My brother Preston went through an intense football obsession from grade school through the fall of his junior year of high school. My dad had been a college football player and he pushed Preston really hard. Dad sent Preston to a special camp in Texas one summer where the kids train for real with the Dallas Cowboys. My dad knew a guy who played for the Cowboys who got Preston in. I met that guy a couple of times. He was gigantic, and he wore an immense fur coat because he thought Chicago was very cold, and I suppose because he wanted to look cool, which he did. He also wore a massive gold ring that he got for playing in the Super Bowl, which he let me look at up close. He seemed like a gladiator to me.
Preston was not a big guy at all. He was only five foot ten and fine-boned like our mother. Our dad was six foot one, big and scary, and had huge shoulders. Dad wanted Preston to be the quarterback of our high-school football team, which was known for being great. Preston wanted that too, and he did it.
There was a big game that changed everything forever. Our school was playing their biggest rival. Preston was the starting quarterback for the game. He was just beginning his junior year and was first-string quarterback. My mother had been saying that the coach was putting Preston under too much pressure. My dad said he could handle it. For the homecoming game, my parents got all dressed up in stylish sweaters and nice denim jeans and my mom wore her glamorous long shearling coat and high-heel boots. I wore my nice wool coat with fake shearling trim and a big cozy hood lined with the same fur. The coat came down to my calves just like my mom’s did, and I wore my new brown Frye boots that came up almost to my knees. All that day our parents were talking about what they were going to wear and it felt like we were making a big public appearance. I knew that Preston was very worried and excited about this game and it seemed like an important occasion for all of us.
Preston headed over much earlier and I waited around while my parents got ready. I stood in the front hall all bundled up in my coat, ready to go, so I wouldn’t get in trouble for slowing them down once they were ready to leave. We drove over in the four-door Jaguar, even though we could have just walked, but my mom was wearing high heels and my dad probably wanted people to see his car. The three of us looked pretty good I thought, as we entered the high-school outdoor stadium and climbed the stairs to get good seats up in the stands. Mom and Dad didn’t know any of the other parents, and I was too young to know many of the kids who were there. My dad set a wool stadium blanket down over the bleacher bench and my mom sat down with him. I squished in next to her in the crowded stands. My mother watched with interest as they crowned the new homecoming king and queen. The queen from the previous year was there and she seemed grown up and was very beautiful, wearing high boots and a big fur coat. The marching band played, which always interested me because I was studying the flute. Then the game started and I just sat watching people mostly.
Near the end of the second quarter, things were not going well for our home team. It seemed to me that my parents were concerned with Preston’s performance. My mother was worried and my father looked angry. Suddenly, everyone on our side started booing and shouting. I couldn’t tell what had gone wrong. I was trying to ask my dad but the crowd around us was so loud I couldn’t talk to him. Then in the next play something bad happened again and our side started shouting to have Preston replaced. All around us in the stands people were angrily shouting to have my brother taken out of the game. My face burned red. I tried to see my brother’s face on the field but I couldn’t get a glimpse of him in the jumble of players in the middle of the field.
After that, all I remember is Preston being called off just before a new play was to start, and people clapping as he jogged slowly toward the benches with his head down. Those minutes of watching Preston with his shoulders slumped over and his head down, with my mother’s overly dramatic laments in my ear and me worrying what my dad was going to do to Preston for this, were excruciating for me. I watched in aching terrible pain for my brother. I watched as a friend of Preston’s who was older and bigger was sent out to replace him and people around us cheered and called out that boy’s name. My heart ached for my brother. I thought about how he lay in bed in the middle of the night and would shout out the plays in his sleep. I used to tease him about it in the morning. “And Duncan is going out for the long pass … no … he’s running! He’s running for the touchdown!”
My mom and dad were upset. They spoke to each other in complete shock and as if this was a very shameful thing that was happening, as if these people were against our family, as if it was a rejection of our family by the entire community. That’s the way my parents acted and that’s the way it felt to me. My parents stood and gathered our wool blankets from the bleachers and said, “Come on Sidney, we’re leaving.”
