And yet, still he tried to impress his father. He asked his mother to let him play fifth grade football. She refused. When his father came home a few months later, he ridiculed Jeffrey for not being on the football team.
“Maybe you could be a cheerleader,” he suggested, shaking his head. “Jesus, what a mess you are, boy.”
Whenever his father came home, he made a point to show him he wasn’t a sissy. He wasn’t a little queer. He was tough. If that meant finding a way to get into a fight (never a difficult thing to do when all the other kids seemed to pick on him more every year), so be it. He’d come home with a black eye or bloody lip and a note, wearing those injuries like a badge of honor. But his father always took them to mean that Jeffrey had lost the fight (which was true, but how did he always know?) and ridiculed him all the more.
When his father was away, his mother ruled with an iron fist. Her hand was quick to slap his cheek for any reason. Sometimes there didn’t seem to be a reason, but he learned not to ask her why, because that resulted in a follow-up smack.
Jeffrey stopped wishing that it would ever truly be she and him against the world. He knew that she wasn’t going to love him enough for that to happen. Every so often, though, she gave him a renewed false hope. This seemed to happen in the evening and only when she’d been drinking her vodka (he didn’t call it ‘special stuff’ anymore. That was a baby word, too) for the majority of the day. He always knew when it was coming. First, she stopped watching television. Then she brought out old pictures and thumbed through them. Next, she grew weepy. She’d mutter things he couldn’t hear clearly nor understand. Then she’d call him to her, draw him to her chest and stroke his hair.
“You and me against the world,” she’d whisper over and over again.
Sometimes, she’d fall asleep in the chair. When that happened, he always cleaned up the pictures. He didn’t bother to look at them. Most were of people he didn’t know. A few showed his mother and father much younger and smiling. He put them back in the shoebox his mother kept them stored in and covered her with a blanket. He always hoped in vain that she’d wake up and hug him in the morning like she did on those nights. Maybe she’d even make him breakfast and repeat that it was the two of them against the world. But she never did. Instead, she awoke in a foul mood, demanding silence all day because she had a ‘splitting headache.’
Other times, her mood would turn before she even fell asleep. She’d push him away, toppling him to the floor. Then she’d throw down the box of pictures and hurl invectives at him. He was worthless. He was an anchor pulling her to the bottom of Puget Sound. He was everything that had ever gone wrong in her life.
Once he told her he was sorry for being all of those things. She responded with a vicious slap. “Don’t patronize me, you little bastard!” she screeched.
His head humming from the blow, he blinked back and didn’t reply.
“And don’t you sit there and give me your father’s look, either!”
He struggled to put a neutral expression on his face. And after that, he didn’t say anything when her mood turned. He sat and endured it until she shouted herself out, turned and staggered away. Then he’d slip off to his bedroom and go to sleep.
There were times, though, that her weepy affection and reminisces led her to take him to bed with her. In those instances, she took him by the hand and led him into her room. Together, they curled up under the blankets. She held him close, her chin resting atop his head. The warmth of their bodies surrounded Jeffrey like heated cotton. He closed his eyes and let himself drift, always hopeful that this is how it would be forever. While she slept, her arm rested gently across him. Her breath plumed lightly in his hair. Even the rattle of a snore deep in her throat was somehow comforting.
He soon learned that even on those rare occasions, nothing good can last. When she woke first, she expelled him from her bed, calling names ranging from ‘little baby’ (which he understood but didn’t agree with) to ‘dirty little boy’ (which he didn’t understand but knew he didn’t like to hear). In either event, she’d send him to his own bed with an ear ringing from a slap and the blankets of his bed cold. So after that, if he was lucky enough for her to want to snuggle with him, he tried hard to wake up first. Sometimes that didn’t work, either, because if she remembered the night before, he’d still get the slap in the morning. But the nice thing about vodka, Jeffrey discovered, was that sometimes it made his mother forget the previous night. Maybe that’s why it was a whore’s drink, he figured. That’s what his father said about vodka. Jeffrey thought that maybe a whore was someone who forgot things in the morning. Or maybe it was just another word for a mean mother. He wasn’t sure exactly, though he had figured out that only a woman could be called a whore.
At school, he found an oasis of safety — the library. In the library, everyone had to be quiet. They couldn’t call him Jeffie Pee-Pee Pants or queer-bait or any of the other dozen names that kids kept coming up with. No one was able to take his place in line or steal his milk money. There was always a librarian on duty who made sure of these things, though Jeffrey figured out that it wasn’t him she was worried about so much as the sanctity of library silence. He didn’t care, though. He was able to find a book, hide away in one of the study carrels in the corner and read.
The books took him to worlds far away from Seattle. He read about pirates and wizards and monsters. He read about sports heroes and war heroes and super heroes.
For his birthday that year, he convinced his mother to get him a library card at the public library. Unlike the school library, which only housed children’s books, the public library had a wide array of books about anything he could imagine. She balked at first, but he said he wanted it more than any presents (she would have only bought him some clothes, anyway, he figured), so she relented. Besides, he explained to her, it was free. There was a library branch just six blocks from their apartment. This quickly became his sanctuary. He spent hours among the shelves. When he wasn’t there, he holed up in his room, reading the books he checked out.
His mother only occasionally objected to his absences, but since he’d turned ten he started making his own meals and taking care of himself in every way, which left her more time to drink her whore’s drink and watch her programs. About the only thing they did together on a regular basis was sit in the Laundromat once each week and watch the three loads of laundry as they were first washed, then dried. Every other interaction seemed to be in passing, sometimes punctuated with a sharp word or a stinging slap. He learned to absorb those without crying. Crying in front of his mother was almost as bad as crying in front of his father and there were far more opportunities for it.
So they settled into a routine of sorts, Jeffrey and his mother. She seemed to accept his bookishness because it freed her of dealing with him. He accepted that the cost of being her son remained the frequent slurred, angry words and hard smacks, but that they never lasted forever and he was eventually allowed to escape into a book.
Then his father came home and disrupted the truce. For those few days, Jeffrey tried to hide his reading habit while at the same time needing the escape all the more. The arguments between his parents grew fiercer and more frequent. The bruises and swollen lips appeared on his mother’s face more often. At the same time, it seemed like his father only ever slept on the couch. Sometimes he went out, staying away until late in the night. Every time he left, Jeffrey hoped he was going back to the best damn ship in the Navy (even if it was full of idiot officers) instead of coming home in the middle of the night, slamming doors and singing incoherently.