And hours later the folks come home, drunk and bellowing. Mom bungles into my room and frightens me with her poking and her broken-glass voice. I curl against the wall to escape her reeking breath. Afterwards I hear thuds from their room and Dad being sick.
And all night I have strange pressured dreams. I wake up sore and hot with a thickness in my head.
And what began that night has been with me, to one degree or another, ever since: an unquashable sexual desire for my sister.
There. Happy now? While Jim Anderson does time for embezzlement, his Princess gives head behind the bowling alley to pay for her habit. Donna Stone, well, she’s pretty dim these days behind the Woolworth’s lunch counter, not a lot to say since that drunk driver took out her whole family Christmas Eve. And Beaver? Everybody knows about the Beav; he’s torn and stinking under a betel palm as Charlie strips him of boots and wristwatch.
Realism, it may be seen, has no more to do with reality than anything else.
6
I WAS EIGHT YEARS old when I first saw my mother on the stage. Gordo drove us into the city for the Saturday matinee. We stopped for fried clams en route and Carla was sick all over herself the minute we rejoined traffic.
Gordo punched the gas pedal. “I’m not taking you in that condition,” he said.
Carla kicked and sobbed while being led into Aunt Rita’s Lexington Avenue apartment building, but I wasn’t the least sorry she was being left out. The experience would be exclusively mine. And I wouldn’t have to share the intermission candy that had been promised.
I remember the sense of event, the rustle of overcoats and the aromas of perfume and cigarettes, far better than the name of the play or even what it was about. A comedy, yes, one of those set in Westport or Bala-Cynwyd: tennis rackets and cocktail glasses, a long white sofa with tasseled cushions, and my amazement at the living laugh-track surrounding me in darkness that reached undiluted to an impossibly high ceiling dotted with gilt extrusions. My plush seat cradled me like an outsized hand, and the program’s coated paper curled and went sticky in my small one.
You can see my attention was not where it belonged, and so could my father, artist of laws. His hand fell threateningly on my knee; he hissed. So I fixed my eyes in the prescribed direction, took in the furniture and the cellophane fire that shed no light, passed quickly over yapping faces. I could follow words individually, but completely missed their point. Too, the voice tones were like none I’d ever heard. Considerably later, I learned of projection from the diaphragm and reaching those red EXIT bulbs at the back of the theater; but at that moment all dialogue felt alien in my ear. I lowered my gaze to the rows of heads in front of us, studying varieties of hair.
Gordo’s elbow was sharp as my mother entered through French windows at the back of the set. Disillusion took but an instant. She had a white sweater tied round her neck by the sleeves — a style frequently affected at home — and a bundle of fat white blooms across one arm, as if she’d come in from clipping the peonies that marked the edges of our property. Where was the transformation? I knew what “playacting” meant, like any third-grader, and this wasn’t it. I felt like crying when she opened her mouth to speak and out came the teasing snob accent she used to cajole my sister and me into drab chores, or to dinners where we had to keep quiet.
This display of her ordinary self before strangers was indecent. She was exposed, without even the small tricks of glamour a little boy could recognize. I noticed that Gordo didn’t laugh with the rest. His posture was stiff and defiant, chin jutting. Was he reading the same indecency that I did?
The curtain couldn’t fall soon enough for me. With alarming suddenness, the slight pressure in my bladder had grown into a torment. I shut my eyes against it, afraid to move. Then I heard my mother trilling from the stage: “How do I get out of here?”
The lights came up at last and I zigzagged my way to the men’s, praying the hot dribble inside my leg wouldn’t turn into something more. I didn’t want to end up at Aunt Rita’s too. Finding an empty stall, draining myself, I thought for a mad instant of hiding there until the theater was empty and explorable, but knew I’d be found. My father, I was sure, could order up a special police squad whenever he wanted. Nothing to do, then, but thread through the forest of people and find him. At least there’d be chocolate waiting.
His suede shoes made him easy to locate; they matched the carpeting. He wanted opinions from me. I mumbled around my Hershey bar. This was no time for lenience, though, and he prompted me so fiercely I could barely keep up. A Saturday matinee, indeed. What had been offered as a rare treat turned out to be one more privilege earned through adherence to ceremony.
As the second act got under way, I was a determined little gut-squeezer. It would take plenty to make me fall for their pretending. I would follow Gordo’s lead, wedging myself in place like a one-man totem pole, taking it all in and giving nothing back. Coolly, I would tell Carla later on how I’d indulged the grownups. But all this went like dust before an angel’s sneeze when my mother reappeared.
She floated in a strapless satin gown, hair a braided crown that revealed the pale column of her neck. Bright as her eyes, long earrings left glitter trails with every movement of her head. She looked like herself, but had become someone else. Her laughter was slow and low and filled the distance like an echo of itself. Edging forward, edging forward, I finally conked myself against a metal seatback and felt my eyes brim over with the vulgar distraction of pain. Band music spun on a phonograph and my mother danced with a younger woman back and forth across the artificial living room. I had never seen her move with such reckless grace.
Just as it had begun, with the suddenness of a detonation, this vivid interlude was finished. Lights blinked off, then on again, and the parade of dolls resumed. It was a mystery to me that such an abandoning didn’t empty the place. But the laughers laughed, the snoozers snoozed, and I watched while not watching, in the manner of someone who leafs all the way through a newspaper without picking up any news.
After a while my teeth began to hurt from the effort of not seeing and the press of discomposure. I longed to peel back time, to rub out those few glory-radiating minutes of satin gown and low laugh, to save my mother. Because what could she do from her place of elevation but slip, trip, and fall into grayness? Into the sad kitchen where we knew her as reluctant wife and nervous mother who stared into the freezer, rummaged in drawers, talked to herself, was constantly looking over her shoulder: Where was it? Had it been there at all?
After she died, I saw how huge her own longings must have been. It was only on the altar of the raised proscenium that power drew near. She inhaled it through open pores; she swelled with it and rose like a balloon. But there came inevitably a closing line and a final light cue, and the inescapable return to the place where she flaked dried gravy off oven mitts, bandaged knuckles scraped against the cheese grater. What had to be learned was that, over the long run, short respites only deepened the agony. How do I get out of here? You find a place of warm, dark peace where the lights never dim and there is always another page of script: the inside of a television.
The next thing I noticed was the curtain call — all of them up there holding hands, grinning with what seemed to be embarrassment. And why not? My mother looked right at us and gave a small wave. I looked at the ceiling. Out in the street Gordo bought some flowers and put them in my hand.