He was the first blind person my mother ever saw up close, and his face was badly shaved, pockmarked, pale. He wore dark glasses, but my mother could see that the eyes behind them were always open, as dispassionate and inorganic as Ping-Pong balls. His voice was frail and wavering, and when he sang he’d lift his chin toward the ceiling and sway sleepily—
My mother imagined him alone in his bed every night in the black, crooning like that to the silence, and she hated that picture. It was how she imagined death. Night closing down on you like a lid. No way out. Brightly, emptily white, or pure fluid darkness.
Perhaps my mother remembered this as she looked into Mrs. Hillman’s eyes, then looked past her, around her house—the layout of which was identical to ours. Except for the smell of it, Mrs. Hillman might not know the difference between her own house and ours, and to think of that gave my mother a chill that began behind her knees—to imagine Mrs. Hillman in our home, to think that one day she might pull into our driveway and find Mrs. Hillman stumbling across our lawn, believing it was hers, or in our hallway. How was she to know where she was, or wasn’t? My mother imagined Mrs. Hillman feeling her way to our bathroom, washing her hands in our sink, slipping into one of our beds without ever opening her eyes.
“Winter Formal,” my mother said too cheerfully. “Yes. Tomorrow Kat and I are going to look for a dress.”
Look—it echoed off the bare walls. She wished she’d used another word.
“Yes,” Mrs. Hillman nodded. “Phil’s renting a tux.”
“Kat’s excited,” my mother said.
“So is Phil.”
Mrs. Hillman’s chin drifted toward the kitchen, and my mother looked in that direction, too. There was the sound of footsteps overhead, a door opening.
First, my mother saw his legs, in jeans. The big brass buckle of his belt, and then the skin of his stomach, and the sparse, damp hair on his chest, between his nipples—those hard, dark buttons of flesh. She could see his ribs—he was boyishly thin—how they tapered into his waist as if a witch’s bony fingers had grabbed him from behind, as if the witch were squeezing him. His face was long, shaved. Dark eyebrows. But his hair was light—the straw blond of a child—and it was wet, combed back. When he saw my mother, he said, “Oh.”
“Phil,” Mrs. Hillman said without turning in his direction, still speaking to the kitchen, “this is Kat’s mother. Mrs. Connors. Our new neighbor.”
“I’m sorry,” Phil said, covering his bare stomach with his arms. “I heard something. I didn’t know anyone was over. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Connors.” And he hurried back upstairs.
There was a hollow place in his back where his spine swerved neatly into his jeans.
PHIL AND HIS MOTHER ARE AT OUR HOUSE THIS AFTERNOON because their basement flooded last night, and now the plumbers and the forty-dollar-an-hour workers have come to patch and bail. They’re pounding in and out of the house in their big boots with the doors wide open on a ten-degree winter afternoon.
Last night, while Mrs. Hillman was bathing—hot water and bubbles spilling over her—she’d heard the rush of bursting pipes, the gulping ocean roar of plumbing run amok. “Phil!” she’d shouted, feeling her way out of the tub, both hands gripping the slick rim.
Phil pretended not to hear her at first. He thought she just wanted something, like a sponge, or that she’d dropped her washcloth, or she’d slipped, or she couldn’t find her bathrobe because it had fallen off the hook, and he couldn’t bear to walk into the bathroom, to see his mother’s long breasts naked, to see her soaped and groping toward him with her needs, her panic disguised as impatience—
“Where were you?” she’d want to know. “I’ve been shouting for ten minutes.”
But then he’d heard the basement overflowing, too. Water, he told me on the phone a few hours later, sounds just like fire, and his first thought was that the house had burst into flames, that he’d have to haul his mother out into the snow without her clothes, that she’d catch pneumonia and die—or worse, that she would suffer for a very long time, complaining.
Now Mrs. Hillman is cocking her head in our living room again—a mechanical Mrs. Claus in a Christmas department store display. Phil bounces his foot nervously, ankle on his knee, glaring at his mother. He looks rangy in a flannel shirt this afternoon, thermal underwear beneath it, like a blond boy playing the part of a woodcutter in the high school play.
She listens. Fogged eyes wide.
“It’s nothing, Mother,” Phil suggests. “It’s probably the furnace, like Kat says.”
“Do you want some more coffee?” I ask politely, trying to make up for Phil’s unkindness—his tone, which is the tone of an angry youth, a disrespectful son, one who needs a father around to frighten him now and then.
“No,” Mrs. Hillman says, fidgeting with the rim of her empty cup, looking worried.
“Maybe it’s my father,” I offer. He’s upstairs, and won’t be coming down as long as Phil is here. Although my father admires Mrs. Hillman—her spunk, her homely courage (“She’s a good woman,” he says. “The kind of woman you could hang your hat on if you had to”)—he refuses to come into any room Phil’s in. This has gone on for more than a year now, since before my mother left, since the afternoon he caught me with him in my bed, Phil’s naked ass rising and falling over the pale shadow of my body.
It had been an accident. Until then, Phil and my father had gotten along well—nervous and polite in each other’s company, chatting about football, looking respectfully at the emptiness just beyond each other’s shoulders as they shrugged and nodded.
But my father had come home from the boat show in Toledo early. “Daddy,” I’d called to his back as he hurried down the hall. “It was my idea.” But he didn’t turn around. I could hear water running in the bathroom sink behind the closed door for over an hour.
“I’ll look around,” I say in Mrs. Hillman’s direction, “if that will make you feel better.”
“I’m sure I hear something,” she says, which means she wants me to look around.
Phil’s hands turn into fists, as if he’s just grabbed two slim throats in them. Maybe he hates her, and who could blame him? It would be nearly impossible to be her son. Her stubbornness. Her needs. “What will I ever do?” Phil asked me angrily one afternoon as we drove together to the grocery store on some errand his mother had sent us to do. “I can’t ever leave, now that my father has. She can’t even open a can.”
“Oh, Phil,” I said, “you’re her son, not her father. She has to let you go.”
“No, she doesn’t,” he said, and I could see a blue vein in his temple. I didn’t want to think about whether or not what he said was true, but I could see how hard it would be for him to imagine the rest of his life, and where it would lead him, unless she died. It would be like having a job in a fortune cookie factory, standing all day on an assembly line while optimism passed through your hands on flimsy strips of paper—“You will inherit a million dollars,” “You will go on an exotic vacation”—but never moving, standing in one place while the damp batter of the fortune cookies slid by, all your possible futures settling into that clamminess as it passed.
Once, I looked out my bedroom window and saw Phil in the backyard with his mother, a plastic basket full of laundry between them. She was telling him how to hang it on a line, and the wet sheets looked as heavy and limp as dead women. I could see she was worried that he’d drop the clean laundry on the ground. She was gesturing, tugging on his arm, until finally a pair of her underpants slipped out of his hands, dropped at his feet. Phil just left them there for a while, and then he stepped on them, hard, purposefully, before hanging them on the line—white, over-bleached, too intimate, and dirty.