pointed out that she had gone to a parochial school in a tough neighbourhood where girls” cotton panties were sometimes torn off for a joke and then set on fire with Zippo lighters engraved with the crucified body Jesus. And if you had suggested that her own attitudes toward child-rearing differed only in terms of material goals from the attitudes of her hated father, she would have been furious and pointed out her good son as her final vindication.
But now her good son stood before her, pale, exhausted, and greased to the elbows, seeming to thrum with the same sort of barely chained anger that had been his grandfather’s trademark, even looking like him. Everything seemed to have fallen into a shambles.
“Arnie, we’ll talk about what’s to be done in the morning,” she said, trying to pull herself together and beat back the tears. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
“Not unless you get up real early,” he said, seeming to lose interest. “I’m going upstairs to catch about four hours, and then I’m going down to the garage again.”
“What for?”
He uttered a crazy laugh and flapped his arms under the kitchen’s fluorescent bars as if he would fly. “What do you think for? I got a lot of work to do! More work than you’d believe!”
“No, you have school tomorrow… I… I forbid it, Arnie, I absolutely—”
He turned to look at her, study her, and she flinched again. This was like some grinding nightmare that was just going to go on and on.
“I’ll get to school,” he said. “I’ll take some fresh clothes in a pack and I’ll even shower so I don’t smell offensive to anyone in home room. Then, after school’s out, I’ll go back down to Darnell’s. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I can do it… I know I can… it’s going to eat up a lot of my savings, though. Plus, I’ll have to keep on top of the stuff I’m doing for Will.”
“Your homework… your studies”
“Oh. Those.” He smiled the dead, mechanical smile of a clockwork figure. “They’ll suffer, of course, Can’t kid you about that. I can’t promise you a ninety-three average anymore, either. But I’ll get by. I can make C’s. Maybe some B’s.”
“No! You’ve got college to think about!”
He came back to the table, limping again, quite badly. He planted his hands on the table before her and leaned slowly down. She thought: A stranger… my son is a stranger to me. Is this really my fault? Is it? Because I only wanted what was best for him? Can that be? Please, God, make this a nightmare I’ll wake up from with tears on my cheeks because it was so real.
“Right now,” he said softly, holding her gaze, “the only things I care about are Christine and Leigh and staying on the good side of Will Darnell so I can get her fixed up as good as new. I don’t give a shit about college. And if you don’t get off my case, I’ll drop out of high school. That ought to shut you up if nothing else will.”
“You can’t,” she said, meeting his gaze. “You understand that, Arnold. Maybe I deserve your… your cruelty… but I’ll fight this self-destructive streak of yours with everything I have. So don’t you talk about dropping out of school.”
“But I’ll really do it,” he answered. “I don’t want you to even kid yourself into thinking I won’t. I’ll be eighteen in February, and I’ll do it on my own then if you don’t stay out of this from now on. Do you understand me?”
“Go to bed,” she said tearfully. “Go to bed, you’re breaking my heart.”
“Am I?” Shockingly, he laughed, “Hurts, doesn’t it? I know.”
He left then, walking slowly, the limp pulling his body slightly to the left. Shortly she heard the heavy, tired clump of his shoes on the stairs—also a sound terribly reminiscent of her childhood, when she had thought to herself, The ogre’s going to bed.
She burst into a fresh spasm of weeping, got up clumsily, and went out the back door to do her crying in private. She held herself—thin comfort, but better than none—and looked up at a horned moon that was quadrupled through the film of her tears. Everything had changed, and it had happened with the speed of a cyclone. Her son hated her; she had seen it in his face—it wasn’t a tantrum, a temporary pique, a passing squall of adolescence. He hated her, and this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go with her good boy, not at all.
Not at all.
She stood on the stoop and cried until the tears began to run their course and the sobs became occasional hatchings and gasps. The cold gnawed her bare ankles above her mules and bit more bluntly through her housecoat. She went inside and upstairs. She stood outside Arnie’s room indecisively for almost a minute before going in.
He had fallen asleep on the coverlet of his bed. His pants were still on. He seemed more unconscious than asleep, and his face looked horribly old. A trick of the light, coming from the hall and falling into the room from over her shoulder, made it seem for a moment to her that his hair was thinning, that his sleep-gaping mouth was without teeth. A small squeal of horror strained itself through the hand clapped to her mouth and she hurried toward him.
Her shadow, which had been on the bed, moved with her and she saw it was only Arnie, the impression of age no more than the light and her own exhausted confusion,
She looked at his clock-radio and saw that it was set for 4:30 A.M. She thought of turning the alarm off; she even stretched her hand out to do it. Ultimately she found she couldn’t.
Instead she went down to her bedroom, sat down at the phone table, and picked up the handset. She held it for a moment, debating. If she called Mike in the middle of the night, he would think that…
That something terrible had happened?
She giggled. Well, hadn’t it? It surely had. And it was still happening.
She dialled the number of the Ramada Inn in Kansas City where her husband was staying, vaguely aware that she was, for the first time since she had left the grim and grimy three-storey house in Rocksburg for college twenty-seven years before, calling for help.
28
LEIGH MAKES A VISIT
I don’t want to cause no fuss,
But can I buy your magic bus?
I don’t care how much I pay,
I’m gonna drive that bus to my bay-by.
I want it… I want it… I want it…
(You can’t have it…)
She got through most of the story okay sitting in one of the two visitors” chairs with her knees pressed firmly together and her ankles crossed, neatly dressed in a multicoloured wool sweater and a brown corduroy skirt. It was not until the end that she began to cry, and she couldn’t find a handkerchief. Dennis Guilder handed her the box of tissues from the table beside the bed.
“Take it easy, Leigh,” he said.
“I cuh-cuh-can’t! He hasn’t been to see me and in school be just seems so tired… and you s-said he hasn’t been here—”
“He’ll come if he needs me,” Dennis said.
“You’re full of muh-macho b-bull-sh-sh-shit!” she said, and then looked comically stunned at what she had said. The tears had cut tracks in the light makeup she was wearing. She and Dennis looked at each other for a moment, and then they laughed. But it was brief laughter, and not really that good.
“Has Motormouth seen him?” Dennis asked.
“Who?”