I followed them, but it seemed wrong to walk down the bleachers right then, before the game was finished, just after their son had been called off to the bench. I saw people’s heads turn and I thought they were looking at my parents. I followed slowly behind thinking that this felt worse than if we had stayed. We stood huddled together at the base of the bleachers as the game roared on around us, my mother talking to my father, saying it wasn’t right what the coach had done by putting Preston in so soon, blaming my dad for getting Preston’s expectations so high about football in the first place. We walked to my dad’s car in the big brightly lit parking lot with the roar of the game behind us and Preston somewhere down in the bowels of the high school football machine. I was worrying about him. How would he leave? How would he get home? This was a big celebration night and kids would be going out in groups after the game. But what would Preston do?
My parents and I drove the few short blocks back to our house and I ran up to my room and locked the door. I heard my parents arguing about my brother and football and the coach and the people at the game.
A while later I heard Preston come in the house. I don’t know whether he walked home or if someone gave him a ride. He went in his room and locked his door. I listened, holding my breath for a very long time. There was only silence in the house. I went to bed with a heavy heart.
After that game, Preston quit football. My dad was mad. There were many fights, my father yelling, Preston earnestly defending himself, our stupid mother, crying helplessly. I heard Preston say that the coach and some other boys he knew from football passed him in the hallway and the coach called out, “There goes the quitter.”
One night when the football season was still going, soon after Preston had quit, Seymour Hoffman and his wife invited my parents over for dinner in their screened-in porch. It was nice because they kept a fire going in the big brick fireplace, making the porch very cozy in the late autumn. The Hoffmans lived in our neighborhood even before my parents bought a house. Our old third-floor walk-up apartment was across the alley behind their house. They had a son who was Preston’s age whom we had known since my brother and I were little kids. My parents wanted Preston to come along because their son would be there too. I knew I had to go, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do anything else. Preston was in his room refusing to come out and when he did, he looked disheveled and miserable and my dad yelled at him to spruce up and “get a decent shirt on.” We drove over together with my brother slumped in the back seat next to me like a beaten dog. My heart broke to look at him.
We arrived there and everything was just as it used to be when we were younger. Seymour and his wife were glad to see us. Their son came down from his room and he and Preston exchanged awkward but friendly greetings. The screened-in porch was at the back of the property attached to an old stone garage so we carried the salad and the dishes out through their nicely tended garden to the porch. The porch had a stone wall at the back and a built-in fireplace. The fire was going and there was a grate with cooking barbecued chicken and baked potatoes. I was excited that we’d be having a nice dinner. My mom looked beautiful in a cream cable-knit sweater and slim jeans with lace-up boots. She was wearing her heavy gold hoop earrings, her gold bangle bracelet, and her wide gold band wedding ring that had one very large rectangular diamond. She had an ability to look very regal in her casual attire, which I admired and loved. I think Manhattans were made for the adults. My mother said she’d sip that one drink the whole night and still never finish it. Seymour’s wife, Mrs. Hoffman, said she’d be ready for another pretty quickly so Seymour should keep ‘em coming.
The food was good and the grownups were in high spirits as we ate. The boys were allowed to drink beer. I got the feeling that the boys were drinking beer faster than the parents were aware, but I don’t think anyone cared. I was just watching the fire and enjoying the cozy porch. The boys were gone for a while, I thought they were inside watching television. The parents were drinking some more. My mother was starting to get agitated. Her voice was wary as she started saying, “Oh honey, do you really need another one?” with each of my dad’s drinks or freshly opened cans of beer.
I knew it was getting late. The colder night air was starting to win out over the warmth of the fire and I was wishing I had a warmer coat. I put my hood up on my pale blue windbreaker jacket and tied the strings tight. I got out of my little metal folding lawn chair and crossed to the back corner away from the screen door and sat down on the stone edge of the fireplace. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and leaned back as close as I dared to the fire.
I was getting very sleepy and no one was talking to me so I wasn’t really paying attention until I saw that the boys had returned to the porch for more beer. They were looking kind of wobbly and my dad picked up on that and started accusing my brother of stealing extra beers. Seymour’s son Sam tried to defend Preston. “I offered him the beers, Mr. Duncan, it’s my fault.”
My dad got madder. “Shut up, Sam. This is between me and my son. Preston, do you think you’re an adult? Do you want to drink like a man?”
“No Dad, I’m sorry Dad.”
“No Dad? No what? You think you aren’t a grown man? But you want to sneak beer like a little coward, and drink it anyway?”
“No Dad, I’m really sorry Dad.”
