Deep Water
Jon Fain
I hated how my father introduced me, like I was his possession--this is my boy—when I’d go with him on one of his jobs, those times I went to “help,” whenever my older brother Jeff refused to go, when I went with my dad to pick up a broken TV, or to a yard sale to buy old furniture he was someday going to restore, or the morning in May the year I turned thirteen, when he started cleaning swimming pools.
My father fixed televisions but he wasn’t very good at it, and he never did strip and re-finish anything, and cleaning pools was a business he’d bought from a guy named Paul because it was “too good a deal.” It turned out to be nothing more than the next new scheme, and the Saturday morning when the first pool needed to be cleaned and my brother was sick or more likely pretending to be, my father came into my room and told me I had to come. If my mother had been home, instead of at the department store—if she’d even caught him upstairs, for that matter—it would have ended finally right then.
I hated the smell of the chemicals. The old blue truck with “Paul’s Pools” still stenciled on its sides was full of it. Bouncing up and down on the busted front seat next to him I thought I was going to puke. But bad as the pool chemical smell was, the prospect of dealing with water was worse. It wasn’t clear that I’d have to get into the pool, but my father had made me wear my bathing suit, which wasn’t a good sign. I couldn’t swim, although he must have assumed I could. That he had successfully taught me over the span of summers, a couple of attempts each year at the beach walking me out into the water beyond where the waves broke, lifting me off as my toes scrambled to maintain their hold in the sand, laying me out in swimming position. How could he think I could swim? He could never let go without me crying.
At the Coronet Motel, a few miles away from our house, the old guy in the grimy overalls running the place beat my father to it--that your boy? he asked. Once we started, while my father skimmed out the leaves and other debris from the water’s sparkling surface with a long-handled net, I waited on the other side. Then he took the long green hose that was there and sprayed a mismatched collection of chairs and loungers that should have been thrown out. My father pulled the hose so that it stretched to its full length—from the faucet on the side of the motel, across the apron of cracked blue tile, across the width of the pool. He yelled for me to get more soap.
Wanting to be quick I jumped the taut hose. I got one foot clear but not the other, and lost my balance. Trying not to fall, I slipped on the wet tiles and fell into the pool.
Sinking, swallowing water, over my head and panicked, I kicked and flailed, kicked! I forced my eyes open underwater and remembered, hold my breath! Closed my eyes, held my breath and kicked, opened again to see—a hand into the pool and my father had me by the hair, grip slipped to my shoulder, neck, grabbed my shirt and got me out.
This never happened, was what he said and said, even as I heaved up pool water.
Don’t tell your mother, he made me promise on the ride home.
I agreed beside him in the truck, shivering under the cheap white towel we’d gotten grudgingly from the old guy at the hotel, but the next day, she asked me about the scratches on my neck.
I was not loyal to either parent, but if it came down to it, I would favor her. I was a naïve thirteen year old, so I told her, although that’s not an excuse. Our family was in deep water, and even I knew it.
The Monday morning after this happened, my friend Chris caught up with me after our bus dropped us into the mix of kids, and told me that a girl named Melanie liked me. That she thought I was quiet but cute. Chris told me I should ask Melanie to go steady. He said he would ask her for me.
Melanie had blonde hair, glasses with gray-green frames, and often wore a fluffy pink sweater that showcased recently arrived breasts. Melanie and her friend Laurie Major sat right in front of us in English class.
Nothing was striking about Melanie—except that she was Laurie’s best friend. Laurie was the one I couldn’t stop looking at. So I told Chris--my best friend since we were in first grade, the youngest son of the local minister, the first boy I’d seen pee outside, the first kid who showed me a dirty picture, with whom I’d smoked my first cigarette—sure, he could ask Melanie to go steady with me, never questioning why he was the go-between. I had immediately determined going steady would get me more access to her friend.
“You’ll need a ring,” he said.
I should point out that I was a naïve thirteen. I nodded, but wondered—what type of ring? How I was supposed to figure out how big her finger was? I didn’t have any money for a ring. My father never paid me.
The next morning on the bus Chris told me he had talked to Melanie and she’d agreed to go steady. I still didn’t talk to her myself. In class she seemed to look over more, even laughed once when I said something meant to be funny. When we passed in the hall she smiled. When Laurie Major smiled at me I knew something really had happened.
At lunch, Melanie sat with the girls who would go on to become the cheerleaders, the class officers, the school paper staff, the girlfriends of the top jocks. Sensing their nascent lofty status, freaked out and intimidated, I took my tray and sat somewhere else, knowing enough (if nothing else) to try to look cool while I did.
“So, why haven’t you called her?” Chris asked impatiently after a couple of days, clearly disappointed in me.
It wasn’t like I didn’t want to. My hormones were churning. My bus ride into school had become dominated by the daily need to hide the raging erection that was like an alarm going off every morning; for some reason, my body had grown unable to distinguish between the glimpse of a girl and a bump in the road.
As embarrassing as this could get, any way I got out of my house was preferable to being there. The arguments sparked whenever my father dared to come upstairs when my mother was home. In between, when passing by the cellar door you could hear the murmur of TVs—my father ran them day and night to test them out after his “repairs”—but you never really knew if he was down there with them.
