Now, with my wife gone, and my children with her, and my job, I start my day with eggs I buy two dozen at a time on gray cardboard sheets. I germinate bean plants and tomatoes in the little bra-like cups, and I stack the cracked half-shells like bowls in the corner of my kitchen. I toast bread or graham crackers or English muffins in a wire basket over the gas flame of the camp stove until they turn just the color of catalpa husks, and I read a verse out of the New Word Bible. I say a prayer over my plate: God, thank you for this. This day is mine.
I check the sky while hauling out my two-quart Teflon sauce pan that serves as chamber pot, adding a deposit to the growing pile of compost in the southwest corner of my lot, farthest away from the well. I’m interested in seeing just what I might leave behind, just what mark a man might make on the world. I have read that a row of garbage trucks loaded with one year of this country’s trash would line up halfway to the moon. I’d like to see that. Or the wall, twelve feet high, we could assemble out of used Styrofoam that would come twisting out of Los Angeles across the Nevada high desert, over the Continental Divide into the corn land of the central plains, through the industry of Ohio and Pennsylvania, onto the avenues and docks of New York. That, too.
We throw away enough paper and cardboard in this country to keep five million people warm for two hundred years, but it would look like Romania, where you can’t see now for smoke. There they’ve accomplished something. They’ve put their hand to the vein and pinched it off, but instead of the pressure pumping up to burst out in a mighty ejaculation and a cleansing rush of wind, the backside gave out and dribbled everything into the rivers and the Black Sea.
These are the only two man-made things you can see from outer space: the Great Wall of China and disaster.
I try to be unobtrusive.
“Rock,” my wife said when she moved out the last of her things, “what’s changed?”
“This,” I said. She had my youngest daughter hefted in her arms and furniture piled in the street. “Everything.”
“You,” she said.
The telephone rings without fail by seven-thirty. Connie and Maxine are up already for hours, scratching together work for the employees of the Lend-A-Hand Temporary Agency’s light industrial division. I deny any aptitude, take no tests besides the timed one that requires me to screw on wing nuts as fast as I can with both hands. After being caught in the corporate purge of middle management I don’t sell, don’t wear a tie, don’t serve as junior vice president of anything. Connie and Maxine call me to clean a warehouse, pack the belongings of a young officer’s family into plywood overseas shipping crates, truck pallets. I am, by virtue of small gifts and little attentions which come at no great cost to me when I am by the office—Connie likes a word about her outfit, Maxine a little pat and harmless flirting—always first on their list. I never refuse the work or the venue. I am reliable.
“Be there by eight?” Connie will always ask. No sense in nine o’clock jobs for me, up already with the morning paper and the milk trucks.
“Sharp,” I say. “Thanks, lover,” if it’s Maxine on the line.
“Promises,” she says, “always promises.”
“I know somebody for you,” she’s always saying, too. “Why don’t you give it a try?”
This morning it is Connie, checking to make sure I’m still on at Ace Chemical.
“I’m a hit,” I say, “they love me.”
“Call me when they’re finished with you,” Connie says.
I am easy to work with, a good man to have working for you. I am a big man, six-and-a-half feet tall and weigh over two hundred and thirty pounds, but I am congenial and a quick hand and study. In the break room over spudnuts, while we wait for the day’s roster at Ace Chemical, I keep the ice broken and stirred with mutant jokes. I’ve stitched a sixth finger onto the side of my Wells Lamont jackass glove.
“I didn’t wash my hands,” I say. Someone warns one of the younger kids on the crew, newly married and who comes to work tired and propped up on a 32-ounce mug of Coca-Cola and powdered mini-donuts, that caffeine overdose will inhibit his staying power.
“Huh,” he says.
The newlywed started as a temp, too, from another agency. Not everybody’s looking to get on full time, though. Mostly I work in gangs of men who stoop and stand for five dollars an hour and take no particular pride in their work. I worked with a man moving his family across the country in a beat-up station wagon that breaks down or runs out of gas in front of police stations where they will give him enough money to get him to the next town, off their hands and out of their jurisdiction.
“There’s good folks on the road,” he said, “people who’ll see you a gallon of gas or a sandwich.”