I was worried that Preston couldn’t take this right now. This was too much for him. I knew it. Our dad should shut up and leave him alone. Mom started in with, “What? Have the boys been drinking all this time? Oh my god … we need to go home … our family needs to go home. This isn’t right. How did this happen?”
My mom stood up and started cleaning up dishes and glasses. She was talking to Mrs. Hoffman who seemed pretty out of it, encouraging her to start bringing things back to the house. “Let’s get the dishes going. I don’t want to leave you with a mess.” Mrs. Hoffman was mumbling, passing a careless hand over the direction of the wooden table covered with serving platters and plates and glasses, beer cans, liquor bottles. “We can clean it up in the morning, this is nothing.”
But my mother was insisting, gathering more plates in her arms and beseeching Mrs. Hoffman to join her. Eventually the two women left the porch with their arms full and Mrs. Hoffman stumbled along behind my mother up the path to the kitchen door. They disappeared inside. I thought I’d get up and clear dishes and go in too, hoping it would be warmer in the house. But that’s when Dad and Preston started up again, worse than before, and there was no way I would be able to squeeze past them to get out the porch door. I sat on my perch by the fire and hoped things wouldn’t get bad. But Dad was livid and he lurched toward Preston.
“God damn it Seymour, my son needs disciplining. He is spineless. He’s a sneak and a coward. Do you know what he did Seymour? Do you know the shame he’s brought on us?”
Mr. Hoffman said, “Hey, come on Don, calm down, there’s no reason to get into this.”
“Get into this? It needs to be talked about. Am I supposed to pretend it didn’t happen? Walk on eggshells around my own son?”
“Dad, stop it. Everybody knows what happened.”
“Oh are you talking now? Preston Duncan, the family coward? The quitter? The sniveling little cripple who couldn’t take the pressure. You couldn’t handle it could you? You choked!”
“Jesus, Don! Take it easy. It’s over. Come on.”
But my dad couldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop, “Is this how I brought you up? What, do you take after your fearful whimpering mother is that who you are? You fucking little pathetic worm! Come here. I’ll teach you not to steal beer from your father’s friends. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He lurched, he grabbed, my brother let out a yelp. In one fell swoop my brother was on the stone floor of the porch, my father was shouting, “You aren’t my son! You’re a fucking worthless piece of shit on the fucking ground! Look at you! You’re an emotional cripple, you’re weak, you are weak and sickening!”
My dad started to kick my brother’s crumpled form, my brother winced as my dad kicked him in the stomach. I wanted to stop him but I was afraid to, he was so out of control. I was trying to get Mr. Hoffman to do something.
“What’s wrong with you? Get up and do something!” I shouted at him. He sat shaking his head, “This is between a father and a son and there’s not a thing anybody … ”
He was drunk and cowardly and I could see in his eyes he was lying and afraid to intervene.
I yelled, “You know this is wrong! You aren’t doing anything!”
My dad busted out of the porch, smacking the screen door so hard it slapped against the back wall and stomped toward the house yelling my mother’s name, “Ingrid! Ingrid, goddammit let’s go! Let’s get out of this shit hole! These people are all going nowhere! My son can stay here and fucking rot for all I care! Get in the car!” I went straight to my room when we got home and I locked my door and got into bed and tried to sleep, but all night I wondered if Preston was okay.
Preston didn’t leave his room much the rest of that semester. He yelled at anyone who tried to talk to him. Mom would make me knock on his door to get him out of bed for school. If by chance his door was unlocked and I poked my head in to wake him up, he would grab one of the many books lying about in his covers and whip it as hard as he could at me. If I was lucky I’d close the door before it hit me. If I saw him coming out of our shared bathroom I was struck by his drastic change in appearance. His face had broken out into bright-red acne. Both cheeks were covered in a rash that seemed to be multiplying by the day. He looked much thinner and terribly sad. Our dad took it upon himself more than once to berate Preston for not washing his face enough. I knew that wasn’t the problem because Preston took a shower every time he went out and he had different skin products on the counter that he seemed to be constantly applying. One night my dad came home with some horrible loofah thing, brought my brother into our bathroom and with the door open, and as my mother and I stood there horrified, he “taught his son how to scrub this disgusting fungus off his face.” The blood ran down Preston’s neck as our dad held him with one hand by the neck and brutally scrubbed his sores with the other. That night I threw my body in the middle of the scene and started screaming for Dad to stop but he knocked me aside so I turned to our mother who put her hands over her face and went into her room and closed the door.