My mother worked long hours at the department store, and that same week as the thing with Melanie started she began a second job waiting tables. My older brother, in his last year of high school, had started spending most of his time somewhere else; he came home late and left early. Left to myself more often than not, I squared my solitude by staying in my room—waiting for something to happen, but dreading its arrival.
I welcomed the distraction of going steady with Melanie—even if it existed only in some foggy, assumed state. It was soon after my father was banished to the basement that I started to stutter; not so much at school—at least at first—but at home. I tripped dependably over words starting with s or c.
In spite of everything I was apparently on track. Normal. The afternoon after Chris told me to call Melanie, I walked quietly across the upstairs hallway even though I was alone in the house. My mother was working, and having gone down into the basement stairs and called for him, I confirmed my father wasn’t there either.
I’d snuck into my parents’ room before. I would open the drawers in their separate dressers, look in the closets. I’d count the small amounts of cash my father kept around. I’d stare at my mother’s underwear. I’d look at the framed photos of them together in high school: my parents at their prom and in their robes together at graduation; my father in his football uniform, my mother in her sweater and skirt cheering him on.
We had two phones in the house: one downstairs on the wall in the kitchen and one on the night table in their room. I took the phone book and got onto the bed, which was so tightly-made you could have played it like a snare drum. I lay there for awhile; as always, my head raised so it wouldn’t dent the pillow, my feet as lightly as possible on the white bedspread so my sneakers wouldn’t leave marks.
I finally sat back up and dialed the phone. I listened to it ring, ready to hang up. Then Melanie’s mother answered, and I remember how when I told her my name she seemed to recognize it, but that may have been wishful thinking. And then Melanie came on. I don’t remember what we talked about, only that it went better than I thought it would. She was easy to talk with; it turned out to be easier for me to talk on the phone, when I could close my eyes and think about what to say next. I only stuttered a few times. For the most part it came out smooth.
I remember thinking that something good was happening for a change.
I asked her to meet me—as Chris had told me to do, although I couldn’t get this one out right—at the junior high ca-ca-canteen, held in the cafeteria the third Friday each month. Oh, and that I’d have a ring for her then. All this was slightly complicated by the fact that the canteen was the next night and I wasn’t sure how I would get there.
The good news was that I had the ring covered. Earlier that day I’d had metal shop—another lily pad of junior high panic that needed to be hopped across—and had discovered on the floor a ring cut off a brass pipe. Desperate as I was, the round piece of metal fit the definition; it had to fit at least one among Melanie’s ten fingers didn’t it?
The next morning at our rendezvous by the back entrance of the school, I showed it to Chris.
“You can’t give her that.”
I spent the rest of that Friday smiling back at Melanie in class, when we passed in the hall and when I saw her in the lunchroom. I had that part down. I imagined how she was passing along to her friends the lies about my family that I’d told her the night before.
While my plan had been to ask Chris for a ride with his parents to the canteen, I was too embarrassed after the ring fiasco. I got on the bus.
When I got home, I heard multiple TVs running in the cellar. Watergate was hitting its stride, and as the “to the best of my recollection, Senator’s” boomed through the house, I looked in the nearly-empty refrigerator, heard my father coming up the stairs. The sound riveted me in place—hand on the door, staring into the light.
He caught the refrigerator door before I could push it shut. He wore a white T-shirt, exposing his muscular, hairy arms. He hadn’t shaved in awhile.
As I stepped away, he grabbed a can of beer from the bottom shelf, stashed behind some containers of leftovers. I couldn’t miss that there were two empties by the sink; no doubt, so my mother would see them too. He walked over to a drawer, took out an opener, and put a pair of triangular holes in the top of the new can, and tossed the opener onto the counter.
“What’s going on with you?” he asked, which he never did.
What’s going on? I was thirteen years old; what wasn’t going on? Dad, I get boners on the bus.
“Nothing much.”
My father stared out the window over the kitchen sink. Buddy, our beagle, was out in a chicken-wire and pine post pen my father had slapped together; from the day we’d gotten him, he barked at everything and nothing. And the dog got loose all the time. One time he killed a neighbor’s cat. My father offered the guy next door five bucks, but that had made it worse.
“Nothing,” my father agreed, took his beer and went back down cellar.
I was glad to see him go because that left me alone with the only other plausible idea I had about what to do about a ring. I went up to my parents’ room—my mother’s alone now. Her large mahogany jewelry box was on her dresser, near where the framed photos of them together had been. My plan was to find something she wouldn’t miss, some old ring that she never wore. I lifted the top of the jewelry box and a song played out. I decided there was no way my father could hear it so I let it; I didn’t know how to stop it anyway.
My mother didn’t wear a lot of jewelry so I couldn’t believe how much she had. There were gold and silver necklaces, bracelets of colored beads, pins that looked like birds, pins that were abstract shapes, earrings that would dangle, earrings that would sit and catch the light. I tried to envision her dressed up, out somewhere with my father. Perhaps she had gotten a lot of it from her own mother or other relatives; most if not all of it not to her taste, not something she would wear while she made change at a cash register, or hung dresses on a rack, or poured someone another glass of ice water or cleared their dirty plates. I kept looking, started to panic—could it be she didn’t have any rings other than the two, the small diamond and the gold wedding band, that she still wore? Then I lifted the maroon, felt-lined tray.
