(There was a moment, once. I was eating dinner with Mom, and Dad was at work late, and Ginny was at a friend’s house learning fractions. I barely remember this; it’s sort of made up, if you want to know the truth. But we were eating spaghetti and cottage cheese, and Mom looked at me, and then all of sudden it was like her face melted; the lines around her eyes all pointed down, arrows down her face to the lines around her mouth, which pointed down, and then her chin caught it all like a net, trapping all the down arrows and feeding them back into her jaw and lower lip, which drooped and sank from the weight.
She took a sip of her water.
“Mom, you okay?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Why?”)
For about a month, I went to classes across town taught by the long-necked doctor. They involved me and her in a dark viewing room, looking at huge slides of babies’ faces crying and laughing, and I had to tell her which was which. The doctor was stupid, because she kept using the same set of slides, and each time she’d tell me which was which, not realizing that every slide had a small gold number embossed in the corner. I just made notes on my leg: 14 is laughing, 13 is sneezing, 12 is crying, 11 is sleeping, etc. Within two weeks, I got eight out of ten on the test (I missed two on purpose), and she seemed very pleased with both of us. “Let’s see how you do for now,” she said, and she let me have my Saturday mornings back, which I used to climb roofs and mess with people’s TV antennae.
(I was walking to school with Ginny. She was telling me about her verb project, where she is gathering underappreciated verbs, and putting them to use. “Look, I’m sauntering to school,” she said, doing a little trick with her feet. She tilted her head to the side for a second, and she’s a few years younger than me, and when she squinted, putting her lips to one side, for a second I thought she looked hot. I’m making this up. She’s nine. She crossed the street and yelled, “Behold you later!” over her shoulder.)
My mother did not pick me up from school again. She was back pounding the streets, looking for a job. She did interrogate me several times at the kitchen table when we were home at the same time, but by now I’d learned my lesson. “His name’s John Gath,” I said to her, as I ate my fifth piece of toast. “He talks the most of anyone, and he is the leader of the group. I like him the best, except on the days when he’s in a bad mood.”
“John?” she said.
“John,” I said, chewing the crust. “And his brothers are George and Paul, and his cousins are Rocky and Jo-Jo.”
“And who talks the least?” she asked, brushing ants into the trash can. I watched them climb out.
“Jo-Jo,” I said, “is a quiet sort. By the way, my favorite color is blue.”
“Blue,” she sighed, leaning back on the counter. “That’s a good one. Have you done your homework?”
“All done,” I said. “Did you get a job?”
“Soon,” she said.
(We were smoking at the wall at recess, and one of the Gaths handed me a bag of barbecue chips, and when I took it, he had this look in his eye. Glinty. Looking right at me. “What?” I said. “What?” he said.)
You know what I like to look at? The birdbaths, locked up. The stuffed bear stuck together with staples and tape. The TV. The refrigerator. I like the car. The changing weather. The taste of wrong-color peppermints. The doctor’s neck.
(There’s a photo of the Robertson family in a blue wooden frame that sits on top of the TV that we got done at the department store’s photo department. I try to focus my attention on the TV, but sometimes I glance up by accident. Mostly I just see hair and all of us in our nice shirts and I remember the dick photographer who made us say “buttercream pie,” but once in a while, I look up and it’s a flash, like the photograph is screaming and everything is imprinted there, everything. Like the shape of my mother’s jaw might as well bleed out the word “disappointment” and my dad’s eyes are way far back and blank in his head and Ginny smiles too big like she’s pouring grout on the world and somebody’s flattened me.
One night, Mom held it up during commercials and said, “I think this is my favorite picture of us yet,” because she likes how the angle doesn’t show her double chin and she likes to see Ginny smiling with her pretty teeth and Dad with his hair just cut, and how for once I wasn’t scowling at the camera.
“Look, William, how handsome you are when you’re not being difficult,” she said.
I shrugged at her. “Can’t see it,” I said. “Sorry.”)
On a Saturday Afternoon
I have known them for at least three years, these two; we all went to school together, and at one point I dated the blond but it was brief. The timing was off and both of us were swept along by the river of another match. I have flirted with the brown-haired one for years.
I have this fantasy, I say one evening, when all of us are slightly drunk, sitting on my apartment steps on Gardner on a clear July night. Would you come back? Four o’clock? Saturday?
Sure, they tell me, curious. The word marked by brake lights and bitten fingernails. Everybody facing out. We all hold hands at once, and we are all lonely when we go home, but this is helpful, this hand-holding, this sitting on the stoop of my apartment building, watching while other people look for parking.
I have recently broken up with someone whom I did not expect to break up with, and every morning, the earliest time I wake up is suffused with remembering; I can’t seem to beat that moment, no matter how early I rise. I once thought if I traveled in France I would have a different brain, the brain of a girl who travels in France. I saw myself, skipping through meadows in a yellow-and-blue-print dress. But even with the old buildings, with the bright bready smells, with the painted French sunlight, it was still my same brain in there, chomping as usual, just fed this time by baguettes and Brie.
In the mornings I write long circular journal entries when I wake up. Too early. Before work. But even though I am making steady proclamations about who I will go for next, and why, and how it will all be different, it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times: the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character. The cautious revealings of insecurities. I have said them already, and they sit in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore. A while ago, this sharing was tremendous; now the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity. Surely it is not good for my own mind to make myself into a speech like that. The only major untouched field of discussion will have to do with this feeling, this tiredness, this exact speech.
The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence. We will have to learn it from each other some other way.
On Saturday, there’s a knock at the door right at four, and I open it up. Hi! Hi, hi. We’re all joking and nervous, and they brought beer. Me too. I usher them in. My apartment sometimes reminds people of a warehouse; the space is high and elongated and feels empty. The living room is a stripe. It’s too narrow to watch TV in, so I put the furniture on a diagonal.
They both look great, thriving out of control. These are solid men, with square kneecaps and loving mothers, who are still sort of awed by women. They have a line of fur instead of hair at the napes of their necks, sometimes dusting the hinge of their cleanly shaven jaws. Me, I’m clothed and workmanlike in overalls with many pockets. A red tank top, legs covered. They have had crushes on me at some point, and me on them, but everyone knew that friendship was best, and it is in this spirit that they walk through my door. They’re good at the greeting hug routine. There is a wild fondness in the air. We grab beers, twist off, fling bottle caps into the air.