Preston started reading philosophy books and studying French and German saying he wanted to read the philosophers in their original texts. Our dad had been a philosophy major in college and used to talk philosophy and literature with Preston. I was not involved in these conversations even as they swirled around me. Sometimes if the family sat down together for dinner, usually on a weekend night, our dad would open a bottle of red wine, which often turned into a second bottle, and then he’d talk about authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and philosophers like Sartre and Nietzsche. Every once in a while, I would recognize the subject matter as something I had studied in school and would try to join in. Our mother never tried to participate, she just cooked and served dinner and did the dishes. But I wanted to engage in the intellectual discussions. So I would try to add something I felt had been overlooked like a fact about an author’s life that I had maybe studied for a class report.
My father would invariably turn his scrutiny on me and with great sarcasm and amused displeasure, say something like, “Are you part of this? Are you talking? Did anyone address you?”
To which I would gamely answer, “No Dad, but I just thought you guys should know that … ”
He would cut me off with something like, “Have you read the works of Aristotle? Plato? No, I didn’t think so. Did you read the Wall Street Journal this morning? Did you read Barron’s? The New York Times? Do you have any idea what’s happening in the world? No. How old are you now, ten?”
“I’m thirteen, Dad.”
“Thirteen. Thirteen years old. I’m sorry, but thirteen does not deserve an audience. Let me know when you grow up. Thirteen doesn’t cut it.”
Preston got involved with a very unusual girl around this time. They were in the same advanced philosophy class at the high school. She had dark eyes with dark circles around them and long wavy black hair that she said her parents said would never be cut. Her family was Jewish, of a very liberal mindset, very Bohemian and intellectual. The girl played the flute, as did I, so I talked to her about that whenever I saw her, but she was much more keenly devoted to the flute and had a more fitting demeanor for a flute player than I thought I did, so I always deferred to her in conversation. She was four years older than me, but beyond our age difference, she seemed to be from an entirely different time. Her clothes were handmade and exotic. She sometimes had stars painted on her face. The girlfriend’s family allegedly grew marijuana in their yard and had live chickens—both daring acts in our community at that time.
One Saturday night my brother and the girl showed up very late at our house. Awoken by the sounds of arguing, I came down the carpeted steps so I could see what was happening. There stood my brother with black stars on one cheek, wearing a long caftan of rough woven cloth.
Our mother was looking at Dad, “This is terrible, he can’t walk around like this. They’re on some kind of drugs. I’m telling you they’re on something!”
“Mom, these caftans are very common for the men to wear in Morocco.”
“You aren’t in Morocco. Preston what has happened to you? Are you taking drugs with this girl?”
Dad was saying, “Get upstairs and take that ridiculous thing off and scrub that shit off your face. And you need to go home to your parents, little girl, and let them see who their daughter is.”
Preston was swaying, his eyes red and squinting, but he got a sudden burst of clarity and announced, “No. She’s not leaving. She’s staying with me.”
With that our parents let out a simultaneous roar, “What?! No she is not.”
My dad started scuffling with the two of them, grabbing the girl by the arm saying, “You are getting out of my house! You will never set foot in this house again!”
The girl screamed, “Preston! He’s hurting me!”
My brother grabbed Dad’s arm, “Dad, come on, she’s okay. Come on Dad take it easy.”
The girl escaped out the front door and was on the porch and Dad was yelling at Preston, “Look at you. You look like a clown. You look like a loser. You want to be with this girl so bad? This filthy slut of a girl? Are you fucking this? You are, aren’t you! You’re only sixteen years old! You want this? Then you aren’t my son! I don’t want you here! Get out! Go over and fuck at her parents’ house and see what they think of you two idiots! Get out and don’t come back!”
“Dad, please, you don’t understand. Dad!”
Preston went out onto the front porch and I heard him let out a sob. But I also heard the girl saying, “Preston, come on, let’s go. Fuck them. Come on, Preston.”
Preston did a surprising thing then. He left that night with her and didn’t come back. He lived with the girl at her parents’ house, for the rest of his junior year. I never saw him. He never came to the house. He came in to get things from his room maybe once or twice early on, but after that, I never saw him.
