The Miss America Family Read online

  “I was a Manhattan housewife,” Richard said. “But now I own a convertible. That’s it.” And then he whispered to me, “I stole the convertible, actually. I’d drive it into the river if it weren’t the only thing I had.”

  “Family shoes,” Mrs. Pichard elaborated. “Shoes for the whole family.”

  “And I don’t mind the blacks,” Mr. Pichard added.

  “Oh, no, of course not,” Mrs. Pichard said.

  “They need shoes, don’t they? Come Easter, the blacks will buy the finest shoes in the shop. Jimmy Carter once said that by eight years old he could tell a good person from a bad person. The good ones, he said, bought his peanuts and the bad ones didn’t. That’s a motto to understand, to take to the grave.” Mr. Pichard winked at me. I thought about rules, how everybody must have them, stupid rules that nobody really lives by.

  “I think that statement was taken out of context,” my father said. “I think he was in a church, making a very different point, and had been misunderstood.”

  “I understood him,” Mr. Pichard said. “Some things I don’t understand.” He glanced at his son. “But that I understood.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Pichard said. “He’s fond of that story. He is. He tells it often.”

  Richard said, “I’m trying to take this setback in my life as a time to reflect on my circumspect childhood. I could be living in New York still, you know, with friends of friends of friends, but I need to regroup, to relive, and renew.” He turned to me. “You see, Ezra, there’s no conversation to follow here, really. You can say whatever you want. Tell them about your mother shooting your stepfather in the arm, anything at all.” This got Mr. Pichard’s attention. He looked up at me across the table quickly and returned to his plate. “It doesn’t matter here,” Richard went on. “You just talk and talk and talk some more.”

  Mr. Pichard grumbled. “He shouldn’t have gone to college. That was the problem, Hester. Our son should have sold shoes.”

  “My father doesn’t really speak to me,” Richard said. “Have you noticed that? My mother is in denial. No one here is paying attention.”

  “I am,” I said. “I think.”

  “When my son was a boy, he needed too much attention,” Mr. Pichard said. “Not like Ezra here. A good young strapping boy who knows to sit quiet, eat, and listen. Like me, when I was a lad,” Mr. Pichard said. “Our boy had an unnatural need for attention, and Hester gave it to him, as best she could.”

  “He had the loveliest assortment of shoes a boy could ever want,” she said, her fork clattering on her empty dessert plate absently.

  “I dressed up once as Betty Page for Christmas dinner, in the leather thigh-high boots,” Richard said. “But he still didn’t talk to me. He doesn’t talk to me. He blames my mother.” He took a sip of ginger ale. “We only speak through her. It’s odd at first, but you get the hang of it. Like right now, if I wanted the salt, I’d say, ‘You know, mother, if I had a father who spoke to me and if he were sitting right there, I’d ask him to pass the salt.’ And often enough, miraculously, the salt arrives. There’s all kinds of love.”

  Mr. Pichard didn’t look at him. “It’s time to go upstairs. I need a soak in the tub. Hester, leave the dishes.” He pushed his chair from the table and let his napkin fall to his plate. He walked to the stairs and used the banister to pull himself up. Mrs. Pichard placed her fork diagonally across her plate, nodded to us all sweetly, and followed her husband, disappearing into the dark at the top of the stairs. The dark almost seemed to swallow them up as if they no longer existed.

  The three of us stood up and started stacking plates.

  Richard said, “It’s a show, really. All of that business of me needing so much attention, it’s his way of acknowledging my sexuality. And, to him, it’s the nicest way to say it. If you looked into their hearts, you’d see that they both love me.”

  “I’d go back to living in New York,” I said.

