Shannon, with Eugene in her wake, left for wherever women in the prime of their youth go in the morning. By eleven she had a Saturday lab class at UNC-G, where she was majoring in anthropology. I have no idea why she chose anthropology; maybe nobody knows their kids.
I stared at the manila envelope a while, then walked to my room to fetch the Grape-Nuts I kept hidden for times when Gus fixed breakfast and disappeared into her rich personal life that I know nothing about. She’s been with us ten years, and she still won’t tell me if she’s married or has children of her own or anything. Shannon probably knows.
Back in the kitchen, I poured two-percent milk over the Grape-Nuts and ate without looking in the bowl. Two-percent milk is another of those decisions the women had made for me. When you don’t have money, you think people who do have money can do anything they like. Don’t believe it.
Finally I stood and washed the cereal bowl and spoon, but not the beans plate or pan—the subterfuges we have to scheme through in our own home—and walked back to the table. The envelope held one sheet of paper from a yellow legal pad.
The father thing has caused me a lot of discomfort late at night when thoughts range out of control. As a kid, I used to make up scenes where my real father was a famous baseball player or a CIA spy or something— anything, so long as he had an excuse to deny me up until the point of my daydream.
In school when I should have been studying geography, I drew pictures of Dad. Mostly he looked like Moose Skowron who played first base for the New York Yankees. Sometimes he looked like John Kennedy.
But then Lydia spilled the beans about the group rape thing, and I had to face the fact that I am a child of violence. When I first started writing stories, I wrote the scene over and over.
I wrote a thirty-page version of the evening that ended with Lydia near death, crawling through vomit and come into the bathroom where she passed out with her fingers reaching for the spermicidal jelly.
Maurey says the truth about my roots is why I hate men.
“I don’t hate men. I just don’t trust the dirtbags.”
“Face it, Sam, you’re a male-aphobe.”
“If I hate men, then I hate myself.”
“That’s the point, dildo.”
My own mother claims I’m a latent homosexual. “All men who can’t stand men are denying their sexuality,” she said. “The thought that you’re queer makes you sick, so you deny it by overreacting. Why don’t you behave like Petey Pierce and let the door swing whichever way it swings.”
“I’m not gay, Lydia. If I was, I’d say so.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
My personal theory is I’m a Lesbian trapped in the body of a man.
Let’s analyze this deal: I am alive because of a monstrous crime. I enjoy being alive. I wouldn’t want it any other way. Which means I must be pleased these high school prick football players got Lydia drunk and forced their penises into her fourteen-year-old body. I must be pleased they stood in a circle and peed on her bloody, torn crotch.
Following this logic, whenever I think of the rape, which is all the time, I can’t stand myself for being pleased it happened and I’m alive. I can’t stand men for the physical power they possess over little girls. Therefore, I avoid contact with the male sex and I cannot resist giving oral orgasms to women, generally low-class women, although my standards vary with availability.
I popped open a Dr Pepper and wandered the house without energy, room to room, looking at the corners where the walls and floor came together. My grandfather, Caspar Callahan, had been semi-old New York money, and when he met and wed Lucille Weathers, semi-new Durham money, he founded the Caspar Callahan Carbon Paper Company and built the rich Yankees’ dream of an in-town plantation home. Not a scrap of carpeting in the house. Painting from the Sir Walter Scott school of chivalry. Natural-wood chiffoniers and hutches and a Lincoln rocker I wasn’t allowed to sit in that must have been as old as Lincoln himself. The library was full of bound books I hadn’t read and a very large globe of the world as it appeared in 1948. The den was filled with paperback books I had read and a stereo system that could vibrate the columns out front.
The only major change I’d made downstairs in the fifteen years since Caspar’s death was to convert the salon into a home gym, with Nautilus equipment, a climbing wall, and a Sears Exercycle 6000 that faced the Charlie Russell painting of Indians killing a buffalo killing an Indian.
It’s odd owning a house, especially a big son-of-a-bitching house like mine. You tend to think in terms of
From day one Caspar viewed my mother as a pretty little lamebrain—the traditional Southern attitude toward rich girls. Lydia balked at the genteel lamebrain mold, opting for the rebellious lamebrain, which meant fighting Caspar night and day and entering numerous self-destructive scenarios simply to prove he couldn’t stop her from self-destructive scenarios. So, when the strokes finally nailed Caspar, he left me the house, the money, and the carbon paper company—which I almost instantly turned into the Callahan Magic Golf Cart Company. Caspar also left me the game of trying to control Lydia by controlling her cash flow. Pissed Lydia off to no end.
Upstairs are eight bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms. I opened and closed the doors of each one, just to see if someone I didn’t know was living with me. It could happen. Shannon has a way of bringing home lost pets and people. Takes after her mom, although Shannon specializes in out-of-work blues musicians, where Maurey mostly takes in drunks.
The last door on the left side of the north hallway was Wanda’s private sanctuary, where I’d been forbidden to set foot the last year. Maybe that room was the one I’d intended to explore all along, and the others were just circling the subject. When she first moved in, Wanda insisted on a space. Her word. She’d seen the cover of Virginia Woolf’s book in the den and decided a room of her own was the strong woman’s due. Wanda had gone out and charged various decorative items, including a wet bar, a Smith-Corona typewriter, a two-drawer file cabinet, and a Stanley padlock, and hauled everything into the room I used as a fort when I was growing up.
She claimed to write in there, but I don’t know, as I saw nothing she ever wrote. That’s how we met—at a writer’s conference on Okrakoke Island. I was the token Young Adult sports action novelist, and she gave me grief for not being Saul Bellow.
I was sitting in the bar, discussing minor league baseball with a sci-fi writer from Montana, who, like me, was waiting to get laid. Writing conferences have a sexual pecking order: The poets and agents are chosen first, followed by serious artists with vision, followed by writers who actually make money. Us genre guys must wait for what’s left, which often means the first two days are spent drinking and watching ESPN in the bar.
A short woman with jet black hair and soft cheekbones shouldered in between me and the sci-fi writer. “I
