8.

School emptied. One by one kids double-locked their doors, dressed in their warmest winter coats, and made the air around Washington Square echo with the rolling of luggage wheels along pavement, on their way home for Thanksgiving break. Even those kids who lived far away seemed either to have flown off or found someone to stay with. Wednesday, when bathroom stalls swung open emptily, when the cafeteria conveyor belt snaked a circuit with just his own ketchup-splattered plate, Matt could no longer put it off.

He trudged out with his bag and plunked down on the A train to Port Authority.

His car filled with strangers. A Latina girl kept checking her reflection in the blackened windowpane. Outside, a woman in a red suit ran along the platform—but the train drew away before her; she threw down her suitcase, cursed euphorically. Oh, if he could stay, just ride around with these people on the train! He could gate-crash the Thanksgiving luncheon at the international students’ center, putting on some foreign accent. And how like an inverse of his kiddie fantasy, that idea: to run off on a steamer for parts unknown. Where, after a day of hard work and human brotherhood, say digging sewage canals in Africa, if someone passed the wine gourd and inquired, And where ees home forr you, Friend Matt? he might laugh, rueful, shake his head, hardly recall. Now, let’s see. There was a little town…it started with a T…

But Port Authority presented no escape. Inexorable as ever, with its Christmas music piped in, its dazzling megalopoli of magazines under blazing, stagey lights, the changeless destinations blaring out over the loudspeaker. He was heading home.

Merely to endure: that was the task. Merely to lie still and let it wash over him, a stone beneath poisonous flow, these five days.

His mother was waiting at the bus stop. Under the streetlight, at night, the silver Camry seemed like a shark, idling by the curb in wait for him. Inside, the car’s overhead light was on—there she was bent, looking at something—slathering her dirty-blond ringlets, the masses of her shoulders in the orange uniform, with a fiery color. He lifted his bag higher, made his mouth and eyes perky, and unclenched the door handle.

“Matt!” she squealed. “Get in, get in, you’re going to catch a cold.” Waving spasmodically. Then her arm drew him inside a cloud of White Rain hairspray and meat-smell: he kissed her cheek, squeezed the canvas-stiff tunic. Something crinkled between them; when he pulled away she shoved a pile of envelopes toward his hands. Self-congratulatory, she smiled as she cast the rearview a worldly glance and began warily guiding the car into the vacant street. “I know how particular you are about your mail.”

Evidently she had forgotten about his having forwarded all post to NYU: this little pile consisted of several implorations he use a dry-cleaning service in Bergenfield, cleverly printed as to appear in a personal, cursive hand, and one belated invitation to subscribe to National Geographic’s kiddie World magazine. But who could interrupt her obvious pleasure? What kind of monster would do that? She was trying; that was a fetching surprise. “Thanks, Mom!” he said, or shouted, expending a touch too much effort there. And in the instant before he clicked off the overhead light, he saw the slivers of her blue eyes bulge with delight.

Maybe that’s all it took? Not be smart-ass, moody, not try to show her up, just cheerful, loving. That wasn’t overmuch to ask a son. So when she boasted, “I’m taking all tomorrow and Friday off,” shoving open the front door and wiping her feet on the smudged blue rug, he murmured, “That’s excellent!” and gave a little laugh. Or when, “I told Fred—you remember Fred Meese?—I said to Fred,” she went on, fumbling in the closet, kicking off white faux Reeboks without undoing the Velcroed high-tops, self-importantly careless as a rich matron with alligator pumps, “I said, ‘My son’s coming home from college, so I hope you’ve got some other…’”—he joyfully reached for a hanger, nodding. Was she actually proud of him? The extra punch put into college, the patent significance of a son’s visit?

Suddenly, she whirled on him. “What is that?” Reaching, cross. “That jacket?”

He clung at it protectively. “It’s not real, if you mean…I mean, this is fake fur round the hood.” His beautiful parka that Sophie had picked!

She was patting the hood’s fur ruff, lifting and setting down her hand, mesmerized and disgusted as if what she touched might be herbage from some other planet. “It was expensive?”

