“Vacation?”
“Yeah,” he said. “At a dude ranch, a high-class one.”
“A dude ranch,” I echoed. “Can’t say I’ve ever been to one of those.”
“They call it the Lazy-R. They’ve got a fancy lodge with horses and fishing, you name it. Gerry says everything’s first-class. At night they wash their steaks down with peach brandy.”
The boy listed a few more of the dude ranch’s amenities, including activities like making bullwhips and writing cowboy poetry, but there was no light in his eyes.
“You sure this is that kind of ranch?” I asked. “Isn’t it more like a rehabilitation center or a convalescent home?”
He looked at me like he didn’t know what the heck I was talking about.
“Your mother is recuperating, isn’t she?” I asked. “I mean, wasn’t there some sort of accident?”
The boy’s look turned from incomprehension to uncomfortable vacancy. I wanted to grill him a little more about this supposed ranch that was open in the middle of winter, but I understood the kid was going through some hard times.
I tried to strike the right tone, a mix of casual and concerned.
“When was the last time you talked to her?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything.
In the silence, you could hear Gerry snoring in one of the adjacent rooms.
From nowhere, an inmate strolled into the kitchen in his underwear — skin sallow, flesh pasty. I could tell he was a millionaire by the way he grabbed a gallon of milk from the avocado-colored fridge and stood in the light of the open door drinking for himself what was meant for us all.
The kid took the opportunity to pick up his wax.
“I’ve got to finish my sled,” he said.
I took a long look at him. “You don’t have any idea where your mother is, do you?” I asked him. “You don’t know when she’s coming back at all.”
He seemed not to hear me. With his special wax, he began stroking the runner, methodically, the wax caking where he pressed too hard.
* * *
I went to the shower house. Under the urinal trough I found a stiff-bristled brush and a jug of industrial cleaner. I didn’t have my shower sandals, let alone a sponge caddy, and forget finding any yellow rubber gloves. I just started scrubbing. Somehow that kid had gotten to me. Under the spray of old copper nozzles, I couldn’t tell if I was crying or not. It felt like I was. Using the brush handle, I scraped at chalky green calcium deposits. Then I dug the bristles into the purple-black grout where microbial flagella clung as tightly as when they gripped the earth in the Precambrian era.
Normally, cleaning soothed me. I found solace in its sense of purpose and accomplishment, in the single-minded attention serious housework required. But I couldn’t focus at all. Cold condensation dripped down from the ceiling. The lingering smell of kiwi shampoo and mango conditioner sickened me. Kids, I thought. They were born suckers. It made me shudder to think how lost and clueless they were. The way they looked at you, so blind, so trusting. They fell for any damn thing you told them. Then there was the neediness, the withdrawal, the tears. Who’d blame a mom if she did head off to the old dude ranch? Who wouldn’t turn to a diet of cowboy canapés and nightly charades?
Under each shower nozzle was a depression in the cement where decades of human feet had worn the concrete, exposing an aggregate of sand and crushed river rock. I stood in these stations, polishing the tile, making the fixtures shine, dehairing the drains. I scrubbed until the first glints of morning light shone down through the vent shafts. I looked up, as if I could see pale sky through the lean ducts. High in a propeller plane, at that very moment perhaps, the most beautiful paleobotanist in the state of North Dakota was on her way to see me. Yet inside, where my stomach should be, there was only a hollow drop-off.
It was the same pang I’d felt after buying the Corvette. I had just published a book, one I fancied would shake things up in the intellectual world, and to celebrate I duffed five years of savings on a stupid car. After I paid for it, the shop in Sioux Falls kept the car a week while they installed the custom stereo I wanted, and mounted the rear spoiler and the window louvers. When a guy from the dealership finally dropped it off, he left the motor running, as if I’d dive in and race through town. But all I felt was this: that no fool had ever so fooled himself, that self-suckery had now become an art. Babes, I suddenly understood, weren’t going to start speaking to me — and they didn’t. Colleagues wouldn’t begin to respect me, as I’d fantasized. But what was there to do? I climbed in and drove around town all afternoon, revving the engine for nobody.
I moved to the commodes, which were filled with all manner of material, amber and otherwise. After I flushed them, though, you could see the porcelain bowls were passably clean. The toilet tanks, however, had never been touched, and when I lifted the lids, I found that beards of algae had grown deep into the water — they waggled, as if with wisdom, after each flush. I closed a stall door, took a seat on a toilet lid, and leaned back against the tank. Who did I think I was fooling?
In the bare light of a jailhouse crapper, I counted a thousand reasons Yulia would reject me. There were my bony wrists, so thin and flimsy that my hand could just about squirrel through the hairpin curve of a toilet trap. There was the fungal smell my scalp had picked up. These were obvious flaws, and then there were the ones that I couldn’t see but she undoubtedly would. I was an expert at knowing when people secretly didn’t want to be around a guy. I’d been trained to detect in my fellow humans those quiet inclinations to be somewhere else, with someone else.
After your mother leaves, you look back on things with sharper vision. You understand that those days she scanned the horizon, she wasn’t thinking about the weather. You realize your walks to the post office weren’t about your fascination with stamps, but some secret correspondence she was keeping, with someone far away. In retrospect, you remember which sections of the paper she read first, what distant radio station she spent forever trying to tune in. Flying a kite, she was the kite. Ice-skating, her tight turns were loops around the world. When I close my eyes and try to feel her now, it is not my mother’s embrace that comes to me, not her hug, or the lap I sat on, but those interminable swing sets. After school we always went to the playground by the river. Even as a child, you know when the hands on your back are absent hands. To swing, you must face away from your mother, and she pushes you away, she pushes you away, but you keep swinging back. Her heart loses ground the longer this game goes on, until she is barely touching your back and you are barely moving, until her hands feel so faint, it’s like she’s pushing you from Paris. Listless in a swing, you toe the sand and watch the water as she finishes her cigarette. You never step in the same river twice, your science books say, and your mother is only a puff of smoke, passing over your shoulder.
So, after she leaves for good, your radar is on as your dad begins rotating through the parade of girlfriends that will eventually lead to Janis. After dinner, your father and a woman drink sherry in silence as you finish your ice cream, and you know when your company isn’t preferred, you know they can’t wait for you to go to bed. At the cinema, your father slings a jacket over his shoulder and leads a different woman to the lobby, where they will chat and gesture, where they will lean casually against the theater’s big windows, touching fingers, waiting for you to watch the end of the movie reel. In a restaurant, you come out of the bathroom, and there are three half-eaten dinners around a table, some cash under a plate, and this means your father and some woman are already in the car, radio on, smoking. When you crunch across the lot, your dad’s engine fires up, and as you climb into the back seat, he passes you a mint and gives you that look. The look isn’t mean. It doesn’t wish you weren’t born. It doesn’t hope you’ll be gone tomorrow. It only wonders if you have to be right here, right now.