I saw it—gold, with a ruby setting, a raised design, the facade of a school, a date. My mother’s high school ring I realized. I tried to rearrange the jewelry as it had looked before.
She had begun to insist we have dinner together every night. Even on the nights she worked she would come home, cook the meal, eat with me, and then go back to the store or off to the restaurant, both nearby.
I’d sit on a tall yellow stool in the kitchen while she got the food ready. The radio would be tuned to the news, dominated at that hour by traffic reports. She asked the same questions: how were things at school, how were my grades, what happened that day.
That Friday, the canteen and Melanie looming, I watched the hands on the clock on the wall jerk ahead. I had my hand in my pocket over the ring I had taken, afraid of my mother’s X-Ray vision. She didn’t have to go to work that night so she could give me her full attention. She was at the stove. A lid rattled on a pot of boiling vegetables.
“I need a ride somewhere.”
She emptied a can of gravy into a white saucepan. It was getting dark outside the same window where my father had looked out earlier; for an instant, when she took the vegetables off the stove and moved to the sink to pour out the water, it flashed her pale reflection before a cloud of steam rose and fogged the glass.
“Tomorrow?” she asked, not turning around. “Baseball?”
There was a league I had played in the year before and she meant that. She had probably forgotten I was too old for Little League.
“Tonight,” I said.
“Tonight? You need a ride tonight? What for?”
As things had gotten worse, I tried not to ask for anything. From my mother I’d get clean clothes, lunch money, and a hot meal every night. My father sometimes would stick a television he was trying to fix in my room, and tell me to keep it running. It seemed a lot of them had the same problem: after the TV had been running for awhile, the black and white picture would start flipping, some problem with what he called the horizontal hold. And one time, in the days right after he’d been banished to the basement, for no apparent reason—no cat had died after all—he came outside to where I was fooling around with the dog, gave me a five dollar bill, and walked away.
“There’s like a... dance,” I said, carefully choosing my words.
My father seemed fascinated by my stuttering. It was my mother who got angry, one more load shoveled on. She got tight-lipped whenever my own mouth stopped working right.
“It’s... they call... it’s a—”
“How long have you known about this?” she asked, drying her hands, bunching the front of her apron.
“They have it once a month.”
“Where is it... at the school?”
“Yes.”
“And there’ll be girls there,” my mother told me, as if I didn’t know. I felt cornered on my yellow stool.
“You’re going to be a little heartbreaker, aren’t you?”
It didn’t sound like a question. I imagined this was how it felt to be on the witness stand on Perry Mason.
“Go down and ask your father,” she said.
It was a week and a day before they would have their final confrontation, when he would go upstairs to the bedroom late on Saturday night. When at some point he pushed her, hit her, whatever the right verb. The tension that had seeped out and grown hard over my family like a shell would finally crack. A gash would rip from the pressure through which a geyser would let loose. That was the night my father left, although the next day he would return to take the rest of his stuff, including what my mother had taken out of the bedroom and thrown down the cellar stairs, and then soon my brother would suddenly be around again, but only to take over the other side of arguments with my mother that ended with him shouting accusations at her, and then sooner than seemed possible he would be gone for good too. I had no choice; I was the youngest; I had to stay in the rubble of that shattered cave until it became my turn to crawl out.
I didn’t know all this that Friday night. I only knew I had a choice: walk down into the basement or head upstairs and continue to hide in my room. It was one of those moments when you know you’re about to sail into uncharted territory. And you’ve heard the stories. There be monsters there.
Down below it was crowded with old TVs—stacked up, against the walls, filling the available space. Console color behemoths, small black and white portables, a few of them loudly running, being tested after being “repaired.” For me the monsters came with the sound, like endlessly running water, of laugh tracks, jingles, deep-voiced pontifications being made by Southern-accented senators, and the cash register bells and whistles of early evening game shows.
“Dad?” I stayed on the staircase, as if the cellar was flooded.
His workbench was covered with tools, wires, screws, nuts, and the glass vacuum tubes of assorted sizes that were inside televisions back then. The TV on the operating table had its metal innards exposed.
Part of the cellar was garage space for a car, but we’d never used it for that; he came in and out through the garage door without coming upstairs. He had a cot, a hot plate, an old chair and a floor lamp with a water-stained shade. He’d hung up old faded and soiled rugs over the cinder block walls. The rest of the space was crowded with the furniture he’d acquired to repair, re-finish, and re-sell. The pool stuff stayed in the old truck.
“Dad?”
He came around the corner, tucking in his shirt; apparently he’d been asleep even with all the noise from the TVs.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked, as if everything was back to normal, and I’d come to get him, tell him it was time to wash up.
“Nothing much.”
He picked up a pack of cigarettes off his workbench.
“I need a ride somewhere.”
He gave me that same half-grin as he had earlier that day, when he didn’t really look at me, like he was posing for a picture being taken by someone only he could see.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I... I have to eat first.”
My father banked his smile. “Train’s leaving. Now or never.”
I got something or I didn’t, beyond my control. I still had the five dollar bill he had given me, and I had planned to take it with me to the canteen that night. I felt like taking it out of my pocket, crumbling it into a ball and throwing it at him.
