IN THE MORNING, Bob and I would wake in our bed and laugh and fight. If he woke before me, he would nudge me, poke me, kick me, and if all else failed, open my eyelids with his fingers, asking, “Dick, are you awake yet?”
I remember hanging my foot out from the covers on a morning when I could see my breath, pinching my nose shut to keep from laughing, seeing how long I could stand it, letting my foot get colder and colder, intent on how he would shriek when I placed it on his sleeping back, anticipating his counterattack and readying my pillow for a shield. Mom would be in to wake us any minute, and when I heard her on the stairs I did it, right up under the back of his pajama top.
“Hey! Quit it! Quit it! Mom!”
“Let’s go, you two monkeys. Time to get up!”
Sometimes she sang reveille:
“You gotta get up
You gotta get up
You gotta get up
In the morning!
You gotta get up
You gotta get up
You gotta get
Out o’ bed!”
She stood in the doorway, already dressed for the day, in a shapeless pink homemade dress, with a Chesterfield in the same hand as her coffee cup and an ashtray in the other.
Dad was usually gone to the brewery by the time we came downstairs in the morning. All day he loaded tall brown bottles into wooden crates on a conveyor belt, or loaded passing cardboard cartons with cans. Some days he loaded the delivery trucks, a job he liked better because he could be outside.
“It’s good for your muscles,” he’d say. “Here. Feel that.” And Bob and I would marvel at his big, hard biceps.
“Watch me make a muscle!” one of us would say, and both of us would flex our arms. Dad would pinch my biceps between his thumb and first knuckle and say, “You’re getting strong!” and squeeze it till my knees buckled and I fell on the floor laughing, hurting, and rubbing my arm. And then he’d do the same to Bob.
He told us stories of bottles of beer that had come down the line with things inside: a rag, a cigar butt, a dead mouse. When either of us fetched him a beer, we were allowed the first swig, but we always held the bottle to the light first.
OUR HOUSE WAS a narrow brick row house painted with a thick cream enamel, and we had the last slate sidewalk on the block. The slate was broken and heaved up by the roots of a huge tree that shaded the front of the house. Dad called it “that god-damned hemlock,” because the roots were cracking the walls of the storm sewer in front of our house and threatening the foundation. He’d already had to call a plumber to pump water out of the cellar.
Bob and I knew right where the crack was because the concrete bunker underneath the sidewalk was what we called “our secret hiding place.” The crack was just below the corrugated metal drainpipe, an echoing darkness wide enough for skinny kids to crawl in and to back out. It led from the vault to wherever we decided on a given day: the sea, the center of the earth, China.
We took turns crawling into the pipe: I remember reaching ahead with my hands, feeling my way as far in front of me as possible, worried that the horizontal pipe might suddenly turn vertical and I’d find myself falling, plummeting toward the answer to our arguments.
“I think I heard the ocean!” I’d say to Bob as I backed out of the pipe. Or I’d tell him I saw a pair of glowing eyes in there. I was just as afraid whether I was in the cramped dark tube or waiting in the vault. A year older than Bob, I felt responsible for him. And of course each of us, once out of view, tried to scare the other by keeping silent.
WE’RE GOING ON a trip: Mom, Dad, baby Joey, Mammy Etta, Bob, and me. We’re in a big, round, shiny black ’50 Pontiac, my dad’s first car. Joey’s on Mom’s lap; Bob, me, and Mammy are in the back. Bob and I want to sit next to each other, so we can fight, Mammy says. She lets us. Lancaster is two hours from Allentown, four hours to look at things and places out the window! We look and fight till Dad says, “Etta, what the hell is going on back there?” We stop for gas; get back in the car with Mammy between us.
Bob cried all the way home, a bandage wrapped around his right leg, Mammy Etta’s arms around him. I looked out the window, trying to get excited about the hills, the farms, the cows, the other cars, the billboards. Except for Bob, I don’t remember anyone, all the way home, making a sound.
They’d done a biopsy, slit the back of Bob’s right calf and snipped a bit of muscle from it. Minor surgery: to a child there’s nothing more terrifying—the needle itself is terror, then a stranger, a grown-up, cuts you! My father decided to remove the sutures himself, a week or so later. Mom and I held Bob on the bed; Dad, with his tweezers, kept saying, “Keep still, damn it,” while Bob screamed and cried. It must have been too early for the stitches to come out, because he bled; he had a tender, raised scar on his leg after that.
IT ALWAYS TOOK us a while to quiet down at bedtime, and my parents were always shushing us and telling us not to wake our baby brother, Joey, who slept in the crib in my parents’ bedroom. Sometimes we stayed up playing chestnut football. On the embossed linoleum floor, a purple and pink floral design, patterned after an Oriental carpet, horse chestnuts were arranged in rows. The object of the game was to roll your running back, your roundest chestnut, down a cardboard ramp, and through eleven squat defenders, flat-sided chestnuts that had to be at least four fingers apart, without touching any of them. The further object of the game was to stay up as late as possible having fun, but without making enough noise to anger Dad and bring him upstairs.
In autumn we collected the chestnuts from around the neighborhood, prying them from their spiky cases and polishing them on our sweaters. Dad, inventor of chestnut football, told us they were called horse chestnuts because, like “horse corn,” they were fit only for horses to eat, while another kind of chestnut, the kind that Nat King Cole sang about at Christmas, was delicious roasted. Horse chestnuts, Dad told us, were poison. Bob and I, daring each other, ate a little piece of one, and although it tasted awful, like a bad pistachio, and dried out your mouth like a crab apple, neither of us got sick from it.
Other times we knelt together at the floor register, a grate that allowed heat to rise from downstairs, and listened to the television and to our parents talking. Sometimes they argued, often about money.
“All I know’s my mother raised the five of us on half of what you spend,” Dad said. “I’m bustin’ my ass, pulling double shifts, and, what the hell, look at this god-damn TV set. The picture tube’s going; then what? I got a piece of linoleum plugging the hole in my shoe. We’re eating Spam, for Christ’s sake.”
“You said you liked Spam.”
“When I was in the Army, I said. I liked it when I was in the Army. Jesus, Dolly, we ain’t got a pot to piss in!”
“So let me go to work! I could help with lunch at the high school. My mom said she’d watch the kids.”
“No, god damn it, I said no. Wait. What’s that? Is that those sneaky kids again?”
We dove back into bed and lay there, trying not to make a sound. After a while, we looked at each other, pulled imaginary zippers across our mouths, and crept back to the grate.
MY MOTHER STAYED home; my father went out. It seems incredible to me, the energy he had. At times he worked two jobs. One he still remembers with pride was laying track for a diesel roundhouse at Bethlehem Steel. For a time he worked in a brewery and then unloaded sacks of spices at a warehouse in the evenings. When he wasn’t working in the evenings he was always doing something—coaching baseball in summer, refereeing basketball in winter—I went along, a batboy in summer, and in winter a lonely spectator at basketball games between teams I didn’t know. He knew, the former promising left-handed pitcher from the Boys’ Club, that Bob’s illness was called Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, and that it was progressive and lethal. He ran up and down the court, blowing his whistle, pointing his finger, shouting. “Foul on number nineteen. Hacking. On the arm. Two shots.” Sometimes people booed, and I sat behind the scorer flushed with anger and embarrassment.
My mother stayed home. And wanted a girl this time, a Catherine Marie; carrying Michael Steven, who never learned to walk.