“Junky men,” my wife would have called them, did call them. “Not like you,” she said when I started working with Lend-A-Hand. “Not like you at all.”
The newlywed’s name is Ethan. His wife’s name is Cheryl, and I ask how she’s doing while I’m riding on a pallet of empty brown sacks that Ethan drives to the middle of the lot on a forklift. The sacks are heavy and lined with plastic, with the stitched top like pour-it-yourself concrete comes in.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Ethan says.
“What’s that?” I say.
“She keeps leaving,” he says. I can see his eyes over the paper surgical mask he wears while we off-load potash from a trailer that came in yesterday five minutes before closing. They are the murky green of pond water in a bottle. I have a mask, too, and we look like doctors over the table.
We talk in between pallets and the noise of the auger. Cheryl leaves, without fail, after the nine o’clock rerun episode of Knot’s Landing. Three weeks now in a row, and counting.
“She’s back by noon the next day,” Ethan says, his weak mustache prickled with salt. “She’ll call me at lunch. I can’t make anything of it.” I can’t either, though there’s nothing in those shows that would lend to a good marriage, nothing to make a man or woman feel adequate. There’s all that money and the horses. There are the bodies of women who don’t exist in this world.
“Other than that,” I say, “how are things?”
Other than that, Ethan talks about hating Rory Lundquist, two weeks his senior on the job. “He just keeps asking for it,” Ethan says when Rory drives by on a bigger forklift. “He keeps on riding me.”
I could tell Ethan that if he chooses to look at it that way he might be ridden for the rest of his life. But I don’t know that. I don’t know that any better than I know whether Cheryl might just not come back by noon the next day. There might be an episode that proves to be too much.
You can tell a young man lots of things, though no more than you can tell an old man. The New Word Bible says let all your answers be either yes or no. Beyond this only leads to trouble.
My wife was always the better Christian. She is a good Christian, in fact. It’s not a thing she will tell you. She will say, I try and I fail, but there is the grace of God. She didn’t believe in divorce. But it came down to her not believing in me even more. A forty-two-year-old Kelly girl. She told me. I didn’t ask to be believed in.
She said to me the day she filed, “God is going to have to forgive me for this.”
He may have to forgive me, too.
I gave my wife everything without argument to settle. A man who uses up the choicest years of a woman’s body, fathers children by her, interrupts her worldly pursuits by virtue of holy promises is a man with debt and obligation. The children went with her by her choice and their own fuzzy instinct.
“I won’t take the house, Rock,” she said, “It’s in your family,” which was a final act of love and restraint, rather than pulling down on my head the full weight of the law. “But you’ll feed and clothe these children,” she said.
“I’ll do that,” I said.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Not ‘I’m sorry’?”
“If you are,” she said.
“It’s fair,” I told her. And she gave me her hand, a formal seeming thing to do, to seal the bargain.
I went on working to keep food on my children’s table, clothes on their soft-skinned backs, money in the pockets of piano teachers and soccer coaches and the manager of Cinema 6 and the roller rink for my thirteen-year-old daughter and the illicit boyfriend she thinks she has hidden there from her mother.
“If I need to step in,” I’ve told my wife.
“They’ll need a man in their lives, Rock,” she’s said. “Girls go through puberty too soon without a father.”
But I’ve lost my girls.
My oldest calls to ask for favors.
“But your mother has the car, sweetheart,” I say.
“She does,” my girl says, “but…”
“But?” I say.
“How are you getting along?” I ask my youngest, and she says, “Fine.”
I used the phone to turn off the gas first and then the water. I’m energy conscious about the lights. I’ve unplugged all my clocks.
“You going on vacation or just moving? Either way, there’s valves inside the house,” they said at city water.
“Neither,” I said. “I just want it off. And garbage and sewer, all of it. I don’t want any more bills.”
“I don’t think we can do that,” city water told me. The gas people tried to refer me to their old-age assistance department.