As I came back up, I saw my mother had been listening at the top of the stairs. After she put my meal on the table, she surprised me by going down. I wanted to sneak out of the dining room and over to the door to the cellar to listen, but maybe because it was so quiet I didn’t dare. When she came back she told me to finish eating, and change into my good pants. When I did and came back downstairs she told me to go outside and wait by my father’s truck.
We didn’t talk as we drove. I didn’t because I was so nervous, and maybe because of that I didn’t notice the pool chemical smell as much. When we got to the school he asked where to go and I pointed to where the buses dropped us off, behind the single level of the junior high that stretched out from the larger, multi-storied senior high, where my classmates and I were headed next.
“They teaching you about sex in there?”
“No it’s a... dance.”
“You probably don’t know how to dance either,” my father said.
“We have Health,” I said defensively, sort of realizing what he meant. “Health Class.”
“That what they’re calling it these days? Like biology? Like who’s got what and how they fit together?”
“I guess.”
My father rubbed his unshaven face as we sat in his blue truck with the “Paul’s Pools” on the side, the engine stuttering as it tried to keep its idle, its exhaust drifting past the other kids as they climbed from their parents’ cars, glancing over at us sitting there— making me feel like everyone else was getting ahead of me, as usual.
“This whole sex thing,” my father said. “I’ll tell you the only thing you’ve got to know.”
Before taking Health, during which I tried to keep cool when I heard something new—which was a lot—all I’d “known” was what I had heard from either my friend Chris or my brother Jeff, most of which was being proved wrong or certainly in the case of my brother, some sort of joke, a lie.
“Just don’t get caught,” he told me, and I still don’t know if it was his idea of a joke or not.
I got out of the truck and he honked as I walked off. But when I looked back he’d done it at someone in his way.
Chris waited at the building entrance.
“Come on! They’re inside. Have you got a ring? Let me see it.”
He seemed to approve—or probably didn’t care at that point. Inside, the cafeteria had been transformed. The lights low, it was decorated with ribbons, balloons, and streamers. It even smeller better, without the steam table food being served.
Music was playing, some high schooler the deejay. Some kids had paired off and were dancing, but most were standing along opposite sides of the room as part of the separate armies of Girl and Boy, waiting in line at the refreshment area in the back where normally the school lunches were served, or sitting on the folding chairs that had been set up around the perimeter. A few boys were kicking around a red balloon like it was soccer ball and my first instinct was to go over there and join them.
I followed Chris over to where the girls were, right into the heart of it, into that seedling popular crowd. I saw Laurie Major first. Earlier in the week her legend had grown. She’d come in to school in a see-through blouse without a bra underneath. Reportedly, a few lucky boys had seen-through to the good stuff before their homeroom teacher took a good look himself and marched Laurie through the halls to the principal’s office, making her hold her textbooks in front of her chest. They made her wear some old baggy sweater from Lost and Found the rest of the day.
Chris went over to her. They kissed and then held hands.
Melanie appeared beside me.
We went and sat together. My hand was in the pocket of my good pants, over my mother’s high school ring. I worried that Melanie was going to be disappointed with it. And so as usual, I didn’t know what to do.
It wasn’t as easy to talk with her as it had been on the phone. I had been able, on my mother’s bed, to keep my eyes closed and concentrate on each word. Sitting beside Melanie, I was afraid sooner or later there would be something I would stumble over, hoped the music would cover it. But surprising myself, I managed. Once without thinking, remembering I had that five dollar bill, I asked Melanie if she wanted a Coke—and even that sweet C word came out clean.
Like spirits from another dimension there to taunt me, paired-off kids made out around us in the shadows. I tried not to watch what Laurie Major and my buddy Chris seemed to be doing in the dark. Other kids were outside, maybe smoking, maybe drinking; maybe trying out those parts they’d learned about in Health—seeing how they fit.
Melanie and I danced to a couple of slow songs, the grip and sway like everyone else. She pressed her pink-sweatered breasts against me. Her blonde hair was thick and nice and I kept my face as close as I dared.
That Monday at school after the dance, Melanie didn’t smile back in the hallways or in the lunchroom when I looked her way. She didn’t pretend to laugh at all the funny things I said in class. Her friends stopped smiling at me too.
“She doesn’t want to go steady anymore,” Chris told me at the end of the day.
He and Laurie Major wouldn’t last much longer. And after ninth grade, he would go off to private school. His father would later get a post as minister at a church out of state, and the family would leave town. Melanie would be there all through high school, a cheerleader, in the Honor Society, but though we had the occasional class together, I don’t recall ever talking to her again.
“She thought you were using her,” Chris said.
I’d worn my good pants to school that day, planning finally to give Melanie the ring, still in my pocket from the Friday before. I knew it wasn’t any sort of magic ring, but I couldn’t help thinking that since I’d taken it from my parents’ bedroom, I hadn’t stuttered. As I rode the bus home that day, I decided to keep it a little while longer.
Before I had a chance to go into my mother’s room and put it back everything exploded. My parents had their final fight and my father left.
I found out some years later, when I’d moved in for the last eight weeks to take care of her, that for some reason, she always thought he’d taken her old high school class ring; for some reason, somehow without her noticing, nothing out of her jewelry box but that.
