thought of as our own. Each of us referred to it by a different name, and over time qualifiers became necessary. ('You know,our house.') The summer after we didn't buy it, the new owners — or 'those people,' as we liked to call them — painted The Ship Shape yellow. In the late seventies Amy noted that The Nut Hut had extended the carport and paved the driveway. Lisa was relieved when the Wait 'n' Sea returned to its original color, and Tiffany was incensed when The Toothless Black Man Selling Shrimp from the Back of His Van sported a sign endorsing Jesse Helms in the 1984 senatorial campaign. Four years later my mother called to report that The Sandpiper had been badly damaged by Hurricane Hugo. 'It's still there,' she said. 'But barely.' Shortly thereafter, according to Gretchen, The Shell Station was torn down and sold as a vacant lot.
I know that such a story does not quite work to inspire sympathy. ('My home — well,one of my homes — fell through.') We had no legitimate claim to self-pity, were ineligible even to hold a grudge, but that didn't stop us from complaining.
In the coming years our father would continue to promise what he couldn't deliver, and in time we grew to think of him as an actor auditioning for the role of a benevolent millionaire. He'd never get the part but liked the way that the words felt in his mouth. 'What do you say to a new car?' he'd ask. 'Who's up for a cruise to the Greek Isles?' He expected us to respond by playing the part of an enthusiastic family, but we were unwilling to resume our old roles. As if carried by a tide, our mother drifted farther and farther away, first to twin beds and then down the hall to a room decorated with seascapes and baskets of sun-bleached sand dollars. It would have been nice, a place at the beach, but we already had a home. A home with a bar. Besides, had things worked out, you wouldn't have been happy for us. We're not that kind of people.
Full House
MY PARENTS WERE NOT THE TYPE of people who went to bed at a regular hour. Sleep overtook them, but neither the time nor the idea of a mattress seemed very important. My father favored a chair in the basement, but my mother was apt to lie down anywhere, waking with carpet burns on her face or the pattern of the sofa embossed into the soft flesh of her upper arms. It was sort of embarrassing. She might sleep for eight hours a day, but they were never consecutive hours and they involved no separate outfit. For Christmas we would give her nightgowns, hoping she might take the hint. 'They're for bedtime,' we'd say, and she'd look at us strangely, as if, like the moment of one's death, the occasion of sleep was too incalculable to involve any real preparation.
The upside to being raised by what were essentially a pair of house cats was that we never had any enforced bedtime. At twoA.M. on a school night, my mother would not say, 'Go to sleep,' but rather, 'Shouldn't you be tired?' It wasn't a command but a sincere question, the answer provoking little more than a shrug. 'Suit yourself,' she'd say, pouring what was likely to be her thirtieth or forty-second cup of coffee. 'I'm not sleepy, either. Don't know why, but I'm not.'
We were the family that never shut down, the family whose TV was so hot we needed an oven mitt in order to change the channel. Every night was basically a slumber party, so when the real thing came along, my sisters and I failed to show much of an interest.
'But we get to stay up as late as we want,' the hosts would say.
'And. .?'
The first one I attended was held by a neighbor named Walt Winters. Like me, Walt was in the sixth grade. Unlike me, he was gregarious and athletic, which meant, basically, that we had absolutely nothing in common. 'But why would he includeme?' I asked my mother. 'I hardly know the guy.'
She did not say that Walt's mother had made him invite me, but I knew that this was the only likely explanation. 'Oh, go,' she said. 'It'll be fun.'
I tried my best to back out, but then my father got wind of it, and that option was closed. He often passed Walt playing football in the street and saw in the boy a younger version of himself. 'He's maybe not the best player in the world, but he and his friends, they're a good group.'
'Fine,' I said. 'Thenyou go sleep with them.'
I could not tell my father that boys made me anxious, and so I invented individual reasons to dislike them. The hope was that I might seem discerning rather than frightened, but instead I came off sounding like a prude.
'You're expecting me to spend the night with someone who curses? Someone who actually throwsrocks atcats?'
'You're damned right I am,' my father said. 'Now get the hell over there.'
Aside from myself, there were three other guests at Walt's slumber party. None of them were particularly popular — they weren't good-looking enough for that — but each could hold his own on a playing field or in a discussion about cars. The talk started the moment I walked through the door, and while pretending to listen, I wished that I could have been more honest. 'What is the actual point of football?' I wanted to ask. 'Is a V-8 engine related in any way to the juice?' I would have sounded like a foreign-exchange student, but the answers might have given me some sort of a foundation. As it was, they may as well have been talking backward.
There were four styles of houses on our street, and while Walt's was different from my own, I was familiar with the layout. The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called a family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood's only Jews had turned into a combination darkroom and fallout shelter. Walt's family was Methodist, and so the room's focal point was a large black-and-white television. Family photos hung on the wall alongside pictures of the various athletes Mr. Winters had successfully pestered for autographs. I admired them to the best of my ability but was more interested in the wedding portrait displayed above the sofa. Arm in arm with her uniformed husband, Walt's mother looked deliriously, almost frighteningly happy. The bulging eyes and fierce, gummy smile: it was an expression bordering on hysteria, and the intervening years had done nothing to dampen it.
'What is sheon?' my mother would whisper whenever we passed Mrs. Winters waving gaily from her front yard. I thought she was being too hard on her, but after ten minutes in the woman's home I understood exactly what my mother was talking about.
'Pizza's here!!!' she chimed when the deliveryman came to the door. 'Oh, boys, how about some piping hot pizza!!!' I thought it was funny that anyone would use the wordspiping hot, but it wasn't the kind of thing I felt I could actually laugh at. Neither could I laugh at Mr. Winters's pathetic imitation of an Italian waiter. 'Mamma mia. Who want anudda slice a dipizza!'
I had the idea that adults were supposed to make themselves scarce at slumber parties, but Walt's parents were all over the place: initiating games, offering snacks and refills. When the midnight horror movie came on, Walt's mother crept into the bathroom, leaving a ketchup-spattered knife beside the sink. An hour passed, and when none of us had yet discovered it, she started dropping little hints. 'Doesn't anyone want to wash their hands?' she asked. 'Will whoever's closest to the door go check to see if I left fresh towels in the bathroom?'
You just wanted to cry for people like her.
As corny as they were, I was sorry when the movie ended and Mr. and Mrs. Winters stood to leave. It was only twoA.M., but clearly they were done in. 'I just don't know how you boys can do it,' Walt's mother said, yawning into the sleeve of her bathrobe. 'I haven't been up this late since Lauren came into the world.' Lauren was Walt's sister, who was born prematurely and lived for less than two days. This had happened before the Winterses moved onto our street, but it wasn't any kind of secret, and you weren't supposed to flinch upon hearing the girl's name. The baby had died too soon to pose for photographs, but still she was regarded as a full-fledged member of the family. She had a Christmas stocking the size of a mitten, and they even threw her an annual birthday party, a fact that my mother found especially creepy. 'Let's hope they don't invite us,' she said. 'I mean, Jesus, how do you shop for a dead baby?'
I guessed it was the fear of another premature birth that kept Mrs. Winters from trying again, which was sad, as you got the sense she really wanted a lively household. You got the sense that she had anidea of a lively household and that the slumber party and the ketchup-covered knife were all a part of that idea. While in her presence, we had played along, but once she said good night, I understood that all bets were off.
