“Calmed down any yet?”
There comes a time when people will start cutting through the childish bullshit you feed them and call your bluff, a time when you’re forced to realize that you’re not unique and you’re not fooling everyone. I was not at that age yet. When the old man spoke, I looked at him curiously. It was, I think, the first time anyone ever spoke to me as if I was nearly an adult.
“Your mama looks tired,” he said then, and I hurriedly looked away and back out at the sea. “Is she?”
“She’s always tired,” I said, without meaning to. My mother’s tiredness was something I hated and held against her, in the same way I blamed her for the bruises that came and went round her eyes. Had I loved my father even a little bit I would probably have blamed her less. The emotions of the powerless don’t always make much sense.
“Maybe she’s got stuff on her mind,” the man said. “Like why she can’t buy ice cream for little boys.”
“We always have ice cream when we come here,” I blurted. “Always.” We did, and as far as I was concerned it was most of the point of being away. I wasn’t just a greedy little boy; the ice cream stood for something in my mind which I was far too young to articulate. Twice a year we got a weekend away from my father—two days when he wasn’t around, forcing us to see the world the way he saw it, cramped and dark and cold. Demons lived in everything my father saw, presences beneath surfaces, evil in mind. He would have understood The Gap very well, but only after it had become strange—life as a mirage, wrapped round horror and preventing us from seeing the truth. Usually, the trips my mother and I took were time away from that. Today, however, it felt as if his shadow was still over us.
“Sometimes you can’t have everything you want,” the man said, a platitude which pushed all the wrong buttons in me.
“My dad send you?” I said tightly, and glared at him. His eyes opened wide at my tone, and he seemed to look at me in a new way. “I can’t have things because I’m’ a kid, and I stop being a kid when I don’t want them anymore?”
“Is that what he tells you?”
“Yeah. That and a whole lot more.” For a moment, I stood on the brink of telling the old man some things, of speaking for the first time about the way life was. I had no friends at the time, because we were kept moving by Father’s endless quest for work. We’d seen most of Virginia by then, and it wasn’t getting any better. My father wasn’t lazy, far from it. One of his most oft-repeated creeds was that a man without a job was fit for nothing but to be fed to animals. He was forever doing something, but to no purpose, with no joy, with nothing but slow-burning hatred of everything around him. Sometimes when he sat you could see his hands tremble, as if his whole body was vibrating with some need to destroy. If he got a job it generally lasted about a week before his fuse burned out and he got himself fired for brawling with someone or messing up because he was shit-faced. Time and again we held a small celebration when it looked like we might be in a town for more than a few days. My mother always tried to mark good moments in the belief that it might make them stay. She would cook a special dinner, and by each plate would be some small gift, carefully chosen from thrift stores. I hated these celebrations for the lies they always told, for the way they smeared her love for us with pointlessness and doom. Even as I unwrapped some new pencil, or small colored box, I would be thinking of the ones I’d had before. Mom would happily stake out the town and find out about local schools, and then within two weeks we’d be on our way somewhere else.
I knew other children for days, maybe a couple of weeks and then they were blown away on the wind and lost up in the mountains. My mother talked to me as if I was a child, because holding onto that belief was the only way she could carry on; and her parents, with whom we stayed at the coast, were not inclined to talk much to the son of their son-in-law.
But I didn’t say anything to the old man; I lapsed into tearful silence instead. The dam was already too strong. To let it break would have felt like a betrayal. I wanted to be happy, as everyone does, and I think I understood that if I started letting things out of the back of my mind they would sour the front forever.
“He’s wrong,” the old man said suddenly. “He’s wrong in a very bad way.” My heart lurched at hearing someone say that, at hearing a grown-up say the words that I believed in every corner of my heart. I wiped my eyes and kept silent.
“When you get older, some things won’t seem so important,” he continued, eyes calmly on the people down at the waterline. “Few years ago, I used to chase a lot of things. Now I don’t hardly even remember why. But then I’m old, and fit to die, so what difference in what I say?” I stirred slightly, embarrassed, and he laughed. “What you gonna do when you grows up, boy?”
“I’m going to have a job,” I said, and he nodded. Maybe he knew what I meant, maybe not.
“What about ice cream then?”
“I’m going to have it all,” I said, firmly and seriously. “I’m going to have it every day, and more than one flavor, and I’m going to have big cones with nuts and fudge.” He began to laugh, and then, at the light in my eyes, stopped. “I am.”
“I hope you do,” he said. “I really hope you do. When I was your size I used to love toffee apples. You like toffee apples?” He raised his eyebrows at me, but I didn’t know. I’d seen toffee apples, but never had one. “They’re good. Maybe even better than ice cream, though I’d admit it’s a close-run thing. My mama would take me to the fair when it came around and I’d always have an apple. They were real hard and I’d have to turn my head on the side to use the big teeth there or they’d all break into little pieces.” I smiled at this, and he grinned, and in his face, behind the paper skin, I saw for a fleeting moment, someone my own age, someone to run and play with.
“Teeth don’t break,” I objected. “They’re harder than stone.”
“Maybe you’re right, but I didn’t know better then. And I’d always say when I grew up I was going to have a toffee apple every day, and I was going to stay up late every night and watch TV until my eyes went square and no one was going to get in my face. I thought that’s what being a grown-up was about. I thought that’s what it was for.”
For a while I didn’t say anything, sensing some dismal news was on the way, some revelation that I didn’t want to hasten. My mother was still down at the far end of the bay. A shadow from the late-afternoon sun crept across the rocks toward her.
“What happened?” I asked, eventually.
“I growed up,” he said, and seemed inclined to leave it there.
“And? What?”
The man’s eyes seemed far away. “I stayed up late, I watched TV, and I had a pretty good life,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ve had a toffee apple in more than forty years.”
“How come?”
“You forget,” he said, and shrugged.
“I won’t. I’m going to do everything. I’m going to do everything and do it all the time and no one’s going to stop me.”
“Good,” he said. “I hope you do. There’s worse ways to live your life than remembering what you want. You remember, son, and take what you want when you want it, and don’t let anyone get in your way. Try to bend the world around you while you still have the time.”
He sat there for a few minutes longer, looking somehow older and further away, and then he gingerly stood up and stretched.
“Are you going?” I asked.
“That I am. Now look. There’s five dollars on the rock beside you. You pick it up, Spend it how you want. But then go down to your mama, and take her by the hand. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, grinning up at him, eyes squinting in the sunlight. Then he was off, stepping carefully over the rocks, and I watched him until he was gone, I glanced at the rock where he’d been and sure enough there was a five-dollar bill on the next boulder, weighed with a pebble. I looked at it a while and then I picked it up, but I didn’t buy a cone. I made my way down to the sand and found my mother, and when she wasn’t looking I slipped the bill in her purse. She was careful with money, and must have noticed it almost immediately, but she never mentioned it. Or maybe she did, because when we changed buses at Williamsburg on the way home she had both a soda and a coffee, and when I came back from the bathroom I found a small bowl of ice cream waiting for me at the table. That was Mom for you. She always knew how to say things without opening her mouth.