Jon Fain
I hated how my father introduced me, like I was his possession--this is my boy—when I’d go with him on one of his jobs, those times I went to “help,” whenever my older brother Jeff refused to go, when I went with my dad to pick up a broken TV, or to a yard sale to buy old furniture he was someday going to restore, or the morning in May the year I turned thirteen, when he started cleaning swimming pools.
My father fixed televisions but he wasn’t very good at it, and he never did strip and re-finish anything, and cleaning pools was a business he’d bought from a guy named Paul because it was “too good a deal.” It turned out to be nothing more than the next new scheme, and the Saturday morning when the first pool needed to be cleaned and my brother was sick or more likely pretending to be, my father came into my room and told me I had to come. If my mother had been home, instead of at the department store—if she’d even caught him upstairs, for that matter—it would have ended finally right then.
I hated the smell of the chemicals. The old blue truck with “Paul’s Pools” still stenciled on its sides was full of it. Bouncing up and down on the busted front seat next to him I thought I was going to puke. But bad as the pool chemical smell was, the prospect of dealing with water was worse. It wasn’t clear that I’d have to get into the pool, but my father had made me wear my bathing suit, which wasn’t a good sign. I couldn’t swim, although he must have assumed I could. That he had successfully taught me over the span of summers, a couple of attempts each year at the beach walking me out into the water beyond where the waves broke, lifting me off as my toes scrambled to maintain their hold in the sand, laying me out in swimming position. How could he think I could swim? He could never let go without me crying.
At the Coronet Motel, a few miles away from our house, the old guy in the grimy overalls running the place beat my father to it--that your boy? he asked. Once we started, while my father skimmed out the leaves and other debris from the water’s sparkling surface with a long-handled net, I waited on the other side. Then he took the long green hose that was there and sprayed a mismatched collection of chairs and loungers that should have been thrown out. My father pulled the hose so that it stretched to its full length—from the faucet on the side of the motel, across the apron of cracked blue tile, across the width of the pool. He yelled for me to get more soap.
Wanting to be quick I jumped the taut hose. I got one foot clear but not the other, and lost my balance. Trying not to fall, I slipped on the wet tiles and fell into the pool.
Sinking, swallowing water, over my head and panicked, I kicked and flailed, kicked! I forced my eyes open underwater and remembered, hold my breath! Closed my eyes, held my breath and kicked, opened again to see—a hand into the pool and my father had me by the hair, grip slipped to my shoulder, neck, grabbed my shirt and got me out.
This never happened, was what he said and said, even as I heaved up pool water.
Don’t tell your mother, he made me promise on the ride home.
I agreed beside him in the truck, shivering under the cheap white towel we’d gotten grudgingly from the old guy at the hotel, but the next day, she asked me about the scratches on my neck.
I was not loyal to either parent, but if it came down to it, I would favor her. I was a naïve thirteen year old, so I told her, although that’s not an excuse. Our family was in deep water, and even I knew it.
The Monday morning after this happened, my friend Chris caught up with me after our bus dropped us into the mix of kids, and told me that a girl named Melanie liked me. That she thought I was quiet but cute. Chris told me I should ask Melanie to go steady. He said he would ask her for me.
Melanie had blonde hair, glasses with gray-green frames, and often wore a fluffy pink sweater that showcased recently arrived breasts. Melanie and her friend Laurie Major sat right in front of us in English class.
Nothing was striking about Melanie—except that she was Laurie’s best friend. Laurie was the one I couldn’t stop looking at. So I told Chris--my best friend since we were in first grade, the youngest son of the local minister, the first boy I’d seen pee outside, the first kid who showed me a dirty picture, with whom I’d smoked my first cigarette—sure, he could ask Melanie to go steady with me, never questioning why he was the go-between. I had immediately determined going steady would get me more access to her friend.
“You’ll need a ring,” he said.
I should point out that I was a naïve thirteen. I nodded, but wondered—what type of ring? How I was supposed to figure out how big her finger was? I didn’t have any money for a ring. My father never paid me.
The next morning on the bus Chris told me he had talked to Melanie and she’d agreed to go steady. I still didn’t talk to her myself. In class she seemed to look over more, even laughed once when I said something meant to be funny. When we passed in the hall she smiled. When Laurie Major smiled at me I knew something really had happened.
At lunch, Melanie sat with the girls who would go on to become the cheerleaders, the class officers, the school paper staff, the girlfriends of the top jocks. Sensing their nascent lofty status, freaked out and intimidated, I took my tray and sat somewhere else, knowing enough (if nothing else) to try to look cool while I did.
“So, why haven’t you called her?” Chris asked impatiently after a couple of days, clearly disappointed in me.
It wasn’t like I didn’t want to. My hormones were churning. My bus ride into school had become dominated by the daily need to hide the raging erection that was like an alarm going off every morning; for some reason, my body had grown unable to distinguish between the glimpse of a girl and a bump in the road.
As embarrassing as this could get, any way I got out of my house was preferable to being there. The arguments sparked whenever my father dared to come upstairs when my mother was home. In between, when passing by the cellar door you could hear the murmur of TVs—my father ran them day and night to test them out after his “repairs”—but you never really knew if he was down there with them.
