1978
It was Saturday morning, early enough so the dew that clouded the corners of her bedroom windows had turned icy and the lawn below was laced with frost. Bobbie huddled in the car with her mother, following a map Craig had sketched on a paper towel, and which she had been instructed not to get wet.
“This is a bad idea,” Bobbie said. They were supposed to go to Craig’s house and get his clothes. Get more pot, is what Bobbie understood. “I don’t want to do this.”
“Why is it a bad idea? It’s perfectly reasonable for a man to want his own clothes,” June said.
Bobbie wore a scratchy olive-colored sweater, jeans with a zipper that wouldn’t stay up, her hair folded into a metal clip. “Why do we have to go? To his house, I mean. Someone else could do it.”
But she already knew. Because he asked for his clothes and records and audio equipment, that was why. Because he wanted them. He’d begun moaning about his things days ago and June agreed at the weekend they would fetch them. Craig said good because the guys he shared the house with were dickwads and jealous of his talents and he needed June to get his stuff before the assholes sold it or stole it.
“We’re out here in the freezing cold,” Bobbie said, “while he’s still sleeping.”
“It’s one morning of our lives. I think we can spare it,” June said. She moved the steering wheel around in her fingers, checked her mirrors, then made a great show of driving instead of listening. She didn’t know why Bobbie had to be such a whiner. They were only going on a little drive, after all. In the back of the car were empty fruit boxes for packing and the car filled with the smell of bananas and soggy cardboard.
“You had to drive him last night, too,” Bobbie said.
“To work, Bobbie. The man needs to get to work.”
Bobbie flicked the heat on higher, then held up the paper-towel map for June to read. They drove for forty-five minutes, arriving at a decaying house at the end of a long line of similar houses. Craig’s neighborhood was full of cars, some slanted onto the sidewalk, some angled halfway onto a lawn. They parked near the house and could see a man at the front door waiting for them. He brushed his hands through his unwashed hair, a phone cord attached somewhere deep inside the house straining across his bare arms. When they walked up the front lawn with their empty boxes he said into the phone, “Aw, shit, they’re here now!” To Bobbie and June he said, “Craig sent you people? He sent you?”—as though they were ridiculous.
He stood wincing at them like the very sight of them was painful or the brightening day held too much light.
“You must be Craig’s housemate,” June said in her singsong greeting voice, the tone of which Bobbie thought never appropriate under any circumstances and certainly not now. She watched her mother extend her hand toward the man, who ignored it.
“Your friend Craig,” the guy began, “hasn’t paid his damned rent for months. Now you want me to give you access to the house? No way!”
He crossed his arms, blocking their entrance. He wore a pair of tattered jeans, a digital watch, a “Keep On Truckin’ ” T-shirt with the big thumb hooked upward, pointing at his beard. The fabric on his jeans was full of cigarette ash and pot resin. His bare toes stuck out from under frayed cuffs. He was about to slam the door when June spoke again.
“I’d like to take care of the rent,” she said. She got a checkbook out, her pen ready. “How many months?”
It was extraordinary to Bobbie that June had brought her checkbook, that she had anticipated paying Craig’s bills on top of everything else. She felt her chest caving, a terrible dread taking hold. She wondered if Craig had convinced her to do this, and what else he might persuade the woman to pay for, and whether the idea was to drain her mother of the money that Bobbie held and that Craig had convinced himself belonged to him. A thousand dollars, one way or another.
The housemate told them the amount and Bobbie watched as her mother stiffened, then let her pen relax. “I’m sorry,” June said. She had a dignity about her that made the next admission more painful than it might otherwise have been. “I can’t quite cover the entire amount,” she said.
The housemate looked fiercely at them. “So, no money, is that it?” he said. “I’m supposed to let him just walk away like he always does? Because that’s what Craig is like, you know. He glides through life and lets everyone else worry about his shit!”
June tried to smile, but the smile twisted on her face. “In point of fact, he’s not walking anywhere,” she said. “He’s had a terrible accident—”
“I know about the accident!” the guy yelled. He made a sweeping motion with one arm, as though dismissing the whole notion. “Fuck the accident!”
He stared at them. Bobbie saw the veins in his neck, how his hair was beginning to stand on end with sweat. Finally he let out a long groan and then threw open the door hard so it banged against the wall. “Give me half the money, and then take every stitch of his clothing! Every piece of shit he has!” he shouted.
“Thank you,” June said, scribbling the check.
“Mom, no,” Bobbie said. She didn’t want to give this man any money, or go inside the awful house, or even to stand at its doorstep. She wanted to go home. Now. She wanted to go home and clear Craig out of their house, out of their lives, before something worse and permanent happened.
“Bobbie,” June said shooting her an urgent look.