The next thing I heard was that he would be graduating from high school a year early. Then I heard he was coming back to our house to get ready to leave for Europe. I can only guess at all of this. I know he broke up with the girl but not because he didn’t love her—he told me he did. Much later, he told me that the mother let him get eggs from the chicken coop and he made himself fresh eggs and it was the best breakfast in the world. Also, I remember him saying that the parents were very kind to each other and to their daughter, and to him as well. He made it sound like it was a very foreign thing for people to be so kind and contented. I thought it sounded so different from our home life that I could barely imagine it. He might have stayed there forever, but there must have been a pull to get out on his own. Preston wanted to know the world. He loved languages and was reading more material in French. The girl spoke to Preston in French. He seemed to have a strong desire for a larger world experience.
Preston somehow made amends with our father. I don’t think our mother was ever really mad at him, she was always just sad and upset and hurt and confused and wrapped up in her own emotions. Dad paid for a plane ticket to Europe—one way—for his son as a graduation present. Our mom was against the whole thing. She said my dad was pumping crazy romantic ideas into Preston’s head about Europe and about traveling and being a writer like Ernest Hemingway. Nobody listened to her.
Before he left, Preston was only home for a short time. His skin was smooth again with a few red scars. He was very thin now, not all pumped up from lifting weights and drinking protein shakes for football. He had a cool new bohemian sense of style. He had an incredible pair of Levi’s blue jeans that were pale blue from years of wear. You couldn’t buy jeans that were that perfectly faded like a summer sky. His girlfriend’s mom sewed patches on the jeans because she knew how much Preston liked them. The effect of all the torn holes and threads and patches was a true work of art.
He knew how much I liked them; one day before he left for Europe he came into my bedroom with them, “Hey little sis, little Sid the sis, you want these don’t you?”
“What? Yeah! I love those!”
“Well guess what, your old brother is gonna give them to you as a little token of his affection.”
He came over and kissed me on the forehead, which I don’t know if anyone had ever done in my whole life.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around. I bet it’s been pretty hard on you having to deal with them on your own.”
“Well, they mostly just ignore me.”
“I know. I see that now. I’m sorry you’ve had it so shitty. You don’t deserve this. You’re smart and you’re pretty and you’re a really good person.”
I started to feel like I was going to cry so I just said, “No I’m not. Shut up. Give me the pants and get out of my room.”
Preston started laughing, “That’s my kid sister! Tough as nails! That’s gonna see you through, kid. You’re gonna be okay, I know it. Well, let me know if they fit. I’ll be leaving tomorrow and you and Brandy are the only ones I’ll miss. Actually, the weird thing is, I’m gonna miss those lousy parents of ours too.”
The jeans fit me great, and my big brother left the next day. He was in Europe for many months, almost a year. He sent a few postcards, addressed to our whole family. He called collect once from London when his wallet was stolen and spoke only with our father who wired him the money to proceed and helped him get new identification papers. Otherwise all we knew was that he had found work clearing rocks for a vineyard at the base of the Pyrenees Mountains near Nice in France. He lived in a hut with an old man who had spent his life working on the vineyard as a laborer, clearing new land, planting and caring for new vines. Preston later told us that the old man read philosophy and literature at night. The old man drank red wine every night and so did Preston. If Preston’s pronunciation was not right, the old man would throw something at Preston’s head, a book or the leather cap the man wore. Preston said it was the best studies he ever had. He learned wines, he learned the French language, the great French writers Zola, Proust, Genet, Sartre.
Our mother became very ill with pneumonia during his absence. Much was said about it being a bad case of double pneumonia in both lungs, and a surgeon pronounced that one lung should be partially removed. I heard all of this in roundabout ways, never directed toward me, snippets of phone conversations and discussions between my parents. My mother was thinner than ever, very weak and wrapped up in her illness. I started scrounging around for food because she wasn’t making dinners any more. Somehow a plan was made that instead of undergoing lung surgery, my mother would travel to Florida to convalesce at the winter home of an older couple who were my grandparents’ friends.
My father went shopping at Bonwit Teller’s downtown and came home with a vacation wardrobe for my mother. There was a white pants suit and a wraparound, designer one-piece bathing suit, and a few other matching pieces.