My mother worked long hours at the department store, and that same week as the thing with Melanie started she began a second job waiting tables. My older brother, in his last year of high school, had started spending most of his time somewhere else; he came home late and left early. Left to myself more often than not, I squared my solitude by staying in my room—waiting for something to happen, but dreading its arrival.
I welcomed the distraction of going steady with Melanie—even if it existed only in some foggy, assumed state. It was soon after my father was banished to the basement that I started to stutter; not so much at school—at least at first—but at home. I tripped dependably over words starting with s or c.
In spite of everything I was apparently on track. Normal. The afternoon after Chris told me to call Melanie, I walked quietly across the upstairs hallway even though I was alone in the house. My mother was working, and having gone down into the basement stairs and called for him, I confirmed my father wasn’t there either.
I’d snuck into my parents’ room before. I would open the drawers in their separate dressers, look in the closets. I’d count the small amounts of cash my father kept around. I’d stare at my mother’s underwear. I’d look at the framed photos of them together in high school: my parents at their prom and in their robes together at graduation; my father in his football uniform, my mother in her sweater and skirt cheering him on.
We had two phones in the house: one downstairs on the wall in the kitchen and one on the night table in their room. I took the phone book and got onto the bed, which was so tightly-made you could have played it like a snare drum. I lay there for awhile; as always, my head raised so it wouldn’t dent the pillow, my feet as lightly as possible on the white bedspread so my sneakers wouldn’t leave marks.
I finally sat back up and dialed the phone. I listened to it ring, ready to hang up. Then Melanie’s mother answered, and I remember how when I told her my name she seemed to recognize it, but that may have been wishful thinking. And then Melanie came on. I don’t remember what we talked about, only that it went better than I thought it would. She was easy to talk with; it turned out to be easier for me to talk on the phone, when I could close my eyes and think about what to say next. I only stuttered a few times. For the most part it came out smooth.
I remember thinking that something good was happening for a change.
I asked her to meet me—as Chris had told me to do, although I couldn’t get this one out right—at the junior high ca-ca-canteen, held in the cafeteria the third Friday each month. Oh, and that I’d have a ring for her then. All this was slightly complicated by the fact that the canteen was the next night and I wasn’t sure how I would get there.
The good news was that I had the ring covered. Earlier that day I’d had metal shop—another lily pad of junior high panic that needed to be hopped across—and had discovered on the floor a ring cut off a brass pipe. Desperate as I was, the round piece of metal fit the definition; it had to fit at least one among Melanie’s ten fingers didn’t it?
The next morning at our rendezvous by the back entrance of the school, I showed it to Chris.
“You can’t give her that.”
I spent the rest of that Friday smiling back at Melanie in class, when we passed in the hall and when I saw her in the lunchroom. I had that part down. I imagined how she was passing along to her friends the lies about my family that I’d told her the night before.
While my plan had been to ask Chris for a ride with his parents to the canteen, I was too embarrassed after the ring fiasco. I got on the bus.
When I got home, I heard multiple TVs running in the cellar. Watergate was hitting its stride, and as the “to the best of my recollection, Senator’s” boomed through the house, I looked in the nearly-empty refrigerator, heard my father coming up the stairs. The sound riveted me in place—hand on the door, staring into the light.
He caught the refrigerator door before I could push it shut. He wore a white T-shirt, exposing his muscular, hairy arms. He hadn’t shaved in awhile.
As I stepped away, he grabbed a can of beer from the bottom shelf, stashed behind some containers of leftovers. I couldn’t miss that there were two empties by the sink; no doubt, so my mother would see them too. He walked over to a drawer, took out an opener, and put a pair of triangular holes in the top of the new can, and tossed the opener onto the counter.
“What’s going on with you?” he asked, which he never did.
What’s going on? I was thirteen years old; what wasn’t going on? Dad, I get boners on the bus.
“Nothing much.”
My father stared out the window over the kitchen sink. Buddy, our beagle, was out in a chicken-wire and pine post pen my father had slapped together; from the day we’d gotten him, he barked at everything and nothing. And the dog got loose all the time. One time he killed a neighbor’s cat. My father offered the guy next door five bucks, but that had made it worse.
“Nothing,” my father agreed, took his beer and went back down cellar.
I was glad to see him go because that left me alone with the only other plausible idea I had about what to do about a ring. I went up to my parents’ room—my mother’s alone now. Her large mahogany jewelry box was on her dresser, near where the framed photos of them together had been. My plan was to find something she wouldn’t miss, some old ring that she never wore. I lifted the top of the jewelry box and a song played out. I decided there was no way my father could hear it so I let it; I didn’t know how to stop it anyway.
My mother didn’t wear a lot of jewelry so I couldn’t believe how much she had. There were gold and silver necklaces, bracelets of colored beads, pins that looked like birds, pins that were abstract shapes, earrings that would dangle, earrings that would sit and catch the light. I tried to envision her dressed up, out somewhere with my father. Perhaps she had gotten a lot of it from her own mother or other relatives; most if not all of it not to her taste, not something she would wear while she made change at a cash register, or hung dresses on a rack, or poured someone another glass of ice water or cleared their dirty plates. I kept looking, started to panic—could it be she didn’t have any rings other than the two, the small diamond and the gold wedding band, that she still wore? Then I lifted the maroon, felt-lined tray.