I live by moonlight and cook over the camp stove. I indulge in a little radio for some news and the bluegrass show on Sunday afternoons, hoping the Lord will look the other way if this is some infringement of the Sabbath. I provide, most weeks, a hundred and thirty dollars for the care and keeping of my family. I figure this is thirty-two dollars and fifty cents a child. Giving my wife a share brings it to twenty-six apiece. Their mother feeds them casseroles and gets them reduced-priced lunch tickets at school.
“Every little bit helps, Rock,” she says. The kids have jobs. Two paper routes, a bag boy, one auto parts deliveryman on weekends.
“Keeps them in shoes and pocket change,” my wife says. “We’re all right.”
Truth be told, my wife’s mother, with whom they all now live, would never let the brood starve. She’s got pension money squirreled away in half a dozen passbook accounts and forty-year-old Treasury bonds. She calls it her legacy. She claims she’ll send every one of my children to college. My wife’s mother claims she is very rich and that my children work these jobs because they build character and teach fiscal responsibility. My oldest, Ben, is going to the University of Southern California this fall, he tells me, under his own steam and the old woman’s auspices.
“Don’t sweat it, Dad,” he says to me. “I’m scholarship material.” He’s come over to work on the truck he has hidden in my garage. I lay my palms out, face up. My son is unrolling an orange extension cord he has plugged into an outdoor socket belonging to my neighbors. The cord runs to a trouble light he has hanging in my garage so he can keep working after dark.
He lays his sockets out according to size on a strip of blue terry cloth. No one has taught him this. He likes things where he can find them. He has a red mechanic’s toolbox the size of a baby carriage he straps to the back of his bicycle.
“How about you?” he says. “How are you doing?” This is how my son, the son of my divorced wife and an earlier self of mine, talks to me now. Like an inquiring neighbor. Like a grown-up. “What are you doing these days? Where are you working?”
I can appreciate it.
Still, sometimes when he does this, I take his arm at the wrist and turn it, palm up, to the light. He has a scar down his forearm six inches long and as thick as a coat hanger. The house we lived in when he was a little boy, when his mother and I first married, caught fire from a dry bird’s nest and old wiring one night. I ran in for him, upstairs, my undershirt wrapped around my head for smoke and my eyes blurred till I was swimming blind. I pounded on his bed looking for him, but he wasn’t in it. I found him underneath, rolled up in a sleeping bag. The fire was in the hall, at the doorway, working up the walls to the ceiling. I left my son in the bag and swung him feet first to smash out the bedroom window. When I dropped him, bag and all, he grabbed at me and slashed his arm on the glass in the windowpane.
I tap the scar with my finger.
“You know how you got this?” I say.
“From love,” he says back to me. And then I nod and let his arm go.
I broke an ankle when I jumped out after him. The house was a complete loss.
“It’s the pictures I regret, Rock,” my wife has said to me, even years later. “We have no record, nothing from the wedding, nothing of Benny as a baby or when he was a little boy, remember, in that red cowboy hat you bought, with his cap gun. Remember?”
I don’t remember that picture, to this day.
“Ben,” I say to my son, who is rolling back the tarp on his truck, “do you remember a cowboy hat, a red straw one?”
“What hat?” Ben says. “My hat?”
“Your mother says there was a picture of you in it.”
“Nah,” Ben says. “I don’t remember.”
“Your mother does.”
“She’s seeing somebody,” Ben says. “She tell you?”
“Her affair,” I say.
“You think so?” Ben says, quick to catch an unintended pun. It’s not a joke you plan on sharing with your son. Ben hasn’t cut his hair in a year and a half; it’s thin and hangs straight down his back. He wears his shirts with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder, and his arms are smooth-lined like a girl’s. Maybe he’s started smoking. I ask him every time he comes over does he need glasses.
“I don’t squint,” he says.
“You squint,” I say. “You look like Clint Eastwood.”
“That’s not so bad,” Ben says.
“You look like Mr. Magoo,” I say.
Ben’s mother does not know about this truck; it is a confidence between Ben and myself, one thing I keep from her. Ben tells me it is a 1948 Dodge Powerwagon, four-wheel drive. “Clean,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe it.” It is massive; it fills the garage like a whale in a cave. Ben talks to me standing straight up with his arms folded across the hood.