“We can’t!” Bobbie said, but June kept walking and Bobbie realized that her mother would go alone into the house, pack every bit of Craig’s stuff herself, carry it to the car herself. Do it all, if that was what was required.
So she followed. Meanwhile, the housemate was barking orders. “Leave his stereo in payment! Leave the speakers, too. But all the other crap, get it the hell out!”
Bobbie had never heard a man speak in such a way to her mother. She’d never imagined her mother entering a house like this, either. It occurred to her all over again how the fact of Craig in their lives had opened a door that allowed entry to every ugly creature. The guy kept yelling, nodding his head forward at June as though pecking at her like a bird. Bobbie noticed that he was dirty, his face, his hands. His fingernails were chipped and yellow and his littlest fingernail had grown into a long scoop so that it curled like a talon and yellowed with length. It seemed wrong for a man to take such care to sculpt a fingernail, and she knew he used it to snort, but wondered why someone who could afford cocaine would live as he did and not wash.
She followed her mother through the dark house, feeling vaguely criminal with her load of empty grocery boxes. Her mother asked which was Craig’s room, still using the pleasant voice she reserved for customers and doctors and any stranger on whom she wished to make a good impression. Her mother’s unceasing politeness, so squandered here.
The housemate pointed to a back room, and they began down the darkening corridor, trying to be careful not to knock against the walls or create any other disturbance. There were rooms here, and rooms upstairs. Bobbie got the idea that there may be others asleep in the house, and so they whispered and were as quiet as they could be on the thinly carpeted floors.
“It’s been a lot better since he’s been gone!” the guy said. He told them Craig had broken the air conditioner by throwing it out the window in a temper, and they’d had to suffer the heat all summer long. They learned that Craig ate everyone else’s food, left the doors unlocked, never changed a lightbulb or cleaned up after himself in the bathroom.
“He’s a hog, a total dick,” the guy said. “He comes across as cool, but he’s scum. He siphoned gas from my truck!”
“I’m sorry,” June said, as though any of this were her fault.
“And he lost my gas cap, too,” he added, “the prick.”
“I don’t know if you are aware, but it really was a horrible accident,” June said. “We are lucky that Craig is alive.”
She wasn’t that much older than the housemate, but something about June’s manner, her calm reason, her humanity, made her seem as though she might have been this guy’s old aunt. She even looked like an aunt in her work clothes, a plain wool skirt, an open-neck blouse, square-heeled black shoes, big fake pearl clip-on earrings. The pocket on her blouse called out for a badge, and indeed there were pinholes in the cloth from all the times she’d clipped on her name tag. It was ridiculous for her to reason with the housemate, whose eyes were bloodshot from too much partying the night before, and who looked as though he’d never done an honest day’s work. No, indeed, not an hour.
“That sonovabitch? He is an accident!” he said. Bobbie thought perhaps Craig had diddled him out of something more than the rent money. Drugs, a job, a woman, perhaps. She watched him push some crumbs from his blond beard, then wipe his palm across his T-shirt. She noticed now that this guy, too, had the voice of a radio announcer. She knew these voices now, the quality of the tone, the throaty reverb. Behind him, in the living room, was a turntable and giant speakers and more electronic equipment than she’d ever seen. The guy glared at her, then at her mother and said, “Someone should shoot him, you know? Make a better world!”
June reeled back. Her jaw began to work, but she could not form any words. Bobbie looked at her mother in her workaday skirt with its matching low heels, her careful makeup and hair. She thought how her mother had no business in a house like this and no way of answering such a man.
“You need to let us get moving if you want his stuff taken out,” Bobbie said.
He turned in a fury to Bobbie. “Oh yeah, little girl?” he said, his voice gaining in volume. But then, all at once, he flicked his hand toward a closed door and said, “That’s his. Pick it clean!”
Of course, Bobbie recognized the room, with its single window and its single bed. She’d been in it several times. It smelled like metallic spray paint and scorched dust. Across the mattress were gray blankets, flattened pillows, a crumpled T-shirt, untouched for all the weeks he’d been gone. His clothes spilled from a system of drawers in fake walnut and with broken handles, a collection of jeans and stacks of T-shirts from radio stations across the country and from bands he’d seen. The T-shirts were mostly unworn; some he’d put into plastic bags, some he’d folded into perfect squares.
He had tons of record albums plus two guitars—one electric, one acoustic—and a set of drums stuffed into the closet, accessed by a sliding door. The room was dominated by a desk on which he’d arranged metal baskets containing electronic gear: colorful wire, copper-clad boards, circuit boards, rocker switches, tilt switches, speakers in various stages of development or repair, a microphone capped with a ball of foam around its head.
Having her mother in this room, in this room with her, was too much. She wanted to get out. “Let’s just take the important stuff and leave,” she said.
“We’ll do our best,” said June.