  “I have no money,” Richard said. “Nothing. You can’t just be depressed, getting fat eating Ho Hos on someone’s sofa, watching soaps all day. Except, of course, here. It’s awful, but they’ll take care of me until I’m on my feet again.” He was trying to be bright, but his face crumpled for a minute as he looked around the room. His eyebrows rose, eyes moist, and then he smiled. “Nothing has changed here. Nothing. It’s like walking through a museum of your shitty life. Each room should be roped off with red velvet rope.” And then he brushed us away with his hand. “I’ll take care of these. You two go on to sleep. That door right there opens into a bedroom.”

  It was a small room. The double bed took up most of the space. It had an adjoining powder room. My dad went in first to take a piss. When he was done, I went. The toilet water was blue, reminding me for a moment of home, my mother’s sparkling toilets, and Ty-D-Bol commercials, a man in a boat in your toilet. The toilet lid was covered in a yellow fuzzy toilet-lid hat to match the hand towels. On the wall were two wooden plaques, one of a little girl sitting on a pot and one of a little boy peeing into a pot. There was a little calligraphy note framed on the wall that read IF YOU SPRINKLE WHEN YOU TINKLE, PLEASE BE SWEET AND WIPE THE SEAT.

  When I walked back into the bedroom, my father was slouched on the far side of the mattress, a weak old thing that pinched and squeaked under his weight. He began untying his shoes, taking off his thick blue socks. “I’m sorry about all this, Ezra. I didn’t know it would be this bad of a scene.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Mr. Pichard reminds me of my own father,” he said. “When I was your age, my dad gave me stock tips. That was his idea of relating.” I remembered seeing my grandfather only once, at my grandmother’s funeral—I don’t remember her at all. He was a practical man, concerned more about the supply of napkins and ice chips at the wake than with grief. His family had made money from cows and they had a lot of it. I’ve thought ever since that he was unemotional and practical because he was midwestern or Scandinavian—they’d come from Scandinavia—that Scandinavians from Wisconsin were unemotional and overly organized by nature, and that it had to do with all of that cold weather. It had been winter, the house surrounded by two feet of snow. “Once when I’d been in the city awhile, attending NYU, but before I met your mom,” my dad continued on, “I went home for Thanksgiving and my dad, who was out on business somewhere, met up with my train. We rode the last leg of the trip together. We ran into an old friend of the family, another from the old country, who’d moved with his family two or three towns away. He asked my dad a lot of questions about who’d died and that kind of thing. Then he said, ‘So, does anyone in your family make love anymore?’ It was a really strange question, because the man was strait-laced like my father, but I said, ‘No,’ just like that, because I knew that no one did. But my father turned and stared at me, my uptight father who hadn’t even loosened his tie. ‘Of course we do,’ he said. ‘The women, at least, Aunt Jude and your mother and grandmother.’ I was shocked, really. I said something like, ‘They do? With who?’ My father was really calm. ‘By themselves,’ he said. I said, ‘Well that’s hardly making love.’ My father’s whole face went red. He stared at me. And the old neighbor almost died. ‘Glogg!’ he cried. ‘Do you still make glogg!’ Glogg’s an old Scandinavian drink with vodka and grain alcohol. The old guy looked like he was going to cry. My father just cleared his throat. ‘We have glogg for the holidays,’ he said. ‘For special occasions.’ And we were all quiet for the rest of the trip, not a word. It’s the closest my father and I ever came to communication. And see? It wasn’t communication at all.” He was undressed down to his striped boxer shorts. He pulled back the covers and slipped under the sheet. His chest had that same evenness as his face, a soft tan, and he was trim, muscled. There was almost no hair on his chest and so he looked even younger, his nipples pink like painted dolly cheeks, like Mitzie’s Barbie hats. He put his arms behind his head and crossed his ankles under the sheet, like someone lying down on a picnic blanket. I looked awa
y from him, getting undressed on my own side of the squeaky bed. I clicked off the light and curled up, my back to him.

  “I’ll tell you this, Ezra, I never hand myself over first. I can’t. I always offer a lamb version of myself to see if the person will slaughter it and if they don’t, well, then slowly I’ll hand myself over, very slowly. Even then it’s a rough road. It’s the only way I know to be.”

