“I understand,” O’Connor says. Sympathetic guy. I could get along with this fella.
I open my heart to him even more. “I was straight for weeks, Mike, and then — Is it Mike or Michael?”
“Usually Michael,” he says.
I might have guessed. There’s something prissy about this guy, uptight, not loose and relaxed. Well, anyway, let’s befriend him just the same. “I was straight a long time, Michael,” I say, “and then something happened, upset me, I fell—...”
“What was that, Mr. Pine? What upset you?”
“Doesn’t matter, Michael,” I tell him, waving it away with a carefree hand. “That’s ancient history. That’s archives, Michael. The point is, I wasted myself. I’d been taking a taste here, a hit there, a pop somewhere else, you know what I mean? Maintaining. That’s my idea of being on the dope wagon, Michael, maintaining that nice balance, that easy lope through life.” And I wonder, am I using his name too often? Do I risk moving beyond manly camaraderie to starrish condescension? Best back off; keep on the good side of the press, that’s the name of the game. “Where were we?” I ask him. “Did I tell you about Marcia, my first wife?”
“Yes, sir,” he says.
“Pow!” I tell him, taking a poke at the air. “Right in the kisser, you know?”
“You were at the ranch,” he reminds me. “Buddy Pal had just told you the Reverend Cornbraker was a con man.”
“And child molester,” I say. “Oh, yeah. Things got kind of grim at the ranch around then. Meantime, life wasn’t so hot down at the beach, either.”
Flashback 15D
The kitchen of the Malibu house was as modern and shiny as ever, still a pale symphony in white and stainless steel and blond butcher block, but there was an indefinable sense of laxity about the place now, an impression of disinterest, a falling-off of care. On the shelf beneath the cabinets, for instance, the canisters were no longer in size places. Some silverware lay about, the trash can was full, and the pot on a back burner of the stove had a faintly grungy look.
Dad had brought a small portable television set into the kitchen and put it on the white table at the eat-in end of the room. He sat there now, switching his teeth from hand to hand as he watched golf. At the butcher-block island, Constanza sat on a high stool, looking at snapshots and drinking a glass of milk, with the milk carton near at hand. Over by the refrigerator (fingermarks around the handle), Mom was angrily on the phone, saying, “Whadaya mean, he isn’t there? You always say he isn’t there! He’s my son, isn’t he? He’s my own goddamn son out of my own goddamn body, isn’t he? Why can’t I talk to my own goddamn son if I want to”
“The twins are gettin’ bigger,” Constanza said, riffling slowly through the snapshots.
Mom bared her teeth at the phone. “You’re a lying sack of shit!” she yelled. “That’s what you are!” She slammed the phone onto its hook, veering away, her hand clutching at air, her mouth snapping like a piranha. “He can’t do that to me!” she cried, and glared across the table at Constanza, who looked warily back at her, beginning to sense that things were going radically wrong. “Why do I have to put up with this?” Mom demanded.
“I no know,” Constanza said, trying to come up with a soft answer in an unfamiliar language.
“How can he treat me this way?” Mom yelled, and waved her hand, crying, “Give me that milk!”
Bewildered, Constanza handed across the butcher block to Mom her half-finished glass of milk. Mom grabbed it, lifted it, and poured it on her own head. Milk streamed down over her face and ran into her tight gray hair. She flung the glass away; it bounced off a cabinet and smashed on the floor. Ignoring the noise, Mom lunged forward as though somebody else were trying to beat her to it and grabbed up the plastic carton of milk. It was about a third full.
Constanza, wide-eyed, shaking, scrambled clumsily off the stool and backed away from the butcher block, as Mom upended the milk carton over her head, milk splashing down onto her head, dripping off her nose, staining the shoulders of her old gray cardigan, gluing her hair to her scalp. Flinging the empty carton away, Mom glared at Constanza and moved around the butcher block after her. Constanza moved, too, keeping the bulk of the butcher-block island between them, and slowly they reversed their original positions.
Mom stopped; so did Constanza. Trying to look sly, but still looking mostly enraged and out of control, Mom said, “We got any more milk?”
“I no know,” quavered Constanza.
“You’re lying, you dirty wetback!” Mom yelled, and waved both arms around. “Look in that refrigerator, and you’d better come up with something!”
Shaking with fear, Constanza stumbled to the refrigerator, managed on the second try to get it open, and brought out two full cartons of milk, which she set on the butcher block as though they were offerings to a violent god.
“Open them!”
The refrigerator door snicked itself shut behind Constanza as she fumbled open first one and then the other carton. Mom grabbed them, one at a time, poured out great gushing white streams of milk onto her head, drenching herself, sopping her old print dress, getting milk even into her shoes.
Over by the television set, Dad snickered but didn’t look away from the golf game. “Pouring milk on her head again,” he told himself.
Mom flung the first carton away, and then the second, and they bounced and rolled around the room. Pointing past Constanza at the refrigerator, she yelled, “Give me that half-and-half! I saw that half-and-half in there!”
Constanza nodded spastically, backing away from Mom toward the refrigerator, not willing to look away from the older woman, but having to in order to open the refrigerator door, search the interior, bring out the nearly full small carton of half-and-half. On the other side of the room, Dad nodded his head in satisfaction, clucking the teeth in his hands.
The half-and-half poured more slowly through Mom’s matted hair, down around her ears, through her eyebrows, and over her hot mad eyes. She hurled the empty carton back over her shoulder, away, away, anywhere. It barely missed Dad, who didn’t even blink.
Mom took a deep breath, fists clenched, knuckles standing out against the thin white milk-stained flesh. “Heavy cream!” she screamed. “Give me heavy cream! I want heavy creeeeaaammmmmmm!”
I rock back and forth on my stinging rump, the heels of my hands pressed to my stinging eyes. Oh, this just came over me, this just came over me, I must regain control.
I regain control. I stop rocking back and forth. I lower my hands from my calm face. I say, “Finally, I just had to go down there to the beach house myself.”
Flashback 15E
Jack, in Hush Puppies and chinos and polo shirt, paced back and forth on the gray board deck of the Malibu house. Through the glass doors of the living room, Dad could be seen watching a bicycle race on television. Out of the curtained glass doors of the bedroom came Mom, soaking wet, furious, a crushed empty milk carton in her hand. She stomped across the deck toward Jack, her shoes making squelching sounds. “So there he is,” she snarled. “The big man.”
“Mom,” Jack said helplessly, spreading his hands. “What do you want from me?”
“Airline tickets,” Mom snapped.
Startled, not having expected this at all, Jack said, “What? Where to?”
“Home, of course.” Mom gave the house a look of hate, gave the Pacific Ocean a look of hate, gave Jack a look of hate. She said, “What is this cruddy place to Dad and me? Nothing but sand and faggots everywhere. We want to go home to Grover’s Corners, where we belong.”