“It’s got to be red,” he tells me.
“Yellow,” I say. “I could see it yellow.”
“It’d look like something from a florist,” Ben says. “Look.” He spreads a plan on the hood and we study over it like architects. He’s drawn the wagon to scale, the curved lip of the bed and the arched wheel wells and the bucket headlights. Sketched on the door of the driver’s side is Institute of Archaeology. “That’ll be in blue,” Ben tells me, “for a touch of class.”
Ben’s light draws the mosquitoes and moths, and they swirl around his head like a crown while he is bent over the engine. He comes up for air and says to me, “I tell Mom you’re doing all right, lost a little weight, but you’re shaved and the house is picked up.”
“I tell her the same thing,” I say.
“Why don’t you let me come live with you over the summer? There’s nothing that says I can’t, is there?”
“No,” I say.
“No which?” Ben says. “No, you can’t; or no, nothing?”
“No, nothing,” I say. Ben is sitting on the front fender, scratching under his chin where he should have a beard.
“Dad,” he says, “what are you doing here? Is this some kind of experiment, or does this prove something?”
“It’s what I can afford,” I say.
“You got nads, Dad,” he says to me. “I’d never say any different.”
This, the thought of my sons growing up without me, troubles me. And my daughters. My boys do not have my size. They take after their mother, birds’ bones and the tiny bound feet of Chinese royalty. My boys were doll babies, and even now they have too little flesh on their faces. It’s unfortunate when this happens, and when girls take their looks from their fathers. My daughters are robust and bovine. They have my extra height and thick legs and heavy arms. My littlest has jowls like a bulldog, and my oldest has uneven skin and at thirteen takes a man’s shoe.
I contemplate this standing out on my fence at night while I survey the neighborhood. I know who sleeps and who sits up late and whether or not they watch TV. I stand eight feet in the air on a two-by-four crosspiece, with my shirt open and my hands on my belly like an idol.
I caught a burglar from up here once. I didn’t catch him really—I scared him away by shouting, “Go ahead, the old man isn’t home and the wife’s deaf as a stump.” I remember he turned to look at me, three backyards away, like he was considering the advice. I said, “Come here a minute,” and he shook his head no, then waved before he slipped off.
Tonight, after Ben, I am convinced that growing up a boy is no easy thing. I’m convinced it’s nothing a father teaches you—but only half convinced, and not sure that I couldn’t help my boys anyway. I’ve been alive all this time. Some of it should count for wisdom.
One night a week I spend at the supermarket, where I buy with coupons. Two-for-one is odds I like. And rebate offers, gold mines the average consumer leaves unplundered for the price of a stamp. Potatoes are good. They go with everything. Beans, rice, bread. Staples. In the summers I have my garden. I have a basket on the back of my bicycle, a blue plastic milk crate that says Mountainland Dairies.
Maxine from Lend-A-Hand tells me the grocery store is a fine place to meet women.
Ben will need to learn to shop on his own if he goes away to college. I ask my wife if he knows how to cook.
“He can boil water,” she says. “He gets his own breakfast. There’s not as much to know these days.” She asks me if I’ve kept up the life insurance.
“The mail goes to you,” I say.
Thursday nights are laundry nights. I wash up everything in a tub half full of lukewarm water with a cup of powdered soap while I listen to a ball game or Mystery Theatre on the radio. I start first thing when I get home, and everything is out on the line by dark and stiff and dry come morning. In the winter I have clothes draped over banisters and curtain rods all through the house for two days.
Ben doesn’t come by on Thursdays. I’ve told him he’s welcome anytime, it doesn’t matter.
“I don’t want to get in the way, Dad,” he says. “You have your life to live.”
Maxine gives me her usual line when I come in for my paycheck, “Rock, I’ve got a hot tip for you.”
I’ve just finished three days with a local company that manufactures miniature basketball hoops and backstops. We’ve cleaned and restacked the warehouse and taken inventory. I got a black baseball cap with YELLOW, the name of a big truck manufacturer, stitched on the front from a sales representative. The job let me put in six hours of overtime, which normally is not allowed.
“I don’t want a job, sugar,” I say.
