the kitchen, one of his palms catches me square on the ass.

THERE’S A RUNNING joke in my mother’s house. For years, she’s been talking about this mink coat she’s gonna buy herself. We say, “How’s the mink coat fund comin’, Ma? You save enough to buy the claws yet?” She says, “Yeah, you watch. The day I get that coat I’m gonna be laughin’ hard. You watch.” She works nights at a department store and her husband delivers bread. Where does a mink coat fit into that picture?

But this night, December 17, 1979, she calls us on our joke. We’ve just finished dinner. My sister, my mother, my stepfather and myself linger over empty dishes and I pick olives out of the salad with my fingers. Our mother says she has an announcement to make. Announcement? My sister and I make faces and validate each other’s confusion. We hardly ever have anything to talk about in this house. Who makes announcements?

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