My father drove her to O’Hare airport one Saturday morning and she was gone. While my mother was in Florida, my great-aunt Evelyn, my mother’s only living relative, came to stay with my father and me. She had scoliosis and was always in pain. She lived alone and had never married or had children. I knew that Aunt Evelyn loved Preston very much, and she thought my parents should not have sent him off alone to Europe when he was only seventeen. She talked about him a lot. That was fine with me. I missed him and I wondered about him too. When I was little she liked me a lot and brought me wonderful little dolls and wonderful treats from the bakery near her house. But when she came to stay this time she didn’t like me at all. I was thirteen and she couldn’t relate to anything about me. She hated that I insisted on wearing the jeans and moccasins I had from our northern Minnesota summers all year round, and especially to school. She hated that I did my homework in my room with my door closed, but it was a habit I didn’t want to change. She didn’t like to cook and I didn’t know how to cook, so we didn’t eat well at all. She was always tired and angry because of her scoliosis, but also because she had some crazy ideas that kept her up at night. She would call me down at two in the morning, on a school night, to hysterically say that the refrigerator was about to blow up and that she didn’t want to wake my dad but that I should take a look at it.
The first time this happened, I stood in the kitchen with her, both of us in long nightgowns and slippers, she with a lovely quilted robe my mother had given her for Christmas the year before. We stood facing the fridge, waiting for the noise she said indicated that the blowup was imminent.
Then it happened and she said, “There, what’s that?! You see? Something’s wrong with it! We shouldn’t be standing this close to it!”
But I said, “Aunt Evie, it’s the ice maker. That’s how the ice maker always sounds.”
“No, it can’t be that. Don’t tell me it’s just that. This is serious and you haven’t even looked into it. You won’t even open the door and check to see what’s really happening. Nothing that’s working properly makes a noise like that.”
The new refrigerator always made that noise. I was sure it was nothing but that. “Aunt Evie, I’m sorry, but I have school tomorrow and I’m going back to bed.”
“What? You’re going to leave me alone with this? Do you want me to wake up your father?”
“No. I think you should go back upstairs and go to bed.”
I turned my back on her and climbed the stairs to my room. Aunt Evie had Preston’s room in his absence, and I wanted her to go back and shut her door and go to sleep. That’s how a person survived in this house, not by getting all worked up about everything. But instead of going back to Preston’s room, she tapped on my locked door, and whispered for me to come out and check the refrigerator again. I ignored her and tried to squelch the anger that was welling up inside me. I wanted to scream at her. I wanted people to stop knocking on my bedroom door. I wanted them to stop picking my feeble little lock with a hairpin. I wanted them to leave me alone.
The next morning, I came down dressed for school, very tired and not in a happy mood. There was Aunt Evie, sleeping at the kitchen table, across from the refrigerator, situated so she was facing it, and under her head and folded arms on the table was the huge Chicago city phone book turned to the emergency fire department page.
I prayed every night that my mother would come home. When she finally returned she was listless and self-pitying. Her beauty and air of sophistication were enhanced by her exaggerated weight loss and I was struck by what an exotic creature she had become. When she arrived from Florida, my father picked her up at the airport and brought her home. I was in the kitchen when she walked in. My father was all worried, “Sidney? Sidney, here, help your mother. Ingrid, would you like to sit down? Sidney, help your mother pull out a chair.”
Pull out a chair? I thought she was supposed to be better. She was wearing her white turban with her shiny auburn hair tucked behind her ears and hanging straight to her collarbone. I had never seen anyone wear a turban before. It was by Halston, made of a heavy stretch fabric and pulled on like a cap. The turban complemented the white pantsuit and the bathing suit my dad had bought her. Suntanned, she had perfectly painted toes and was wearing light-tan suede sandals, and her gold coin necklace. She wore no shirt under the white jacket, and it fell perfectly against her impossibly thin body. I looked at her in wonder. I really didn’t know that people could look so exotically perfect. After a long while, she noticed me looking at her and, now sitting in a kitchen chair, looking like she did not belong there at all, stretched out a thin tanned hand and said, “Come here Sidney dear and give your mother a kiss.”
I didn’t—and did—want to. I approached her slowly and tried to hug her but she didn’t let me, she just turned her cheek toward me and closed her eyes. I kissed her cheek and went up to my room.