I saw it—gold, with a ruby setting, a raised design, the facade of a school, a date. My mother’s high school ring I realized. I tried to rearrange the jewelry as it had looked before.
She had begun to insist we have dinner together every night. Even on the nights she worked she would come home, cook the meal, eat with me, and then go back to the store or off to the restaurant, both nearby.
I’d sit on a tall yellow stool in the kitchen while she got the food ready. The radio would be tuned to the news, dominated at that hour by traffic reports. She asked the same questions: how were things at school, how were my grades, what happened that day.
That Friday, the canteen and Melanie looming, I watched the hands on the clock on the wall jerk ahead. I had my hand in my pocket over the ring I had taken, afraid of my mother’s X-Ray vision. She didn’t have to go to work that night so she could give me her full attention. She was at the stove. A lid rattled on a pot of boiling vegetables.
“I need a ride somewhere.”
She emptied a can of gravy into a white saucepan. It was getting dark outside the same window where my father had looked out earlier; for an instant, when she took the vegetables off the stove and moved to the sink to pour out the water, it flashed her pale reflection before a cloud of steam rose and fogged the glass.
“Tomorrow?” she asked, not turning around. “Baseball?”
There was a league I had played in the year before and she meant that. She had probably forgotten I was too old for Little League.
“Tonight,” I said.
“Tonight? You need a ride tonight? What for?”
As things had gotten worse, I tried not to ask for anything. From my mother I’d get clean clothes, lunch money, and a hot meal every night. My father sometimes would stick a television he was trying to fix in my room, and tell me to keep it running. It seemed a lot of them had the same problem: after the TV had been running for awhile, the black and white picture would start flipping, some problem with what he called the horizontal hold. And one time, in the days right after he’d been banished to the basement, for no apparent reason—no cat had died after all—he came outside to where I was fooling around with the dog, gave me a five dollar bill, and walked away.
“There’s like a... dance,” I said, carefully choosing my words.
My father seemed fascinated by my stuttering. It was my mother who got angry, one more load shoveled on. She got tight-lipped whenever my own mouth stopped working right.
“It’s... they call... it’s a—”
“How long have you known about this?” she asked, drying her hands, bunching the front of her apron.
“They have it once a month.”
“Where is it... at the school?”
“Yes.”
“And there’ll be girls there,” my mother told me, as if I didn’t know. I felt cornered on my yellow stool.
“You’re going to be a little heartbreaker, aren’t you?”
It didn’t sound like a question. I imagined this was how it felt to be on the witness stand on Perry Mason.
“Go down and ask your father,” she said.
It was a week and a day before they would have their final confrontation, when he would go upstairs to the bedroom late on Saturday night. When at some point he pushed her, hit her, whatever the right verb. The tension that had seeped out and grown hard over my family like a shell would finally crack. A gash would rip from the pressure through which a geyser would let loose. That was the night my father left, although the next day he would return to take the rest of his stuff, including what my mother had taken out of the bedroom and thrown down the cellar stairs, and then soon my brother would suddenly be around again, but only to take over the other side of arguments with my mother that ended with him shouting accusations at her, and then sooner than seemed possible he would be gone for good too. I had no choice; I was the youngest; I had to stay in the rubble of that shattered cave until it became my turn to crawl out.
I didn’t know all this that Friday night. I only knew I had a choice: walk down into the basement or head upstairs and continue to hide in my room. It was one of those moments when you know you’re about to sail into uncharted territory. And you’ve heard the stories. There be monsters there.
Down below it was crowded with old TVs—stacked up, against the walls, filling the available space. Console color behemoths, small black and white portables, a few of them loudly running, being tested after being “repaired.” For me the monsters came with the sound, like endlessly running water, of laugh tracks, jingles, deep-voiced pontifications being made by Southern-accented senators, and the cash register bells and whistles of early evening game shows.
“Dad?” I stayed on the staircase, as if the cellar was flooded.
His workbench was covered with tools, wires, screws, nuts, and the glass vacuum tubes of assorted sizes that were inside televisions back then. The TV on the operating table had its metal innards exposed.
Part of the cellar was garage space for a car, but we’d never used it for that; he came in and out through the garage door without coming upstairs. He had a cot, a hot plate, an old chair and a floor lamp with a water-stained shade. He’d hung up old faded and soiled rugs over the cinder block walls. The rest of the space was crowded with the furniture he’d acquired to repair, re-finish, and re-sell. The pool stuff stayed in the old truck.
“Dad?”
He came around the corner, tucking in his shirt; apparently he’d been asleep even with all the noise from the TVs.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked, as if everything was back to normal, and I’d come to get him, tell him it was time to wash up.
“Nothing much.”
He picked up a pack of cigarettes off his workbench.
“I need a ride somewhere.”
He gave me that same half-grin as he had earlier that day, when he didn’t really look at me, like he was posing for a picture being taken by someone only he could see.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I... I have to eat first.”
My father banked his smile. “Train’s leaving. Now or never.”
I got something or I didn’t, beyond my control. I still had the five dollar bill he had given me, and I had planned to take it with me to the canteen that night. I felt like taking it out of my pocket, crumbling it into a ball and throwing it at him.
