I recall feeling breathless and completely without direction as I allowed Tessa to take charge of our stroll home. She stopped momentarily, between two old commercial buildings, not far from the railroad yard, looked straight at me, and said, “Boo. Hiss.” We went on. “I’m lucky you didn’t request Mannheim Steamroller,” she added. I was defeated. “Now don’t be offended, and more importantly, don’t walk in front of that car,” she said. “I realize you aren’t attracted to me, are you?”
“That’s not the real story,” I replied. “I just need a little encouragement.” At these two sentences, uttered with such sincerity, Tessa responded with visible pleasure.
“Then let me tell you my own fears. Why? Because you’re adorable. Of course you’re a complete idiot, but within that, there is a certain appeal. But I have fears, too. Isn’t that real friendship, to tell someone your fears? You could have been extremely disagreeable about those phone calls.”
“What good would it have done?”
“None, but how many would recognize that? I sense that you have a good heart, a good heart trapped in a self that is a hop, skip, and jump from kiddie day care. Obscene phone calls from a stranger are intolerable. But when they come from someone you know, particularly a deluded old walrus like Hoxey, well, they don’t arouse quite the same wrath. The right to revenge belonged to you, and you declined to take it. Mr. Hoxey and I are in your debt.”
I had a clear glimpse here of the sensible side of Tessa, and a hunch that she would end up a friend, which rather worried me because she was the sort who might anchor me and teach me to accept reality, such as it was then emerging.
“How about you just walk me home?” she said finally. “That work for you?”
“Sure,” I said, my voice rising.
We paused at the railroad tracks to watch a big northern express rip through. She peered intently, and I positioned myself behind her so that it looked like the train was pouring into one of her ears and out the other. I knew then that I would kiss her. I suppose it took ten minutes for us to get back to the house, during which time Tessa did her level best to spill out her hopes and dreams, which were honest and simple: ride old man Hoxey into the ground and clean out his estate. This wasn’t how she put it, naturally. Her concern was expressed as a passion for aesthetic rarities. “No one knows the inventory as I do. No one cares as I do, and no one knows the importance of getting it into strong and caring hands as much as I do.” I didn’t say anything, and I suppose she took my silence as censorious. We entered her apartment. Before pushing the door shut behind her, she said, “At the end of the day, it is what it is.” I wondered what that meant. Of course, it is what it is, and it didn’t even have to be the end of the day to be what it was. I couldn’t understand this sort of thing at all, and in a way kissing someone who said things like that was even more confusing.
When I did it, it was with the kind of apprehension one feels on placing a cocked mousetrap in a promising corner. She held me at arm’s length, giving me what one of my professors had called the pre-copulatory gaze. Tessa seemed ominous. I thought of the Big Bang Theory, wherein a tiny speck of matter mysteriously expanded to fill the universe.
I said, “What do you think?” My heart pounded.
She said, “Let’s give it a whirl.”
We made love on the couch. I performed in a state of amazement at all that skin, Tessa egging me on with smutty cries. She asked, “My God, who taught you to do it like this?” and I said, “My aunt.” And she said, “Oh God, no, please not your aunt. No details, thank you very much!” Skin everywhere! She said, “I wonder if you could change your expression. I can barely do this.” When I reached that point to which all our nature aspires and where the future of the species is spasmodically assured, she gave a great sigh and remarked, “Never a dull moment.”
2
I WAS NEARLY MIDDLE-AGED before I learned that my mother’s hometown in Arkansas was not called, as my father had said, “Crackeropolis.” It was Ayers. Ayers, Arkansas. When I figured this out, I then invested way too much time in analyzing my father’s odd little satire. Was it contempt for my mother’s origins? Probably he was just being funny; but I wasn’t sure. I did a bit of research on Ayers and learned that it was the site of an annual slasher film festival held in a big old Art Deco movie theater that was in the registry of historic buildings. Otherwise, a quiet soybean town peopled by farmers in dashboard overalls.
Unwinding my mother’s pointed remark to my father to the effect that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, I eventually grasped that it referred to his few droplets of Cree blood. My father always pretended to be of French Canadian stock, but I’d heard from other of his relatives that they were originally mixed-race folk who worked the lime kilns after the buffalo disappeared. All those people went back and forth between here and Canada looking for work and so got into the habit of saying they were French Canadians as a way to avoid being called half-breeds. The war and generations of marriage evaporated all that, turning that class of folk into garden-variety Americans with slightly exotic names like mine. My full name, Irving Berlin Pickett, will never find its way into common usage.
When I was in my teens I bought a set of drums: a snare, a bass with a foot pedal, and a broad, handsome Zildjian cymbal. I didn’t go far, much past Gene Krupa’s “Lyonnaise Potatoes and Some Pork Chops,” which I got off a 78 rpm record called Original Drum Battle: Gene Krupa & Buddy Rich and which I blasted for weeks out the window of my parents’ house, exhibiting early and alarming antisocial tendencies aggravated by my rhythmless accompaniment. One day the drum set was gone.
“Where’s the drums at?” I demanded of my parents with a fierceness neither I nor they had ever seen. I was just back from school and close to going off the deep end when they said — and I knew it was a lie — that they didn’t know where the drums “was at.” A neighborhood tipster, one Mrs. Kugel, a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and so an enemy of my parents and their Holy Roller ways, confided that my drums were in the town dump. So they were: I stood on a cold winter day staring at them, crushed among the DeSoto parts, shattered lava lamps, and sundry garbage, paper, and dry-rot wood. I was alone with three crows.
Those drums had enabled me to dominate my household and substantial parts of the neighborhood without resort to ideas or speech. I was practicing, I explained, to join a big band like that of Harry James, he of the screeching trumpet. This last detail was entirely strategic, as Harry James was known to me only as a favorite of my parents, who, with their big black vinyls treasured in original sleeves, sometimes fell into music-induced reminiscence of the war years, even to the point of dancing by candlelight while I presumably slept. Their necking during “You Made Me Love You” grossed me out, as it would have any youngster observing his parents being happy in quite that way. I didn’t want to join a swing band, whatever that was; I wanted to rule by noise, and in that I had entirely succeeded. Until the day the drums vanished.
Certainly my parents had made off with them, and I am in no doubt about the great courage required to cross their only child, but their lives had become unbearable: when I was not drumming, I was playing Drum Battle from my room and down the stairwell. My father read his newspaper in the backyard. I now see with shame that our home was really not habitable.