Aunt Evie stayed another day or two, helping my mother get acclimated. One afternoon she told my mother that the big brick house on the corner was housing some kind of nighttime drug-trafficking operation. I knew the house was owned by a prominent doctor and his family.
When I shared this with Aunt Evie, she turned to my mother and said, “You see? Just as I suspected. That’s how they’re getting the drugs.”
“Aunt Evie, cars go in and out at night because the doctor is on call. It’s just one car and it doesn’t go in and out constantly. My room faces their house. Nothing weird is going on over there.”
Aunt Evie turned to my mother, “You see what I mean about her? This is how she talked to me the entire time you were gone.”
“Mom, Aunt Evie woke me up in the middle of the night a million times telling me the refrigerator was blowing up. I told her it was the ice maker.”
“She wouldn’t even answer her door when I knocked. She has no respect for anyone. She doesn’t listen to anyone.”
“How am I supposed to have respect for a bunch of crazy talk about stuff that isn’t happening? Forget it! If it isn’t real somebody gets to say so!”
My mother was getting upset and who knew what might happen. She might faint, or have to go to bed for the rest of the day. She lifted her shockingly thin wrist to her smooth forehead, ready to make a pronouncement: “Sidney, please … ”
I did not want to hear one of her invalid speeches.
“Never mind. I’m sorry. I have to do my homework. I’ll be up in my room.”
After all that, I knew Aunt Evie would never like me again.
Preston returned in May. My dad drove to the airport while Aunt Evie, my mom and I got everything ready for his homecoming dinner. We hadn’t seen him in over a year. Aunt Evie made a relish tray and cut little red radishes so they looked like little red and white flowers. I didn’t like anything on the relish tray but appreciated that it looked so fancy. My mom was making a beef roast and mashed potatoes, Preston’s favorite. Aunt Evie was also overseeing my peeling of the chilled shrimp, making sure I left the tails on for the shrimp cocktail that I was to arrange on small white plates shaped like shells. I was happy Preston was coming and that everyone was cooking together. I was happy that my mom seemed much healthier. She was still very thin, but she was doing more and she seemed happier. We heard the garage door opening and Brandy got up and barked as if he knew somebody special was coming.
The door to the garage opened and there stood my brother, so different. His hair was longer, sun-bleached. His face was wind-burned and tanned like he had spent many hours outdoors. His expression was changed, more serious, thoughtful, older. He was wearing faded jeans and a cotton button-down collared shirt, one I remembered always liking, but which was faded and worn soft like a favorite T-shirt. His eyes were a bit dazed I thought, and I couldn’t tell if he was glad to be home or not. He hugged Aunt Evie first, whom he had always loved, and she wiped away tears as he let her go.
Mom gave him a big hug, “Oh Preston, you look good. You look strong like you’ve been working hard.”
“Yeah, I was telling Dad I worked long hours in a field clearing rocks every day unless it rained hard.”
Preston was talking in a strange way like he had a foreign accent.
Mom smiled, “Oh, listen to you! I can hear your French accent.”
“Yes, well I speak French pretty damn well now. I told Dad I could maybe test out of at least French, maybe German too, for college. I was in Germany at first. I worked for a farmer and he had two wild daughters who were really fun and we had a great time but he didn’t need help after the hay was brought in last year so that’s when I went to France … ”
Mom was getting worried about the roast in the oven and said, “Preston, we can hear all about it later. You can’t sit down at the table like that. You need to go take a shower and change your clothes.”
“No, I don’t. I’m fine. I’m not showering every five minutes like you people do any more.”
My mother immediately looked at Dad, “Don, please. He needs to shower. We’ve made a nice dinner. Please, Preston. You need to put on deodorant.”
“They don’t use deodorant in France, especially not in the countryside where I was.”
“Alright well, that’s fine for them, but we aren’t going to live like that here.”
The shower was taken and we all bustled around getting the dinner on the dining room table. It was a chilly rainy evening so Dad started a fire in the fireplace which didn’t happen very often mostly because Mom didn’t want to get the living room dirty.
From my seat at the dining room table I could see the fire and loved it. Our house felt like a home. My dad poured red wine into all the crystal wine glasses and even a small amount in mine. Preston came down clean and dressed in a heavy, olive-green wool sweater with suede patches on the elbows.