As I came back up, I saw my mother had been listening at the top of the stairs. After she put my meal on the table, she surprised me by going down. I wanted to sneak out of the dining room and over to the door to the cellar to listen, but maybe because it was so quiet I didn’t dare. When she came back she told me to finish eating, and change into my good pants. When I did and came back downstairs she told me to go outside and wait by my father’s truck.
We didn’t talk as we drove. I didn’t because I was so nervous, and maybe because of that I didn’t notice the pool chemical smell as much. When we got to the school he asked where to go and I pointed to where the buses dropped us off, behind the single level of the junior high that stretched out from the larger, multi-storied senior high, where my classmates and I were headed next.
“They teaching you about sex in there?”
“No it’s a... dance.”
“You probably don’t know how to dance either,” my father said.
“We have Health,” I said defensively, sort of realizing what he meant. “Health Class.”
“That what they’re calling it these days? Like biology? Like who’s got what and how they fit together?”
“I guess.”
My father rubbed his unshaven face as we sat in his blue truck with the “Paul’s Pools” on the side, the engine stuttering as it tried to keep its idle, its exhaust drifting past the other kids as they climbed from their parents’ cars, glancing over at us sitting there— making me feel like everyone else was getting ahead of me, as usual.
“This whole sex thing,” my father said. “I’ll tell you the only thing you’ve got to know.”
Before taking Health, during which I tried to keep cool when I heard something new—which was a lot—all I’d “known” was what I had heard from either my friend Chris or my brother Jeff, most of which was being proved wrong or certainly in the case of my brother, some sort of joke, a lie.
“Just don’t get caught,” he told me, and I still don’t know if it was his idea of a joke or not.
I got out of the truck and he honked as I walked off. But when I looked back he’d done it at someone in his way.
Chris waited at the building entrance.
“Come on! They’re inside. Have you got a ring? Let me see it.”
He seemed to approve—or probably didn’t care at that point. Inside, the cafeteria had been transformed. The lights low, it was decorated with ribbons, balloons, and streamers. It even smeller better, without the steam table food being served.
Music was playing, some high schooler the deejay. Some kids had paired off and were dancing, but most were standing along opposite sides of the room as part of the separate armies of Girl and Boy, waiting in line at the refreshment area in the back where normally the school lunches were served, or sitting on the folding chairs that had been set up around the perimeter. A few boys were kicking around a red balloon like it was soccer ball and my first instinct was to go over there and join them.
I followed Chris over to where the girls were, right into the heart of it, into that seedling popular crowd. I saw Laurie Major first. Earlier in the week her legend had grown. She’d come in to school in a see-through blouse without a bra underneath. Reportedly, a few lucky boys had seen-through to the good stuff before their homeroom teacher took a good look himself and marched Laurie through the halls to the principal’s office, making her hold her textbooks in front of her chest. They made her wear some old baggy sweater from Lost and Found the rest of the day.
Chris went over to her. They kissed and then held hands.
Melanie appeared beside me.
We went and sat together. My hand was in the pocket of my good pants, over my mother’s high school ring. I worried that Melanie was going to be disappointed with it. And so as usual, I didn’t know what to do.
It wasn’t as easy to talk with her as it had been on the phone. I had been able, on my mother’s bed, to keep my eyes closed and concentrate on each word. Sitting beside Melanie, I was afraid sooner or later there would be something I would stumble over, hoped the music would cover it. But surprising myself, I managed. Once without thinking, remembering I had that five dollar bill, I asked Melanie if she wanted a Coke—and even that sweet C word came out clean.
Like spirits from another dimension there to taunt me, paired-off kids made out around us in the shadows. I tried not to watch what Laurie Major and my buddy Chris seemed to be doing in the dark. Other kids were outside, maybe smoking, maybe drinking; maybe trying out those parts they’d learned about in Health—seeing how they fit.
Melanie and I danced to a couple of slow songs, the grip and sway like everyone else. She pressed her pink-sweatered breasts against me. Her blonde hair was thick and nice and I kept my face as close as I dared.
That Monday at school after the dance, Melanie didn’t smile back in the hallways or in the lunchroom when I looked her way. She didn’t pretend to laugh at all the funny things I said in class. Her friends stopped smiling at me too.
“She doesn’t want to go steady anymore,” Chris told me at the end of the day.
He and Laurie Major wouldn’t last much longer. And after ninth grade, he would go off to private school. His father would later get a post as minister at a church out of state, and the family would leave town. Melanie would be there all through high school, a cheerleader, in the Honor Society, but though we had the occasional class together, I don’t recall ever talking to her again.
“She thought you were using her,” Chris said.
I’d worn my good pants to school that day, planning finally to give Melanie the ring, still in my pocket from the Friday before. I knew it wasn’t any sort of magic ring, but I couldn’t help thinking that since I’d taken it from my parents’ bedroom, I hadn’t stuttered. As I rode the bus home that day, I decided to keep it a little while longer.
Before I had a chance to go into my mother’s room and put it back everything exploded. My parents had their final fight and my father left.
I found out some years later, when I’d moved in for the last eight weeks to take care of her, that for some reason, she always thought he’d taken her old high school class ring; for some reason, somehow without her noticing, nothing out of her jewelry box but that.