“But look at the size of those drums.” They were stacked one above the other like tiers of a wedding cake. “They’ll never fit in the car anyway.”
“He says he needs those. And his stereo, too. We certainly aren’t going to leave his stereo for that…person,” June said, nodding her head toward the door.
They made their way back to the car, first with the drums, then with boxes now filled with radio equipment neither of them knew the names of. They dragged along his clothes in green garbage bags. Back and forth, back and forth across the yard. Sections of wire fence had been on the ground so long they were now embedded in the grass, and they stepped carefully around them so as not to trip. Bobbie hooked his headphones around her neck, the giant padded earpieces wagging beneath her chin. She stuffed her coat with all the mail that had been collecting, unopened. She lugged the speakers, then their stands.
At least the housemate had disappeared—that was a mercy—but the brightness of the outdoors contrasted the dark hallway so that they blinked as they went in, hoping not to collide with him inside, and squinted when they came out, carrying as much as possible.
With her mother beside her, Bobbie noticed all the signs of the house’s ruin. The air conditioner the housemate had spoken of was indeed tipped on its side out the window, the grass longer near it and weeds growing through its grille. In the living room the curtains were made from single sheets of unhemmed brown cloth that could not be kept open except by wrapping them around a cleverly positioned floor lamp. Bare bulbs, a balding shag carpet. Someone had gotten the idea to take down the wallpaper but given up halfway through. There was a bong behind the sofa and a cage for an animal, or perhaps it was a trap.
She was on her knees by the bed, running her hands beneath it, raking into a pile all the cassette tapes that lay there, when a phone rang from under the bed covers. June and she stared at each other, at first unable to find the phone, and then unable to decide whether to answer it.
“Check if there is a ring in any other part of the house,” June said, and Bobbie scrambled up from the carpet and went down the hall. There was another phone in the awful kitchen, an avocado-colored dial phone with a long extension cord, but it was silent. She felt sure Craig’s caller would soon give up, but she could hear the phone continuing to ring and when she returned, she found her mother staring at it as though at a fierce, barking dog.
“What are you doing?” Bobbie said.
June opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Do you think we should answer it?” she whispered.
This was crazy—why did her mother feel she needed to answer another person’s phone? “Absolutely not,” Bobbie said, but she could read her mother’s thoughts, and knew her to be a woman who could not resist a ringing phone or a doorbell or an oven timer.
June took in a breath. “It could be someone…important to him.”
She meant a girlfriend. Bobbie could tell from the mild panic in her mother’s voice.
Bobbie said, “Maybe it’s a bill collector. Don’t answer.”
The ringing persisted, like a person at a front door who has seen you’re inside.
“What should we do?” June said.
“Go home.”
But her mother could not stop herself. She picked up the phone, holding it lightly, as though she might want to drop it at any second.
“Hello?” June’s voice was high and fluttering, a little feather that floated from her mouth.
Bobbie busied herself with the cassettes. She tried to listen to the conversation but June shooed her away, pointing at the closet where there were drumsticks and fans, some sheet music on the floor. She took these things out, then saw a stack of magazines resting on a shelf above the hangers. She brought down a few issues and saw on the cover of the first issue a naked model in tall heels and stockings, her buttocks taking up much of the page. Where her nipples were the editors had placed strategic graphics so that they could not be fully seen—two red stars covering the areolas. Bobbie thumbed through the pile and saw they were all the same type. She put the magazines back where they’d been and fished down some cymbals instead, balancing them on her head like a hat. Soon, she was again trawling across the uneven ground with boxes and knickknacks—a basketball, a desk lamp. She didn’t want her mother laboring under the unwieldy boxes.
When she returned, June was making an attempt to fold the bed linen, the phone now put away.
“What did they want?” Bobbie asked. When her mother didn’t answer, she added, “The person who called, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” June said, her voice sharp as though Bobbie had asked a rude question.
“Well, you talked to them for a long time,” Bobbie said. “I heard—”
“All right, Bobbie. Enough.”
They made one last trip to the car. It seemed to Bobbie this was the kind of place where feral cats were poisoned, where anything that got broken stayed broken, and where just occasionally a body might be found. Last time she’d been here, Craig had parked well away so his housemates wouldn’t spot her, then checked to see if anyone was home before bringing her inside. She hadn’t liked the place then either.
At the car, she told her mother, “I want to go home.” Even though Craig was at their home, and it meant returning to him.
June balanced the weight of her boxes on the hood. “But what about the rest of his things?” she said.
A foam mattress, a wooden chair, a desk that couldn’t possibly fit. What did her mother think, that they could tie these things to the roof?
“We can come back,” Bobbie said, though they both knew that would not be possible. The housemate would throw out what had been left behind. His instructions, which had put her in mind of vultures, were to pick it clean.