Not even a question, just a statement of failure with a little uptick at the end. “Oh no. I mean, it’s used.”

She snatched her hand away. “Oh, Matt.” She shook her head, giving him a disappointed look. Now she marched airily past him and into the kitchen. “I don’t know why you buy that stuff.” Sound of the sink running. “What if someone died in it?”

Someone’s going to die in it, if you don’t leave me alone. No, stop overreacting, you. “Mom, I got it in the kids’ section.” He walked over to the kitchen and leaned in the doorframe. “I don’t think anyone’s died in it.” He extended an arm, then casually and as though happily let it drop, as if this were all just a little joke of hers, inoffensive chitchat.

She held up a finger as she drained a giant tumbler of water, then set it down, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I wouldn’t be so sure.” But she shifted her weight and gave him a consoling, maternal look. “Well.” She reached to ruffle his hair. “Next time you’ll know.” Then she drew back her hand, as if revolted though gleefully so. “What do you have in there?” She turned the tap, began washing her hands. “Ugh!”

“It’s just gel, Mom.” He reached up, gently patted. “Just trying to look…neat.”

“Neat!” she hooted. Now, what was so funny about neat? So worthy of her clucking and shaking her head as she bustled around the kitchen? You’re right, Ma, gel is disgusting, vintage clothes are disgusting, you’re always right about everything, happy Thanksgiving! Yet see how her hands—on the refrigerator handle, slicing carrots, white and knuckled red, oddly youthful—kept looking just like his own. This is your mother here. Come on, now. Incalculable reserves of patience are yours: if you only tap them you can stand anything.

But she knew the way to get to him, to expertly work the levers on the switchboard of his nerves. She knew how to make the seconds of a minute bend and distend like faces in funhouse mirrors, till he was slogging through a dinner of infinite length, a dinner of galactic magnitude. First—You’re going to get yourself sick!—she shipped him up to his room for those ghastly fox-faced slippers presented for the sixth-grade Christmas, which somehow, demonically, seemed to keep up with his own growth. She played deaf when he said, That’s enough, Ma, I can’t, I can’t eat any more, heaping his plate with sodden macaroni cedillas, remarking only with a stony-eyed stare that he looked emaciated, for Chrissakes. And for someone absent, for someone many hundreds of miles away in the wilds of Minnesota, Dwight might as well have been sitting there in the empty chair given how often he came up: how did Dwight’s Halloween concert turn out? oh, you didn’t go? Raising her eyebrow as if Matt’s absence signified a want of bravery rather than interest.

And yet. Everything negative was leavened by the lighthearted air with which she filled him with bits of this-and-that, seemingly saved up for his visit: how Sarah-Lu, his hick cousin in West Virginia, had delivered herself of a boy babe, mother and child doing swell; how Emmalouise, his mother’s coworker and best friend, had given her a key chain that, if you clapped, shrieked till you found it—and here in fact the marvelous thing was: right in her breast pocket! “Do you want it?” she asked, cradling it with both hands, in awe as always of gizmos. “I know you’re good about your keys, but I thought maybe you could use it at school.” And wasn’t it cute of her to say? At last she ran out of novelties, remarking, “What else,” to herself as she looked around the dining area. Suddenly, “Hey, Matt!” she blurted, her face shining guilelessly above the cream-stained plate. “Guess what I haven’t done in a long time?”

And when the solution she had in mind to this question turned out to be Play Upwords, that humble board-game with stackable Scrabble-like letter tiles, when she giddily clapped her hands and snatched away their plates, then stomped upstairs to find the old set, when he was left washing dishes by the sink with lemon-scented Palmolive and waves of warm water, all he could feel was a dull chill in his chest that might be guilt. Upwords, to play Upwords with her son: what she wants. And you, you heartless prodigal, dreading this visit—paranoid, that’s what you are, forever assuming she means to knock you!²¹ Just give her a chance, try talking as sons talk to moms.