“It’s a woman,” Maxine says. “It’s a favor, from me to you. You’ve been separated more than a year, haven’t you?”
“Why don’t you get me on at Wentzell’s again?” I say. “That was good work.”
“For me, then,” Maxine says.
“What,” I say, “are we supposed to do?”
“Get together for a meal, go dancing,” Maxine says. “Do what comes naturally.”
Maxine’s friend is a second cousin who runs a yarn and fabric outlet called Knit-Wit. She’s trim and tidy. Her blue print jumper is covered with tiny teapots, and she wears rectangle glasses on a chain around her neck like she’s tempting age. Her husband has been MIA in Vietnam for twenty years.
“I lost track of time passing,” she says. “Suddenly I’m forty and I wonder what I’ve missed.”
In the end, against all better judgment, she’s come to the house. I solved all the obvious problems with a barbecue. I took an extra ten dollars out of the overtime money, out of my children’s mouths, and now we sit on the patio eating ribs sticky with honey sauce and ears of new corn. We drink a pitcher of iced tea with a taste of sweet straw, and Sylvia, which is her name, asks me questions about my family.
“Is it OK?” she says. “Do you mind talking about it?” One evidence of her extraordinary politeness. “That’s what I missed, having a family.”
“What is it you want to know?” I say.
“Oh, anything,” she says. “Names, dates, first causes.” She offers to take my side in things, defend me, sitting with a napkin in her lap and eating with her fingers.
“I used to play baseball,” I say.
“Or we could talk about baseball,” she says. “Baseball’s fine.”
She eats well, heartily. She’s making a great pretense of thinking of who else she knows with the name Rock when Ben comes up the driveway.
“Hey, sorry,” he says.
“Hello,” Sylvia says.
“Ben, Sylvia, and likewise,” I tell them. “He’s family.”
“Come eat, Ben,” she says. “What brings you? Or are you living with your dad?”
“For the summer,” Ben says. He has a duffel bag with him he tosses in the house. I dish up a plate of ribs and corn.
“It’s early, still, for corn,” Sylvia says, “but your dad picked a good half dozen ears.”
“You’ll need to call Mom,” Ben tells me. “Let her know I got here.” Which means he hasn’t moved, just left.
“Are your kids still in town, then, Rock?” Sylvia says. “That’s nice for you.”
“It works out for Ben,” I say.
On the phone, my wife tells me nothing I have to say is any news to her.
“Are you going to keep him, Rock?” she says.
“Do you mean is he going to stay?” I say.
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, is he going to be up for work and get fed and be ready for school in the fall? Is he going to have clean clothes? Is someone going to keep him from getting arrested?”
“What’s he done?” I say.
“Nothing. That’s not what I meant.”
“He’s sixteen years old,” I say.
“Seventeen, Rock.”
“Seventeen?” I say. “Seventeen.”
“Sixteen when we split up, Rock. Seventeen last year. Eighteen and starting college in the fall.”
“You keep good track,” I say. “You always had that little calendar in your purse.”
“I keep track,” she says.
“We had a bad marriage, didn’t we?” I say. “We must have.”
“It got that way,” she says.
“But we weren’t unfaithful. We weren’t unkind to one another.”
“I’m seeing somebody, Rock,” she says. “Ben’s told you.”
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s somebody from church,” she says.
“You don’t need my permission.”
“I would let you know if anything happened,” she says. “Why don’t you have Ben stay a week or two, see what’s what? Is he there now?”
“He’s entertaining on the patio,” I say.
“Is that what he’s been sneaking off for at nights?”
“I’ve never seen her before,” I say. “I think she’s older.”
“Two weeks, Rock, trial run. Maybe he needs it, I don’t know. You might as well know, too, Sissy fell down on the playground. She broke out a front tooth, but it was a baby one. We’re going to just let things ride. She has an ugly scab on her lip and doesn’t want to go to summer school, though.”
“Don’t make her,” I say.
“We do things in life we don’t want to do, Rock,” she says.
“That’s where I had it wrong all those years,” I say.
“Do, do,” she says. The closest she’ll come to profanity is pretending. “Anything else?”