“Please, Mom.” They were standing outside the car, the wind working its way through the trees above them. The car was full; there was no room left to haul a thing.
“I know, I heard you. You want to go home.”
The car was warm from sun, but so tightly packed that Bobbie had to sit at an angle and with her knees practically in her face, everything of Craig’s surrounding her.
“Who was on the phone?” she asked.
“No one,” June said. Bobbie made a face and June said, “Oh, all right! It was a police officer.”
Even the word terrified her: police.
“What did they want?” Bobbie whispered.
June shook her head. “Apparently information about a fight before the accident. In a motel…”
Bobbie didn’t hear anything after that. The word motel from her mother’s mouth felt like an accusation.
“But they just want to ask him a few questions. He hasn’t done anything!”
Bobbie nodded. She wondered what would happen next. Would the police show up at their door? Ask her questions? Would she have to swear an oath? The thought of talking to a police officer terrified her and she wished they could keep driving, drive far away, that they could escape.
“I’d like you not to mention this to Craig,” her mother said. “You won’t say anything, will you?”
Bobbie said nothing, not to agree, not to disagree. Instead, she looked out the window at the passing houses.
“He gets very upset about police,” June continued. “And we don’t want him unhappy.”
Of course not. That was the important thing, not to upset Craig or trigger his moods. Bobbie felt a plummeting despair. He was in their house. He brought the police. There would be questions, probes, explanations to be given. It filled her with dread. Finally, reluctantly, as though asking for a tremendous favor, she said, “Do we have to keep him with us?” She almost stopped there, the plea seeming so preposterous given the lengths her mother was willing to go to for Craig. But she carried on anyway. “He is working again now, has his old job back. He could get his own place.”
She longed for her mother to answer that of course they didn’t have to house Craig, that their home was for themselves and Craig was only there for a short while longer, until he was healed enough to drive himself to work rather than rely on June. She ached for her mother to promise he would go soon, but she felt the way she had as a young child, desiring a particular toy at Christmas, an expensive, luxurious toy, all the while knowing the odds were slim. Even so, she asked, just as she’d asked years back, with a child’s heart and hope. When her mother did not answer, she felt a sinking in her chest, and her own inner disciplinarian rising from within her and telling her to stop behaving like this and stop expecting so much.
Minutes later, she began to feel a burning in her stomach that she associated with car sickness, a condition she thought she’d outgrown. At a stoplight, she rolled down the window and stuck her head out to breathe the cool air. She heard the breeze rustling a willow tree that grew messily in a hollow area of ground next to the road. She angled her head, seeing the back of the car, stuffed as it was with all of Craig’s things. And with that sight, the weight of his presence in her life pressed against her freshly, as though he had just now discovered her and had set his desire freshly upon her. Nothing could rival his attention, not teachers at school, not her mother, not Dan. The force of it reigned outside the normal domains of school life and home life.
How could she do anything now? After so many incriminating acts and all the time that had passed during which she’d said nothing, how could she speak to her mother of the things that Craig and she had done? How could she warn her mother, and turn her away from him? She knew she had to say something, that this was her last chance. She couldn’t bear to confess all that had happened, but there was no other way out. “Mom,” she began. She let out a sigh, a wretched sigh loaded with as much meaning as a word and which no word could describe.
“I heard you the first time,” her mother said crisply. “You don’t like Craig. No need to repeat it.”
“It’s just that—” She stopped. “The police, that motel—” She willed herself to continue but her voice died inside her even before her mouth closed. It was impossible. If she told her mother she was in that motel room with Craig, everything between them would change. Her mother’s opinion of her was like a plant that she tended, keeping it decorous and in flower. It was fully false, yet necessary, and the only way she could continue to be in her mother’s presence. How could her mother know any of the truth of what she had done with Craig and then carry on loving her as before? For that is what she wanted, to have things as they would have been if Craig had never existed and had not divided her life into these two halves that must never meet. In future years, she would ask herself why it was that girls like her did not tell their parents, and why they ached with secrets even decades later, and even then felt the impossibility of such a confession. Because, she would say helplessly, just because…And in those years, just as now, she’d keep quiet. Instead of telling her mother what she needed to, she leaned away and spoke out the window, into the bright October morning.
“Will he live with us for long?” she asked miserably.
He would stay for as long as he wished. Bobbie knew this, just as she knew that only a stark and full confession from her would change her mother’s mind. She was not willing to pay that price, that great price, no. Her mother, whom she loved, loved an imagined child that she pretended to be. Bobbie would not let her down. She would act as if everything were all right, even though she felt yet another break between them, the distance that severed growing children from their parents and that separated her from her mother now.
The stoplight changed and the car went forward. “For the time being,” June said, which might have meant forever, and probably did.