Ensconced on the couch, with soft xylophone tones pealing from the ancient radio (her favorite, Lite FM), he made the word juggle and then, as if offhand, while he jotted down his score, began to tell her about Sophie.

Ping ping ping chimed the gay radio xylophones in the long moment after he fell silent and before, cheeks smoldering, he looked up.

She wasn’t smiling, exactly. Though her lips were parted so the upper left-of-center snaggletooth showed. “You have a friend,” she mused dully, though transforming the term sexless, chaste. Then she recovered enough to give her tumbleweed hair a reassuring pat. “Wonderful. And she’s Japanese, how intaresting.” She took a sip of Crystal Light, then raised it toward him for a second, as if having just thought of something. “Did I ever tell you I had an Oriental roommate at the Shore?” Brightly.

Bullseye. There was a rigidity in his chest and a strange pressure around his temples that prevented him from being able to properly see, think. The Shore.²² Was it time for that, then? If his mother hadn’t spent ten weeks as a waitress in a boardinghouse on the New Jersey Shore, she might actually have had to take on the task of communication, instead of being able to resort to these ready-to-hand stories, all those wacky shenanigans cycling through her discourse with such regularity they resembled cut-paper shapes on a magic lantern, spooling continually across the walls of his life. And Oriental. Should he even bother to correct?

But she had something better up her sleeve. “I talked to your roommate Dwight’s girlfriend, you know? She answered the phone when I called, you know, it was a while ago. Allison. What’s her last name?”

“Carleton,” snarled Matt. That trifling nana. That poster child of blond blah, unbeautiful but echt sailor, who had taken up with, or rather been taken in by, Dwight these last weeks. Difficult to say precisely how long such dupery had gone on: Matt had become aware of Allison only by degrees, first as a stolid bulk of good nature following Dwight with shining eyes while he talked volubly at the prepster table, before the indubitable conclusion set in when she and her corn-silk clews began adorning the suite. In the pair of early-morning conversations they’d labored through, Allison mostly stared at Matt, an indulgent demi-smile on her lips, as if he might be a low hurdle her horse needed to jump.

“Carleton. That’s a nice name. What a nice girl. Did you know, she’s from that place in Connecticut that Emmalouise’s husband was from, you know—Da, oh, what is…”

Perfect, why not? Now on to old Emmalouise. A Southern belle who had briefly enjoyed a flush of beauty around the age of nineteen and, on her incipient Me Decade travels across America the Beautiful, met, then over the course of twenty-four hours married, a man above her station in Vegas. Flush dissolving by the age of twenty-three, her marriage dissolved too: and she was summoned from the world’s higher stages to abide in Teaneck, New Jersey. When not on shift at the A&P, she docked her intimidating weight on his mother’s couch or on her own boudoirlike love seat, where she was surrounded by nineteen-, twenty-, and twenty-one-year-old Emmalouises peeping coquettishly, even somewhat saltily, out of a set of heavy gilt scalloped-edge frames. Resting her diminutive feet, choked in white pleather sneakers, on a footstool, she could spend hours dusting herself with scores of cheese puffs, as if carefully restoring to her fingers the artificial color they had leached during the day.²³

“Darien.” His mother had found it at last. “What a nice girl that Allison is.²⁴ And she plays tennis, did you know that?”

“You know, Sophie makes clothes. She’s really, really talented. I’ve seen—”

“What do you mean, she makes clothes? She has to make her own clothes?”

“No, she doesn’t. But she—”

“Used clothes. Homemade clothes. I don’t see what’s wrong with your old clothes anyway,” she muttered, craning over the board.

Matt stared at the sliding glass door dead ahead. There in the reflection was the lamp, the couch, a largish woman holding back her hair in one hand as she gazed down, and a young man sitting rigidly gazing out engulfed by the roiling swirls of red and orange hues bounced from the lamplight and carpet. I’m going crazy. God, just one cigarette, one drink and a cigarette and everything she would say could wash over him like a steamship on the surface of where he lay, fathoms down, breathing water.

“Fried,” she declared.

Eh?

