“Is my dad in Michigan?”
“No, honey.”
“Is he in the navy?”
She turned to me, surprise on her face. “Of course not. What’s gotten into you?”
“I never been to Michigan,” I said.
“Sure you have, honey. We were Wolverines.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“That’s where things got all mixed up, remember?” she said.
“I never lived there.”
She sighed. She lowered both our windows so the car roared inside, then powered them up tight. “I know what you mean,” she said, after a while.
These were the conversations we had.
My mother was a phlebotemist at the hospital, but once she passed her pathology lab technician exam, the rust-colored iodine stains on her fingers changed to the purple and blue of the enhancer oils from the microscopes. She no longer simply pulled blood. Now she came home smelling like xylene, bright-eyed about sputum cultures and cervical cysts, though she wouldn’t explain what words like ovarian meant.
The late cruising and trips to the Indian drive-in stopped with the new night shift. Now she woke late and slow, drinking coffee in a pink silk robe with a gold tiger embroidered on back. It read TigerPak, 11th Sea Command above the tiger, and below, around its outstretched paw, Prowlin’ the 17th Parallel. When she’d turn away from me, that tiger could always catch my breath. The robe was something I couldn’t get a fix on. I assumed my father had given it to her, though there’d never been any mention of its source. But the image of her — sleepy, drinking coffee, with that tiger always guarding what was behind her — was what I balanced in my head as I did wheelies in the neighborhood until it was noon and I could head to Ralph’s.
I was told my father looked like Kris Kristofferson — still does, around the eyes, my cousin claims — and that summer my mother took me to watch the movie Semi-Tough five times. The theaters were ice-cold, matinee-empty, and all the soda I wanted was mine. One time a huge man came into the open theater with a tub of popcorn and sat directly behind my mother. It was just the three of us, and I watched him over my shoulder as he ate fistfuls of popcorn with his mouth open. Kris Kristofferson had a woman’s neck cupped in his palm, and I could see how my mother’s blue fingers twisted the fine hair that curled under her ear. When the man finished his popcorn, he tore a large U in the rim of the tub, so it looked like he’d taken an oversized bite of that too. He turned the tub upside-down in his lap and slid his hand into the slot he’d made. We all watched the movie for a while. Then the man leaned forward and smelled my mother’s hair. His nose hovered right where my father’s tiger would have been. It was the scene with Kris and that woman in the hot tub, so I knew my mother’s eyes were closed.
Ralph had had a girlfriend but she’d died. My girlfriend had moved to International Falls, a site I’d chosen because it was always the coldest in the nation on the weather reports, which from Arizona I imagined as a place where all you needed to know fell between the lines of a thermometer. By then, I’d also confused Michigan with Minnesota. The sole area of contention between Ralph and me was sex, and we fought like academics over the mechanics of how it worked. This was the reason we’d needed girlfriends: to back up our arguments with personal experience. It was the magazines that had sparked the debate, and it was in the magazines we looked for answers.
Forst had an old camper parked in the middle of the backyard. It was the glossy, aluminum kind meant to be towed behind a pickup and on summer nights we practically lived in there, passing the flashlight, turning the pages, making our arguments. Ralph’s theory was this: the woman lay on her back and the man climbed on top of her, so they were face to face. That’s how the screwing would occur, he was sure, and he pointed to the sleepy, dreamy looks on these women’s faces. Why else would it happen in a bed? I was convinced it took the approach encouraged by the women on all fours. They had a way of swiveling their heads back to check on what was going on behind them that couldn’t be denied. In these looks it was practical necessity that I saw, and that appealed to me in a way that dreaminess and mystery never would. Plus there was the way Ralph’s German shepherd Hans would jump on your back if you were near the ground. Our views were irreconcilable on the entire matter, but Ralph had to give me that one.
Ralph had a little sister who’d just made the leap from diapers to panties, and we often looked to her for answers. In the yard, we’d strip her and crouch low, gesturing with our hands as we made our arguments. I’d seen my mother inspect cultures in her lab once, and I copied that long, squinting gaze of hers. Ralph was more animated. There was a blue car his sister loved, and when we could get her to crawl after it, we’d follow in a strange, balled-leg walk while he pointed and nodded like a scientist observing a test probe for Mars.
One day, we had her on her back, each holding a leg up in the air when Ralph’s mom came out the back door. The first time I had ever met her, she hooked a thumb behind the elastic band of her velour shorts and pulled them down to the stubble of her pubic hair so she could show me her still-fresh hysterectomy scar. This was to demonstrate why I was to stay quiet in her house, make my own sandwiches, and not slam that damn ball against the carport. So I didn’t know what to expect when she came out back to see her daughter wishboned by Ralph and the neighbor boy.
Ralph was pointing at the fleshy tuft of his sister’s genitals when he wheeled on his mom. “Can’t you see we’re doing an experiment?”
She let out the kind of staged, knowing laugh you see only in old movies anymore, as if she somehow recognized herself in this scenario of me and Ralph pulling the backpedaling feet of a restless girl. Then she looked at me hard, as if to say it was behavior like this — male, probing, dangerous from birth — that got her where she was today: in sweltering Arizona with a backyard full of dirty tile and kids like us. “I’m through,” she said. “Go see Forst if you want to know about babies.”
“Babies?” Ralph said. “This is research.” He looked at me and mouthed babies?
I shrugged. The baby thing I was still unsure of, but I knew it had to do with the glossy fist of a uterus I’d seen in one of my mother’s pathology books.
We had no intention of talking to Forst about anything, but they were his magazines, and he became our next object of study. He was an ape of a man, the kind rarely seen these days: chest so large his ribs seemed barely to come round to meet, and even his belly — the oiler, he called it — paled underneath what his chest seemed to indicate was possible. But what bothered me was his belly button. It was an outie, and with all that weight behind it, it had swelled to a cone with a nub at the end that wiggled at you like bait.
On days when he came home early, it was Bonanza that he watched, a huge tumbler of iced tea resting on the grayed mat of his chest hair, his yellowed feet up on the ottoman. Forst identified with the character of Hoss, though it was a troubling figure to him. He would direct our attention to the screen, pointing out Hoss’s deficiencies: his fat hands, the way his mouth always hung open, and of course, that stupid hat. “Why is he always smiling?” Forst asked us. “What the hell is he grinning about?”
It was a question I took seriously, and I agreed with Forst that there was something to that Hoss, that the big cowboy must have a hidden interior. I was considering Forst in this same light when he turned from his show to me. “What the hell are you gawking at?”