BEFORE MY first interview with my father, my mother took me to Radio Shack and helped me pick out a new recorder. As we approached the register, she reached into her purse.
"No, Mom."
"I want to," she said, smiling. "I think it's a good idea."
That afternoon, her smile faded when I took out the recorder and sat with her in her garden. Hands caked in soil, she knelt on a thick foam pad beside a small metal sign: Gardeners Have the Best Dirt. She said she had nothing to say, that it was my father who should be talking. I knew that wasn't true. I knew from the hours and hours we spent on the phone over the years, as she talked about this sister or that brother, often the same family events again and again. These jumbled characters and plots seemed to have no origin or destination, like pollen in the breeze. At the end of these conversations, she'd apologize for "talking my ear off." She brushed the dirt from her hands and stretched her back. Then she began a story she'd told me before, but this time slower, and in detail.
But first, like my father's mother, she would interrupt herself and talk about her jobs, the ones she worked from home. Selling arts and crafts or Mary Kay beauty products. For a while, she sold weight-loss pills called Herbalife. I remembered the giant green pill box sitting on our kitchen table. Sometimes I'd lie awake in bed and listen to her drop each pill into its proper place.
She told me about nursing school and the public speaking course that scared her off. She used to tell me this story when I was worried about giving a presentation in school. I thought this was the only reason she dropped out but, in her garden, she told me about the months she worked at a state hospital, scrubbing bed pans and drawing blood. There was one man who liked to talk to her. He told her war stories, heroic sea tales from his time in the Navy during World War I. When she'd lean over to adjust his IV, he'd slip his hand up her skirt. She told him to stop. He'd cut it out for a day or two and then start up again. Eventually, she turned in her uniform and quit.
Then she told me about her father. I could see my grandfather shuffle across his living room rug in pin-striped pajamas, sleeves cut off just above his anchor tattoo. The anchor was the color of a vein, a red heart stabbed on the anchor's fluke. In the summer, the mercury in the red ink made the heart swell like a blood blister. Sometimes I had to fight the urge to reach out and pop it. He made his way across the rug and paused in front of the china cabinet. His knees cracked and popped as he bent down and retrieved a bottle of amber liquid and a small silver cup. He filled the cup once, knocked it back. Again, slower this time, sipping. He sucked air through his teeth, then looked at me and grinned. I grinned back as if we had just shared a secret. Though I'm sure my mother and father were watching, at the time I thought my grandfather and I were playing our own private game of charades.
My mother stuck her shovel in the dirt and began the story she intended to tell me from the beginning. Her twin brothers, Richard and Robert. Robert was wild, rebellious, liked to cut school and smoke cigarettes behind the supermarket. Richard, a quiet boy, ran track—a sprinter. He sat in the front of the classroom. Excellent penmanship. The steady hand of a calligrapher.
When Robert was fifteen, he cut class to hang out at a friend's house. Maybe Richard told him not to, maybe he didn't. "Depends who's telling the story," my mother said. "Richard always blames himself."
Robert and his friend played cops and robbers, stalking around the couch, beneath the dining room table, down the hallway, into the bedroom. Pow. Bang, bang. Pow. I got you. No you didn't. Yes I did. The boy's sister had a boyfriend. He was a real cop, fought real crime with a real gun. The gun went off and hit Robert in the stomach.
My grandparents received a call, from whom my mother couldn't remember. An ambulance took Robert to the hospital. He died an hour later. That night my grandfather stood in the living room, still wearing his postman's uniform. A ship unmoored, swaying with the tide. My mother pressed her ear to her bedroom door, listening to her father, to the man she said always had an answer, repeat over and over: I don't know.
The next day, my mother's sister got married. Robert's wake was the following day, and it lasted for two days and two nights. My mother's sister announced she was pregnant. My grandmother passed out tranquilizers. Robert was buried.
"Busy weekend, wouldn't you say?" my mother said, shaking her head. "After that, I don't know. Things were hard for grandma and grandpa. He was at the bar all the time and grandma kinda checked out. I think she was scared to get close to us, to let anyone get close to her. Richard had a very hard time."
Richard stopped sprinting. He trained for long distances. He took a scholarship and ran away. Headed south: Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia. Years later, my parents traveled down from Long Island to visit him. They spent the night at his house. His land was overgrown, and there was a rusty oil tank beside the shed. My father found a piece of PVC piping and attached it to the top of the oil tank to make it look like a beached submarine. They posed in front as my mother took their picture. On the back of the photograph, my father wrote S.S. Redneck.
My mother stood up and stretched her knees. She grabbed a packet of seeds off the deck and sprinkled them into the holes in the ground. I raised my recorder to her lips.
"I think Richard sort of absorbed Robert's personality."
I nodded and thought about the water displacement experiments I used to do in science class. Drop in a cube made of wood, then aluminum, then lead. Measure the volume until the beaker overflows.
My mother bent down and pressed a seed into the dirt. "All of Robert's stuff was boxed up and we never talked about him. Not until grandma got sick. I hardly knew the woman, Anthony. I talked to her more in her last week alive than I had my whole life."
Robert died while my father was in Vietnam. I imagine my father in his hooch: crew cut, dark green sunglasses, toned body pressing against his green uniform. Hands in his pockets, twirling Eisenhower's profile, the coin he'd rub as his "freedom bird" lifted off from Saigon six months later. The coin he held as medics rushed bodies across Long Binh to the hospital. The coin he flipped as non-compliant American soldiers were escorted to the prison on the other side of the base.
Between the sick and the damned, he twirled a coin and prayed for luck.
One night, the red-alert sirens shocked him out of sleep. He left the coin in his hooch, rushed to the perimeter, gripping his M-16. Dropped to the dirt and took aim at no one, everyone. Squeezed his trigger and emptied a magazine of bullets into the dark.
My mother squinted into the sun. "I never wanted to limit you or your brother." She seemed like she was about to cry. Her tears snuck up on her. She breathed deeply. "Who am I to tell you guys what to do?"