“I made fried,” she announced, rolling her eyes at him. “Here, gimme that.” Snatching the score sheet from his side.

“Wow,” he said, “that’s weird. I think I was just starting to fall asleep. Maybe we should finish this tomorrow?” He stood and faux-yawned into a fist.

“Absolutely!” A bashful smile fluttered to her face. “I’ve got you right where I want you!”

Which was funny because ever since he’d reached the age of reason she couldn’t manage to beat him at a thing. “Good night,” he breathed, heaving himself balefully about her chest.

         

By early Friday he needed escape. Just a couple of hours. To tool out of the house and car-wise rove the streets: get out. Enough already, my God, let this cup pass from me. He made the move after breakfast. He had swallowed her bacon, a thing both repulsive and lovely, still pinkish, sticky. Then he raced upstairs and grabbed two big garbage bags of outsize old clothes on the excellent excuse of Salvation Army.

She frowned. “They’re open today?”

“I called,” he devised.

“Well,” she said reluctantly. Staring at the bags: they were perfectly good clothes. “All right.”

The car wheels screeched as he spun from the curb. He ate up the familiar roads speeding toward Englewood. And when he entered the store, plopped the bags by the counter, nodding at the glum woman who went back instantly to her crossword—a surge of sheer relief poured through him, so much that he was drawn perhaps to buy his Sophie a something? He walked over to the wall where scuffed purses hung above rows of books and records.

That’s where he saw Gene Kim. Going over a crate of battered vinyl.

Gene Kim was wearing a black overcoat and blue-and-red striped cap, from which strands of black hair extended: Gene Kim, whom Matt had seen stalking the hallways of Tenafly as an alternative god, black-dressed and always hanging out with Julie Raffel, the beautiful redhead star of school plays, whose giant breasts were famous. Gene’s reedy body swayed as he pivoted to look Matt over. “Hey man. I know you. Right? But where?”

“We went to Tenafly together,” revealed Matt—stupidly. Better if Gene didn’t remember! One year, tenth grade to be exact, before Gene Kim transferred to private.

“Wow.” Gene Kim proferred a hand for Matt to shake. “Crazy. Your face is familiar…but I can’t say that I remember…”²⁵

“Whatever,” said Matt hurriedly. Please don’t.

“Look at what I got here.” Gene Kim lifted up a few records placed crossways on the crate. “Serge Gainsbourg. The Velvets. Lenny Lavventura.”

“Cool,” asserted Matt, checking over Gene’s shoulder with the air of a connoisseur.

Gene let out a little-boy smile. “These are gonna go over great. I spin records.” He twirled his fingers as if stirring an invisible drink.

“Oh.” Matt nodded vaguely. “Right on.”

“I mean,” now Gene’s long fingers tapped dismissively over the face of the records, “I just DJ kid stuff. But it’s such a trip!” he bent closer to assure Matt, shaking his head in friendly wonderment. Suddenly Gene looked at Matt intently. “Hey man, where do you go to school?”

“New York. NYU.”

“That’s awesome.” Gene’s eyes widened. “What’s hot in New York right now? What’re the good clubs?”

Matt knew this one easy. The black letters in Time Out font appeared before his eyes. “Well, Spin City. Decadence. There’s Robot Parade, but it’s kind of over.” He patted back a false yawn. “You know?”

“Oh man, arrgh!” Gene stamped one green Adidas. “I wanna go! You’re so lucky,” he wailed. “I’m up at Wesleyan; there’s so nowhere to go out.” Then Gene stopped stock-still. He cocked his head. Black strands unfolded over the lapel of his overcoat. “Wait a second. Listen.” He grabbed his stack of records tightly and leaned over. “What are you doing tonight?”

The air in the store seemed to have turned to softest snow, light friable pieces of white. Behind, Matt could hear hangers scratched along a rack. The cash register drawer banged shut. So, the world was going on: though Gene Kim, standing, breathing, one foot away, had maybe just asked him to hang out. “Um.” Not to seem desperate. “Why?”

