A Chinese vase, a rug of embroidered roses, even a peacock feather would have revealed my mother—naked, longing—for the whole world to pity. She knew this because she’d been to houses like that, the houses of women who served European teas, though they’d never been to Europe, and if they ever did go to Europe, they would see it through the tinted windows of an air-conditioned bus, watching the castles and the Alps roll by, too blurred in the distance to appraise.
There’s only so much beauty women like that can bear. You see them at the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Ocean, Niagara Falls, holding the hands of their bored children—who, having been presented with some wonder of the world are drop-jawed with awe at something altogether wrong: the hot dog that fell on the ground, roiling with red ants, or the retarded man with unzipped pants, or the metal railing that surrounds it, fences the awe itself, keeps the tourists from falling in. They want to make a balance beam of that, to walk the space between death and their safe American vacation, and who could blame them?
The children are just bored, but it is their mothers who can’t bear to look at the thing itself.
Not out of fear. No. They’re too far removed for fear. There are signs to tell you when you’re too close to the edge, bronzed lifeguards blowing whistles when you’ve swum too far. There are rangers in uniforms—and, below you, the Maid of the Mist, drifting into the cool kiss of it, then veering back just in time.
Fear would make sense. But it’s something else. A taboo. An inhibition. A kind of modesty imposed on the natural world by women. Their husbands might be gawking and snapping photos, but the wives call them back to the station wagons and their sandwiches and soft drinks stashed in picnic baskets.
And the suburbs are full of homes like those, decorated by women like that. It gave my mother a seasick chill to look to the bottoms of their wistful teacups, to smell the rueful, steeping leaves sinking to the bottoms of their hand-painted kettles. The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.
And my father was not an exotic man. He’d never been to war. He’d never sailed the sea. He’d grown up in a suburb like the one we lived in now. A life without crisis, or wildlife.
Oddly, he owned a rifle, which his father had inherited from his own father, and which he kept in the basement but never used. He seemed, in fact, afraid of his own rifle. It was kept unloaded, locked up in the same cabinet where he kept his collection of dirty magazines. Like my father’s masculinity, it was useless, and unusable, in the basement beneath our feet. Just something he’d inherited from some earlier era, the manlier man of his father’s father, who must have been a hunter, who must have known how to skin a buck.
Once, my mother went downstairs to put a load of laundry in the washer, and surprised him. He was holding that rifle in his arms like a child.
When she saw him, she said, “Put that thing away,” and he did.
My father was a man who spent his days in an office, doodling, wearing shiny shoes, tapping a pencil on his thigh. All that testosterone surging and spiking like bees in the blood, and not a thing to do with it. On Saturdays, he chased little balls over a long slope of lawn with brilliant clubs, came home red-faced, frustrated, badly beaten, hardly a man at all.
“Beige,” I remember my mother saying to the painters who stood in our living room one summer afternoon years ago—two fat men in overalls holding brushes. It was June, and the windows were open. Outside, a sprinkler whirred in rusty spinning, and a domesticated dog yelped wildly for a moment, then stopped. Somewhere someone was practicing a flute, playing scales over and over, perfect and shrill, like a kind of obedient screaming.
“You could try something else, ma’am. Something different. Shell pink. Or a light blue,” one of them offered.
But she just shook her head.
PHIL HAS THE NAME OF A SHRINK WRITTEN DOWN ON A PIECE of yellow paper—
Dr. Maya Phaler: 878–1675.
He hands the piece of paper to me.
“My mom’s been seeing her ever since my father split. She says it helps a lot.” Phil says this as he walks toward the stairs to my bedroom. He says, “You need to get your anger out.”
I follow him, holding my square of yellow.
Phil lies back on my bed, propped up by the pansy-covered pillows, and he looks, worried, at my ceiling. I sit by his feet and rest my hand casually on his ankle. There, the bone feels hard—a sharp rock slipped into his sock—but he moves it away from my hand as if I’ve pinched or tickled him. Then he rolls over and opens the top drawer of my nightstand, where I keep the cigarettes and condoms and contraceptive foam.
That foam is like something a virgin might find in her mouth one summer morning at the seashore. It’s immaculate, and smells like nothing.
But he’s going for the cigarettes, I know—a fresh, soft pack of Marlboro Lights—and he spins the thin cellophane ribbon around the top in one clean movement, like slitting a fish, but he hands it over to me when he can’t get a cigarette out, jammed together as they are, dry and white.
I scratch one out with my nails and pass it to him. When his fingers touch mine, I snag them and pull his hand to my lips. He has to sit up a little for me to kiss the tips.
I look into his eyes, and say, “Want to have sex?”
But Phil glances back at the ceiling quickly and falls again into the pillow, shaking his head. “No,” he says. “I want to talk about this shrink.”
It’s an excuse, I think, not to have sex, but I let him talk.
When it comes to talk, Phil isn’t much. He’ll pause, look soulful, pound a fist on his knee when he really means something, and you can see he means something, but what it is, well, that’s often lost in a fog of generalizations and half-finished sentences. Listening to Phil talk is a bit like watching golf on television. You see he’s got the moves, nice clubs, appropriate outerwear. You can tell when the sun’s in his eyes. You can see the pressure’s finally getting to him. But no matter how carefully you watch, you’ll never see him hit the ball, and you’ll never see it land.
This has never bothered me. Like my father, Phil is simple, and his inarticulateness goes with this like a sprig of parsley on a Salisbury steak. His monologues are full of vivid and amusing misstatements, the mangling of cliches. Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, “My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too.”
I imagined Phil’s mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil’s food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich.
Another time he said, regarding his father’s late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn’t help, it would just make the checks even later. “It’s a vicious circus,” Phil said.
When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation—the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling—might help, he said, “I’m virtuously certain it wouldn’t,” looking martyred and older than his years.
First Phil bites his lip. Then he smokes. Then he says, “This is too much for you to deal with, you know, alone. This is, your mom taking off. It’s a heavy thing, you know. You need someone to talk to about this load.”
I wait. When he doesn’t say anything else, I say, “Is that all?”
“Yeah,” he says. There is a rope of smoke around his fist. He looks at it.