When the phone rang early in the morning, it was as if I had been waiting for the call. I jumped out of bed, hurried down the steps to the common room, and yanked open the door of the phone booth. “Lee,” my mother said, but she couldn’t speak because she was crying so hard.
“Mom,” I said. “Mom, I’m sorry. I want you guys to come back-”
“Daddy’s checking out now,” she said. She breathed deeply several times. “He wants to get an early start. But, Lee, I hope you know that he loves you so much and he’s so proud of you. I hope you know that.”
“Mom-” My chin was starting to shake, my lips were curling out.
“And we really looked forward to this weekend, and I’m sorry it had to turn out like this.”
“Mom, it’s not your fault. Mommy, please. Please don’t cry.” But I was crying, too. Over the noise of her own tears, I don’t know if she noticed. “Why don’t you come back?” I said. “Even if Dad doesn’t. You’ll like the chapel service.”
“Lee, I can’t. He wants to get on the road. What I want you to do is I want you to call him in a few days and just say you’re sorry. And I know he was wrong, too, and he shouldn’t have hit you and it makes me very sad-” She was gasping again.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It didn’t hurt. Really, Mom, it didn’t hurt.”
“I have to go, Lee. I love you. Okay? I love you.” Then she’d hung up, and I was holding the phone, listening to nothing. When I got back to the room, I saw on Martha’s alarm clock that it was not yet six-thirty.
Later, when we referred to it-there was nothing that ever happened to my family that did not become a joke or anecdote-it became the weekend from hell, when it was unclear whether my father or I had behaved more atrociously. In my mother’s version, everything could be traced back to the fact that Lee was looking at one of those trashy magazines she loves and Dad started teasing her and then you know how two people with tempers can get into it. Also, my mother always asked after Rufina and Maria, both in her letters and in conversation when she’d call them “the Spanish girls,” or else “the girl with the boyfriend and the other girl.”
It was the last time my father ever hit me-he’d done it when I was growing up, spanking more than slapping, and really only when my brothers and I were being either completely wild or willfully disobedient-and it also marked the beginning of a long period during which I did not cry in front of either of my parents.
When I was in college, I always had a phone in my room, and my father called often-I think the pay phone system at Ault had simply struck him as a pain in the ass-and sometimes he didn’t even leave a real message but uttered a single absurd sentence into the answering machine, or recited jokes. (How do you make a Kleenex dance? Or, on Halloween, Lee, why can’t witches have babies?) My roommates, of course, thought he was very funny. Later, after I graduated from college, he bought a cell phone, and then he called me daily. I always talked to him, even at work, even when I was busy, and I always let him be the one to end the conversation. It was not that I really thought I could redeem myself for that weekend, or for going to Ault to begin with. (How was I supposed to understand, when I applied at the age of thirteen, that you have your whole life to leave your family? Or maybe it was going to Ault that turned me into the kind of person who would always, for reasons of schooling, then work, stay away.) No, it wasn’t that I thought I could redeem myself, more that I thought I owed it to him to show I was trying. As for my mother: She never punished me, she never even scolded me. And because of this, because unlike my father she never asked me to pay her back, it made what I owed her unpayable. It was an ocean, or a whole cold planet.
Once when I was visiting my parents’ house, nosing around in my brother Tim’s room, I paused before his bulletin board and noticed a nametag pinned up there, a stiff cream-colored rectangle with a thick red ribbon affixed to the top and an image of the Ault crest in the left corner. Timothy John Fiora, it said, and below that, brother of Lee, and after my name, the year I’d graduated. At the time it had been written, that date had been nearly two years in the future; at the point when I stood in my brother’s room examining it, it was more than ten years past, and Tim himself had finished high school and started at the community college. What surprised me was that my brother’s name was not in my mother’s handwriting but in my father’s. Had he grabbed the extra tag when he’d taken them for my mother and himself, I wondered, written Tim’s name (probably he’d made one for Joseph, too), and passed it off to my mother to transport back to Indiana? Or all that Saturday at Ault, had he carried it himself, tucked in the pocket of his khaki blazer, taking care when he sat not to let it bend? And then in the car driving back, had he set it somewhere safe, on the dashboard maybe, or on the seat next to him? They drove straight through, I found out later, and my father drove the whole way. They’d planned to stop around Erie, but my mother fell asleep, and my father decided to keep going. A little after midnight, my mother woke, startled. The engine was off and my father was sitting beside her, cracking his knuckles, gazing out the windshield. “Where are we?” my mother asked.
“We’re home,” my father told her.
6. Townie
JUNIOR WINTER
A n ambulance took Sin-Jun to the ER in the early evening, right around when formal dinner started. In fact, when Tig Oltman and Daphne Cook found her-Tig and Daphne were sophomores who lived in Sin-Jun’s dorm-they were on their way to the dining hall. They opened the door of their room in time to see Sin-Jun appear on the threshold opposite theirs and crumple to the floor, mumbling unintelligibly, one arm pressed to her abdomen as if she’d folded up her shirt to carry a bunch of pebbles, or maybe corn kernels, and she was trying to prevent them from spilling.
It was a Wednesday, and after formal dinner there was an all-school lecture-it was by a black woman who was the choreographer of a dance troupe-and Martha and I were about to enter the auditorium when Mrs. Morino, Sin-Jun’s dorm head, stopped us. When I think of the whole incident, the whole rest of the winter even-it was late February then-this is the moment I remember. Martha and I were cheerfully talking about nothing and I was keeping track of Cross Sugarman, who was several feet ahead of us, watching to see where he and his friends sat so Martha and I could sit close by, but not so close that it would occur to him our proximity was intentional. And then Mrs. Morino was approaching us, and I thought maybe she was waving hello-why would she have been waving hello when we were just a few feet apart, when neither Martha nor I had ever had her as a teacher or coach and we therefore hardly knew her?-and I was startled when she stopped in front of us and reached out to take my hands.
“I have some difficult news,” she said.
Dread surged through me. Already I was scrolling back in my mind to identify any recent wrongdoing, and so I felt relief-relief that would soon seem shameful and cold-hearted-when Mrs. Morino said, “Sin-Jun is in the hospital. She took some pills. The doctors had to pump her stomach. And she’s stable now-I’ve just come from seeing her-but she’s still very fragile.”
“Is she sick?” I glanced through the double doorway. Cross had disappeared into the auditorium, nearly everyone was seated, and the lights were dimming. I looked back at Mrs. Morino, surprised she was making us late for the lecture; I didn’t yet understand that I wouldn’t be attending the lecture.
“She took pills,” Mrs. Morino said, and still I didn’t get it-I think this had more to do with my specific idea of Sin-Jun than with my general naÏveté, though maybe it was a little of both-and then Martha, who could tell I didn’t get it, said, “On purpose, Lee.”