‘I’m a little cold,’ I said.
‘Then go back home,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to watch me get on a bus. It might be a long time. Your mother’s probably thinking about you.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘She doesn’t need to get mad at you. She’s mad enough at me.’
I looked at my father. I tried to see his face in the streetlight. He was smiling and looking at me, and I think he was happy for that moment, happy for me to be with him, happy that he was going to a fire now to risk whatever he cared about risking. It seemed strange to me, though, that he could be a man who played golf for a living and then one day become a man who fought forest fires. But it’s what was happening, and I thought I would get used to it.
‘Are you too old now to give your old dad a kiss?’ my father said. ‘Men love each other, too. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. And he took my cheeks in his hands and kissed me on the mouth, and squeezed my face. His breath smelled sweet to me and his face was rough.
‘Don’t let what your parents do disappoint you,’ he said.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I won’t.’ I felt afraid then for some reason, and I thought if I stayed there I would show him that I was, so I turned around and started back up Central in the dark and the growing cold. When I got to the corner I turned to wave good-bye. But my father was not in sight, and I thought that he had already gotten onto the bus and was waiting in his seat among the Indians.
Chapter 3
When I got home the lights were still on in our house. My mother was watching television in her bedroom, still dressed, and drinking a glass of beer. When I came in the door she looked at me as if I was my father and whatever she thought about him she thought about me, too.
‘Is he gone off to fight the big fire now?’ she said. She was almost casual in the way she said this. She reached and put down her glass on the bed table.
‘He got on a bus,’ I said.
‘Just like a school-boy,’ she said. She looked at her glass of beer.
‘He told me he hadn’t intended to cause any trouble.’
‘I’m sure it’s true,’ my mother said. ‘He has very beautiful intentions. What’s your opinion?’
‘I think it’s all right,’ I said.
My mother reached for her glass and took a drink out of it and shook her head while she swallowed. ‘What about me?’ she said, and rested her glass on her stomach. People on the television were laughing. A fat man was running around a small man and being chased by a dog. I didn’t feel comfortable being in the room at that moment. ‘Maybe he’s going to leave me. Maybe we’re on our own right now.’
‘I don’t think he’s going to do that,’ I said.
‘We haven’t been very intimate lately. You might as well hear that.’
I did not say anything.
‘You probably think I’m making too big a deal out of this, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re thinking,’ I said.
‘Nobody really wants to please you, that’s all.’ She shook her head as if it was almost a joke. ‘That’s all. They want to please themselves. If you’re happy with that, then everything’s great. If you aren’t, too bad. That’s important,’ my mother said. ‘It’s the key to everything.’ She put her head back on the pillow and stared up at the light globe in the ceiling. ‘Happiness. Sadness. The works. You’re happy if—’
Just at that moment the phone started to ring in the kitchen. I turned to go answer it, but my mother said, ‘Let’s don’t answer that.’ The phone kept ringing, loud and with a hard metal sound where it sat on the table, as if something urgent was waiting to be said by whoever was calling. But we were not going to hear it. I must’ve looked nervous because my mother smiled at me, a smile she had smiled at me all my life. ‘Who do you think it is?’ she said. The phone quit ringing and the house was completely silent except for the TV.
‘Maybe it was Dad,’ I said.
‘Maybe it was,’ she said.
‘It could’ve been a wrong number, too,’ I said, though I thought the phone call was my father and I felt afraid because I hadn’t answered it.
‘We’ll never know now,’ my mother said. ‘But. What I was saying.’ She took a last drink of her beer. ‘You’re happy if the thing you naturally want makes the other person happy. If it’s not that way, then I don’t know. I guess you’re in limbo.’
‘Where’s that?’ I said, because I had never heard that word before.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s the place where nobody wants to be. It’s the middle where you can’t feel the sides and nothing happens. Like now.’
For a moment I felt the phone was about to start ringing again, felt a current go through the lines of the house, as if the lines were part of me, alive and surging with a message. But it didn’t ring, and the feeling in me died out.
‘Tomorrow might be a better day,’ my mother said. ‘Now’s not so hot.’ She reached and turned off the lamp beside her bed. ‘Turn off my light, Joe,’ she said. I switched off the overhead light. ‘And go to bed, too,’ she said, lying there in her clothes in the light from the television. ‘Something’ll happen to make things seem different.’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
My mother turned over and faced the wall. I thought she went to sleep at that instant, because she didn’t say anything else to me. And I went to my room down the hall, and in a short time afterward I went to sleep myself.
The next day I went to school as I would on any other day, but my mother told me as I was leaving that she was going out that morning to look for a better job than teaching swimming classes.
‘I don’t want to be poor,’ she said. She was standing at the bathroom sink in her petticoat, putting black pins in her hair. ‘We might have to move into a smaller place,’ she said. ‘I thought of that. Would you mind that?’
‘I think Dad will be back,’ I said.
‘Do you?’ she said. ‘Is that your best opinion on the subject?’ She looked at me where I was in the hall, holding my coat and my school books under my arm. It was warm in the house. The bathroom heater was turned up high, and I could see the little blue flames.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’ I was surprised she was thinking about these changes already.
‘Fine. I’ll remember that,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ She glanced at me with pins in her mouth and her hands in her hair, and nodded. ‘You’re a very trusting boy. You wouldn’t be a very good lawyer. You don’t want to be a lawyer, though, do you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘What do you want to be?’
This was something we had not precisely talked about for a long time, and I did not have my answer ready. ‘I’d like to work on a railroad someplace,’ I said.
‘That’s not very good,’ my mother said. ‘You have to find a better profession. When you come back today have a better answer.’ My mother looked at herself in the mirror. ‘We went to college,’ she said. ‘Your father and I both. But you wouldn’t know it.’ She stared at herself, wrinkled her nose. ‘Handsome is as handsome does, I guess,’ she said. ‘You’re wasting your life standing here watching me, sweetheart. Go to school.’ And I went to school just as she said.
When I came back home at three o’clock — it was not a day that I worked at the photographer’s studio — there was a car parked across the street from our house, a pink, four-door Oldsmobile I did not know, and a man was in our living room, a man I did not know either.
The man stood up when I came in the front door. He and my mother had been sitting in chairs, not very close together. My mother’s hair was fixed with the black pins she had been putting in that morning, and the man had on a suit and a tie. It was still warm in the house and they were both drinking bottles of beer. My mother had her shoes off and was in her stocking feet.