My mother kissed him on the cheek and remarked, “I love that sweater, what a great color on you now with that suntan Preston. You look so European and grown up!”
“Yeah, I forgot I had such nice clothes.”
Dad made a toast: “To our young man returned home after a great adventure! May we hear stories for many nights to come and then it’s off to college! To Preston!” And we all raised our glasses, “To Preston!”
Preston took a drink. He put his glass down and dropped his head. I was watching him carefully, realizing again that I did not know this changed young man who had been my brother. Really I probably had never known him. I didn’t think anyone at the table knew him either. And so much had happened. Were they all pretending that they didn’t remember anything bad that had happened? Or did they just want to make it all go away?
Preston was crying. Mom noticed and said, “Preston, are you okay?”
Dad jumped in. “He’s fine Ingrid. Leave him alone. He’s fine. Preston, come on. Your mother made you this beautiful dinner. You’re not going to spoil it now when you just got here?”
Aunt Evie jumped in, “Don, the boy is upset. Something must have upset him.”
Mom stood up to refill her sterling silver gravy boat, “I knew he shouldn’t have gone. I knew this was too much for a young boy out there alone all that time, who knows what went on … ”
I looked at my brother again, his head bent, and I noticed a scar above his left eye, a reddish line that ran along his eyebrow and then trailed off to his temple before it disappeared. I wondered what it was from and I knew there was a lot we didn’t know about him. He was only eighteen. I knew he was a very sensitive person. I knew that a lot of things hurt him.
I remembered then how on my twelfth birthday our parents did something very out of the ordinary and took us to see Cat Stevens play a big-arena show. I loved his music and the show was a real life-changer for me. But one of the most moving things was when Cat Stevens sang “Father and Son,” one of his most famous numbers, about his frustrations trying to get his aging father to understand him. I was mesmerized by this lone man at the front of the stage in this packed arena singing a song that made every person freeze and not make a sound. At first, as Cat Stevens sang, I didn’t notice my brother crying. He was next to me, and when I put my hand on his shoulder I could feel his body wracked with sobs. I started to cry too and he put his arm around me and we let the words Cat Stevens was singing envelope us and speak for us. We were silent all the way home that night.
As I was lost in thought, Aunt Evie was single-handedly saving the homecoming dinner by asking Preston sincere and enthusiastic questions about all the places he’d been and things he’d seen. Later, after we had each eaten a piece of our mom’s homemade apple pie, Dad brought out more red wine and he and Preston began to talk in more serious tones about what had happened to him over his long absence. He told the story of the scar while mom was distracted doing the dishes so she wouldn’t get too worked up.
“Early on before I took the ferry across from England to France, there was a guy in one of the bars in London who didn’t like Americans, or didn’t like me, probably both. He kept hassling me until I told him to back off which is when he knocked his glass bottle on the edge of the bar to make a weapon and started yelling, “Come on, come on!” like he was a crazy pirate which he may have been. I was pissed off and told him to leave me alone and pick on somebody his own size because he was pretty heavy, and out of nowhere he jabbed at my face. The bottle was so sharp! It jumped out and cut into my skin so easily. It was like a thing he knew would work.”
Mom was back in the dining room holding her dish cloth, her apron with the ironed white ruffles tied around her waist over a sleeveless pale-pink wool dress. “Preston, are you telling the truth? Let me look at the scar,” and she lifted her hand to his face and looked closely at the red line, “How did it heal? It looks like it was a very deep cut.”
“Well, that’s the best part. The bartender saw this guy go after me and now my forehead is bleeding down into my eye.”
Aunt Evie, my mother and I all gasped.
Preston excitedly continued, “So he just grabs me by the shoulders and lifts me up ‘cause he sees I’m about to faint, and he has me lie down on top of the bar so he can see better. He gets a needle and thread out and he pours me a shot of whiskey. And then he sewed it up with a couple of stitches!”
Preston got the response he wanted from all of us then. Dad was impressed and Aunt Evie and Mom were horrified. I was impressed too. Preston’s face was beaming. This was a good night. When it was over, I went to sleep on the carpeted hallway upstairs in my pink flowered sleeping bag because Aunt Evie was staying overnight in my room. Since she didn’t drive, Dad would take her back into the city the next day. We were all under one roof, we had good food in our stomachs, and we all loved each other. We really did.