Wiffle ball or my growing penchant for silent observation, so that was all I said.
“Want to watch TV with me?”
I would have to say yes, then sit with her awhile, though nothing on the square box in front of us interested me half so much as what was going on outside. I was watching only to be polite, because she had asked me, because I suspected she needed company.
I allotted her half an hour, then I went to my room. In summer, the windows were open, the breezes came in. I took off all my clothes and lay on my bed in the dark. Sometimes a car drove by, or there were voices, a boy and a girl. They spoke low, and I listened in such a way that even simple words—words like “No” or “Come in”—stayed with me a long time afterward.
On Sundays we still had the ritual of the beach to anchor us in the old world. The family still gathered at Nahant. We parked illegally. We carried picnic baskets of food, big coolers. We set up four blankets in a row. No mention was ever made of my father, but I could see, in the behavior of my Aunts Carmela and Lucy, a notation made. Emma was always protective of my mother, but Carmela and Lucy looked at her in a way now that suggested they were not unhappy at the turn of events.
On the blanket, eating her food, I don’t believe my mother noticed this, or if she did, she pretended not to. She smiled as if nothing had happened to her, it was all right, being left didn’t make such a difference. I asked her to come into the water with me. I would have preferred to swim alone, but I couldn’t bear to leave her with them.
In the water, sometimes, she became a girl again. She told me how, when she was growing up, she left her sisters to the chores, took her towel down to the local pool, and swam all morning. “I was a fish, Luca,” she said. “My sisters had to do all the work.” So I saw, maybe, how things had once been, and why her sisters had looked at her the way they’d looked at her on the night of John’s party.
When she came out of the water, Carmela and Lucy were usually lying back beside their husbands, often with one thigh draped over the men’s legs. It seemed, since my father’s desertion, they had become more interested in their husbands; they ran their legs up the fleshy thighs of Tony and Mike in ways they never had before. So I tried to distract my mother. I told her to watch out for crabs, to look down, down into the water. I felt all my stiffness and formality, as though I had become a kind of guide for her. In my hyperawareness of the intense sensuality of the world, it became an imperative to mask that sensuality, to stand as a barrier between her and it.
There was another side to my mother that seemed to come out exclusively on the phone. I was home a lot, so I heard. I lay in my room and read. I threw a rubber ball against the back wall of the house. I was too young for a job. My one task was to mow the lawn.
“Well, he can’t see him,” I heard her say once. And then: “Because I told him I would tell. I would tell them at his work.”
After a moment, she repeated it: “If he tried to see Luca, I would tell.”
In my room, I heard the words bouncing off the walls, off the picture of the Aztec warrior, the novels of John Steinbeck I was reading that summer—The Red Pony, The Pearl—and the book George had given me, called My Secret Life. Steinbeck was for the day, but at night, I liked to lie in bed and read about the Victorian author of My Secret Life “rogering” women. I liked to hear the women shout things like, “You’re a horse! Oh my God, my man’s a horse!”
“And they’d fire him right away,” my mother said afterward.
Uncle John had explained nothing the day he’d motioned me inside after I’d gone to see Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. He’d said only, “Your father’s gone away,” or something like that. On his face had been the whole weight of the secret, but he had put his finger to his lips, as if to keep them shut. He shook his head, then made a stilted promise to my mother: “I want to assure you, Dorothy, that I will do everything in my power to make sure that Luca has a normal life.”
After listening to my mother’s conversations on the phone, I expected her to look different, but she didn’t. She took care of her flower gardens and made up her face and prepared elaborate meals, enough for three or four. At the table, eating with her, I felt all arms and sharp, bony elbows. I felt ugly and like my bones would pop out and I would knock her in the face if I moved too quickly. I felt, too, and in dangerous ways, like that was what I wanted to do.
As soon as I gave up going down to the Wiffle ball games, I took to spending time in their bedroom. At the other end of the house, my mother watched four or five television shows in a row, everything that was on, so it was safe. My father’s suits hung in the closet, five of them. I could see I would be taller than him someday, if I didn’t stop growing. I would hover over him, but would I ever see him? Beside the bed was a wedding portrait, his tight smile, and then, on the wall, the BC hockey photo. When he was still here, he would have awakened every morning to the sight of himself poised to bolt.
One night my mother caught me in their room. “What are you doing?” she asked.
She was in the doorway, and I was on the bed, my hands between my legs, resting there. She cocked her head and smiled as though there could be nothing wrong with any activity I chose now. Then she rephrased the question. When I didn’t answer, I saw the change in her face, the beginning of her allowing something in.
She came in and sat beside me on the bed. She looked where I was looking, at the BC picture. Then she got up and took it down, with a decisiveness I had not seen from her up to this point. Carefully, she put it away in a drawer. In the drawer also was a rosary, and some underwear she didn’t use anymore. Then she came and sat beside me. She put her hand in my hair, which was thick and springy and resisted her fingers.
“Come and watch TV,” she said.
“I don’t want to,” I answered.
The next day she did something. I was not home when she did it. It was early September. There was still a thickness of woods behind the houses of Meola and Semenza, and I had gone there to spy on Meola’s daughter. There was a copse of birches, inside it Meola had placed a bench, wrought iron, full of fancy designs. Karen Meola came out with nail polish and a book. She had a broad, flat face and she was short, but she was popular. She painted her nails and I watched the way she lifted her heavy thighs to get at her toes. At a certain point she looked up, as if she’d become alerted—by nothing, by silence—to my presence. If she had discovered me, I don’t know what would have happened. In two days, we would be back in school, and I would see her every day. But here, now, it was charged with strangeness, my watching her, and this was what I liked about it.
When I got home, there was commotion. Uncle John’s car was parked in front of the house, and since it was the middle of the day, this was unusual. It was time for lunch.
But John was pacing in our living room, and when he saw me at the foot of the stairs, I could tell he wished I hadn’t come home.
My mother stood in the middle of the kitchen looking as if she had just dropped something and was contemplating an imaginary mess on the floor before her. Her hair looked a little wild, and her eyes.
John turned on her. “Now what?”
And then, harder: “And how do you keep the house, Dorothy? Did you consider that before pulling this little stunt? You say he needs to see his son, fine—but is the way to do that to call and rat on him, so you lose everything? They’ll fire him now for sure. You think like a woman, Dorothy. You think only with the emotions.”
