After I got my useless degree and gave pointless pain to a good girl, I decided it was time to go home.
2
I EXPECTED GOING HOME to See Mother to be a maudlin, necessary affair. There would be no non-obligatory moves. It would be the kind of ordeal wherein everything you do or say for days feels scripted in advance, and somehow everyone else seems unaware there is a script and yet appears agreeable to the proceedings entire. You gradually get the sense you are not altogether sane in entertaining this “script” delusion, that everything is, as every rational index suggests, perfectly fine, and that you’d best just calm down. In my anticipation of all this — the Homecoming Ritual — I thought of jumping script by not going, but even that seemed to be on a programmed template.
What started me thinking of inescapable behavior was the local military news: they were “discovering” lesbians at Parris Island again and giving them a God-and-country hard time. They had two of them apparently staked out in the center of the base and everyone was kicking sand at them and throwing spitballs at them and they were not going to get to be soldiers anymore. It just gave me pause: the whole objection to women being in the service in the first place was — was it not? — that the defense of the nation would degrade overnight into a panty raid. It would seem that the military would have sought out women not interested in men; would, at any rate, once it had them, prize them above the dangerous, seductive others. And on a lower kind of logic: I’ve been in enough lesbian bars to know you want a platoon of them fighting for you, not a division of debutantes chasing the boys on the other side. So. My conclusion? Join the Marines. What else?
These things never work. You cannot walk into the service. Weeks, months could be required. The form-filling-out itself would be sufficiently dull and long for you to ask what was so wrong, finally, with going home and drinking with your mother all night for a few weeks, or months, or even years? What was so wrong with that? I heard an Elvis champion at school, in the presence of a discussion of Mr. Presley’s alleged taste for prepubescent girls, challenge the group: “Just what’s wrong with that?”
So I did not stop at the recruiting station, which was in a two-hundred-acre mall and would have taken two hours to locate, and I went ahead with the script, and pulled in at the Baby Grand knowing, knowing, knowing You Can’t Go to the Baby Grand Again, but going anyway. You must … you must try.
The reason you can’t go home again is, of course, not that everything has changed but that almost nothing has changed. So Jake would not be absent, or dead; he would be at the bar, leg up and smoking, and he was. He would not not know you, or go into an I-declare and summon someone (a woman) who could second with a Lawd-have-mercy — no. He does not even bother to say, “Sim.”
He comes up to me and I say, “A beer, Jake.”
He stands there.
“Any kind.”
He gets it. It is a Magnum malt liquor. I look at it.
“You say any kind.” Jake smiles. It is nice to know he recognizes me. He smokes some more, back at his station. He times me and gets another one, looking at me to see if I am receiving. I am. He serves me the second one. “You back?” he says.
“I hope not,” I say.
“I heard that.”
“How’s the house?”
“Y’all still have that?”
“I think we do.”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“How it is.”
“Oh.”
I come to. My mother is not in the house. She is in Hilton Head. I have forgotten where my mother lives. The house I am going to see her in, going home to, is empty. I can go home again. It isn’t home! What a pleasant surprise.
“Jake, how’s your mother?”
“Died.”
“Your … girl? I forgot her name.”
“Gond.”
“Got a new one?”
“Always got a new one.”
He laughs a little here, a squarely cynical little chuckle.
3
SO WHEN I GET THERE my mother will not appear coyly doe-eyed at the screen door and say, Oh, Son, come in — a drink? I will not accept one and lay myself out on a wicker sofa opposite her, on one like mine, where she does not recline as I, young man of the world, do, but sits on her legs, folded up to the side of her like a girl. She is half-lit by the conical play of lamplight from the end table on which sits her drink, her cigarettes, her ashtray, and her Charles Lamb or Richard Crashaw or Andrew Marvell, always a small, neat book with a good cloth or leather binding and set at a deliberate, pleasing angle to the drink and the cigarettes and the lamp. It is possible that we will not talk, or that we will talk of something altogether odd. This last is the preferred course, in lieu of nothing at all.
“The thing that worries me” she can say, if we go the odd route, “is not evil—you sufficiently explained that to me fifteen years ago — what worries me is opportunity.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I know exactly what she means. It worries me, too. It worries everyone except those with none of it, arguably the happiest people alive. This is why baseball is the national sport, despite its being slower, duller, longer, and deader than its rivals. In baseball, opportunity is quantized and specified and the players seize it or not and win or lose accordingly. If you have an opportunity to hit, you hit; to catch, you catch. Very relaxing spectacle, in the hands of professional opportunity seizers.
I look at my mother. She is not a professional opportunity seizer. She’s on Thompson Time, for one thing. That she has seized. I am not a professional opportunity seizer, either. I am an amateur opportunity seizer; that case could be made, but only because giant quantities of opportunity have fallen on me and I have been unable to dodge the fallout entirely. Thus I am an architect today, for example, and I can tell it is Coleridge on her end table, and I know what Samuel has to say about the universe containing more things invisible than visible (and he’s right, of course, but how could he have known that then?).
“I sufficiently explained evil to you when I was … how old?”
“You did.”
“Pray tell.” Oh. Already my drink is good to me, too. Thompson Time is good time. I’m back to the sideboard as she delivers the explanation.
“… and you said, ‘Evil? That’s an easy one, Mom. Without evil, dog wouldn’t chase the cat, cat wouldn’t climb a tree. Wouldn’t be … anything.’ ”
“What prompted this thesis?”
“I told you evil was what I could not understand in this world.”
“Why did you tell me that?”
“At the time, I didn’t understand it.”
I have my new drink, and we toast each other silently from our positions, and we would be lovers were the biology not considerably in the way.
But none of this will happen, because my mother will not be in the house when I get to it. I will unlock it and go in, walking on sand and bug carcass and the poppy seed of roach leavings. Announce myself to the Hook Man, or his adult equivalent. A man was discovered in this house by my father’s sister, Sasa, several years ago. He had broken in, drunk all the liquor, passed out on one of the sofas, and was lying there when my aunt found him “with a peter this big,” as she phrased it, putting her thumb on the second joint of her little finger and holding it in the air. The unfortunate’s name was Wishmeyer. Today, entering the house, I call, “Time to head out, Mr. Wishmeyer. Get dressed.” He has not come back. The house is empty, still, and stale. The linoleum cracks underfoot like.22s, as if it’s frozen. The sand is nearly in drifts. How does this happen?