“I gotta hear what the New York DJs are spinning. I’m only here till Sunday. Listen, I’m totally serious. Tonight. My girlfriend’s down from school with me.”

“My girlfriend’s in New York,” he barked, inappropriate.

“So we’ll go? Like tonight, really?” Matt must have nodded, because Gene was scribbling down his phone number on the back of a pink receipt. “Call me. Like, we’ll go at ten or something.” He handed the slip to Matt. “’Kay?”

“Yeah,” said Matt, folding the paper into his pants pocket. He started to edge off. He was going to fall down: his knees were water-wobbly.

“Hey, wait a second,” shouted Gene from behind.

Here we go.

—But the kid was grinning when Matt turned. “Hey man, what’s your name?”

“Matt,” he said. “It’s Matt.” No last name. Less recognition chance.

“Right on, Matt. I’m Gene. Cool.” Gene nodded; Matt began wending away again. “I’m counting on you!” Over his right shoulder, Matt caught a glimpse of Gene pointing at him. “Good club! Good music!”

Then the silver-blue steering wheel was rotating cleanly in his hands, the Camry speeding Matt neatly away. Impossible. I’m counting on you. That thrusting finger.

“Hi, Mom,” he called on walking in and, grabbing the cordless, marched straight up the stairs to his room.

“Wait a second, wait a second.” His mother pounded from the kitchen to stand at the foot of the stairs, hands on hips. “I made you some lunch.”

“Uh, in a minute, Ma, gotta make a phone call…” He shut the door, effectively blocking out her riposte. Pressed Talk, but clicked the phone off, put it on the trim bed, and banged his head against the wall twice. Once more. Then he sat, stomped delirious feet, and called Jason in Scarsdale. Perhaps that club spotted by the river his horrible night of errant wandering, right near the West Side Highway? It looked the requisite level of cool and impressively large, all those varieties of well-dressed bodies waiting behind the red ropes. He could surely ferret out its name by a cross-check with his little black address book. Oh, let’s just put our heads together on this with Jason. Who at least has darkened the doorstep of a nightclub, unlike yours truly?

“So let me get this straight,” Jason sighed. “You want me to come down to the city for some club tonight.”

“Bingo, Jason, that’s right.”

“And what club is that?”

“Any club. That’s the point. A good club. Someplace really cool. It’s your call.”

“But why do I have to come?”

“Be-cause,” he hissed. “Just because. You and Sophie both.” As if he would survive otherwise. And how weird would that look? Like he couldn’t rustle up even a couple of friends? “It’ll be fun,” he crooned. “I’ll pay your cover.”

“You know, I hate to say it, but tonight, it just isn’t that good for me. My cousins are up from Baltimore, my whole family is going to be here—”

“Jason?” He felt like he was going to break the phone. It would crack in his hand. “Jason, this is, this is…ah, how do I…This is The Thing, okay. Like this is, this is It.” What was he saying? “This is, you know…if we, um. Like, if you wanted to, ever…”

“Okay. Enough already. Okay. Who’s your daddy?”

“What?”

“Say it, say, ‘You’re my daddy.’”

What?

“It’s an expression, you doof.”

“Like ‘Daddy-o’?”

“Yes, like Daddy-o. Unbelievable. All right, Daddy-o, I’ll call you in an hour.”

“Thank you,” he said, hoarse. “Thank you.”

“Lordy. This kid better be worth it. Bye.”

Matt pushed from the bed. Walked into the hall, opened the attic-stair door. Up there he pulled a string; below a bare bulb, he found the cardboard box with tenth-grade things, closed his hands on the glossy smoothness of a yearbook cover. There: Gene Kim, joking, with bolo tie. That picture had been famous. Girls had giggled over it; the more daring and favored surrounded a live Gene on a landing in the library, busily scribbling with special colored pens. Matt always left early on yearbook days. This year’s edition featured Mrs. Walters, the librarian; she had kindly reached for his book, silent since she stuttered terribly, and in her fine grownup writing penned, Have a nice summer, Steven!

Pah. Steven.