“Sacco’s has some good corn,” I say.
“Thanks for the tip,” she says and tells me good-bye.
We’ll have dusk as late as 9:30 up until the first day of summer, two weeks away. I need no light to get around my house. The streetlamp across the avenue casts a slanted doorway onto the living room floor, and the bulb over the neighbor’s carport burns all night right outside the window over the kitchen sink. Upstairs, where the air is hot and stuffy as gauze because I have left the windows closed, you get some light from the moon as well. I open windows on the second floor and dump Ben’s bag on the bottom bunk in the north bedroom. Sylvia is laughing out on the patio.
“What did she say?” Ben asks when I come back.
“You’re a potential felon. You’re in the lockup for two weeks,” I say.
“Are you planning a life of crime, Ben?” Sylvia says.
“A life of ease,” Ben tells her. He’s on his back with his plate on his belly.
“And so young,” Sylvia says.
“Seventeen,” I say. Ben has the trim waist of a dancer and the wasted arms of an addict—he looks a young seventeen. He’s stretched out with his hands over his head like he’ll be starting the backstroke.
“Seventeen,” Sylvia says. “My brother was working in the coal mines already when he was seventeen.”
“I’m a math whiz,” Ben says.
“Or he would have been sold like the others,” I say.
Sylvia laughs and then asks if she can use the bathroom. This one thing I have overlooked.
“Problem,” Ben says. He sits up straight. “The water’s off, pipes are bad. That’s our first project for the summer.”
“Oh,” Sylvia says.
“It’s awkward,” I say, looking at Ben.
“Hey, we’ll go for ice cream, my treat, and they’ll have a rest room there,” Ben says. “Sorry for the trouble.”
Sylvia is a sport about it, and Ben has us pile into the big cab of his Powerwagon. I boost Sylvia up and she sits on my side to keep out of the way of the stick. She compliments Ben on his truck. She pats my leg and says look how high up we are. Ben wrestles the wheel around corners like he’s steering a tiger by the ears.
“Look at that dash,” Ben says. It’s spare and functional—speedometer and oil gauge, pull-out knobs for the choke and lights. “Those days are gone.”
Sylvia, in the cab, has a scent of soap and rainwater, of new cloth.
“He should paint it yellow,” I say. “Yellow the color of cheesecake.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Ben says.
Ben leaves us alone when we get back. He’s bought us all double-dip sugar cones, and Sylvia has told him thanks and remembers it’s been years since she’s had one. They are like the ones she used to get in Virginia, before she left home and moved out West.
“I put your stuff upstairs,” I tell him. “I’m gone early in the morning. There’s eggs for breakfast.”
While I put up the barbecue, Sylvia rocks in a metal patio chair.
“What do you miss most?” she says.
I think about it. “Nickel soda pop,” I say. She laughs to oblige me.
“Maxine expects a full report, details, explicit photos,” she tells me.
“My sisters used to get together and do that,” I say. “I thought maybe it went out with the fifties.”
“Girls are girls,” Sylvia says. “Maxine’s been divorced, twice. Third time’s the charm. They’ve been together six years now.”
“She’s told me,” I say. Ben has made short work of any leftovers. I make two piles of the garbage, wet and dry.
“Anyway, thanks for this,” she says. “And you have a nice son.”
“I have a couple,” I say. “Benny’s the oldest, then there’s Stephen. Then the girls—Laura, and Sissy’s last. She just broke a tooth.” The wind starts the chimes while I’m telling her this, the ones with the head of an owl and long wooden tubes of lacquered bamboo. Sylvia comes to me and puts her arms around my waist.
“Here,” she says, to offer me a deep kiss and a try at compassion that have both been twenty years in the making.
Sylvia is asleep now on the couch under the light of the streetlamp in the living room. She is frowzy-headed and calm, and she’s dropped her earrings into her shoes where she won’t forget them. Ben is tossing restless upstairs in his old room, where it’s warm even with the windows open until about four in the morning, when you get a crosswind that freezes you in your sheets. The house seems full, like it hasn’t for a long time, and out on the fence, far from sleep, I cannot remember which of my children it is that has asthma.