  I’d have asked him if he did that with me too, if he’d always offered me someone else, but I knew he did. “Why did you and mom get married?”

  “It’s a curse, heroism, the curse of a boy who read too much Robin Hood. I wanted to be a hero. Then I ruined everything, because I couldn’t save myself from myself. But you remember that part. You must remember that? Don’t you, Ezra?”

  “What part?” I had no idea what I was supposed to be remembering.

  “The mind can be so perfect,” he said. “It knows just what to throw away.” He paused. “Tomorrow, you know, I’ve got business to attend to. I don’t know what in God’s name you’ll do here all day, but I’ve got important things going on in Philly. I’ll be there until after dinner probably. I’d bring you along for the ride, but you’d just be bored.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew that this trip wasn’t a goodwill mission to help out a friend going through hard times. It wasn’t about some promise he felt he had to keep. He was pawning me off, unloading me on strangers. It was typical my father, quintessential him.

  “Look,” he said, “this is temporary. Your mom will be in charge again soon. We’ll figure this thing out.” Like my whole life was just one fucking algebra problem.

  Later, I listened to him breathing, a rattling breath in the dark, a figment just about to disappear again, and maybe that was best. I didn’t know anything about him, still, even after having learned his lousy secret and it was a secret, too. He thought my mom should have told me, that she’d have let it slip somehow, but it was his secret to tell, and he’s the one who let it stay a secret, year after year in his friends’ convertibles, eating crab and corn bisque at the Columbus Inn, making fun of Dilworth and the waiters. It was always the lamb-version of my father, the one he handed over in place of the real thing, and he’d only given me a glimpse of the real thing when he’d had to, when he was on the verge of being exposed. I imagined him out in the silver convertible, picking up men in restaurants or riding around with old lovers. I imagined the silver convertible parked outside some apartment and him and some other man inside, in bed together. I could almost imagine them, their naked chests, the rustle of their bodies under the sheets.

  I tried to shake it off and listened instead to Mr. and Mrs. Pichard upstairs, padding around in their bare feet, the intimate noises of two people getting ready for bed together, brushing their teeth, gargling, murmuring. Richard, I assumed, was up there too, in a bedroom decorated for an eight-year-old boy, probably cluttered with all of the toy trucks that Mr. Pichard had supposedly bought for me. I lay there with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. I tried to imagine Mrs. Pichard having scrubbed her husband’s humped back in the tub. I romanticized them, a tottering pair, still in love, maybe him brushing her white hair while she sat in the chair of her vanity. I thought Janie and I could be like that one day. But it was hard to hold on to. I doubted that they were happy at all. I mean, to some people, my mother and Dilworth may have seemed happy together, prior to her shooting him, that is, the shooting being a pretty good indication that their relationship had its wrinkles.

  I was afraid that my father would roll over in his sleep and touch me or, worse, that I would wake up with my hands on him. I remembered the summer before with Rudy in his dad’s boat, how, after we got stoned, Rudy said, “You up for a peep show?” He had to shout it over the music blaring from his dad’s stereo system, Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.”

  I asked him what he meant and he told me that just a few blocks from the dock there was a commune or something where the girls sunned themselves, naked, that all we had to do was follow some old train tracks. “You want to go?” He took a comb out of the inside pocket of one of his dad’s jackets hung over the back of the captain’s chair and ran it through his blond hair.

  I said, “Sure.”

  He shoved the comb in his dad’s pocket, picked up an empty Coke bottle, and spit in it. Smoking pot always made him want to spit, he said. His dad was still inland. Rudy said that he was probably getting drunk and wouldn’t be back until dark.

  We headed down through some high grass that bent over a pair of extinct railroad tracks. Rudy was carrying an old battery-operated transistor radio that his dad kept on the boat. I’d taken my shirt off on deck and still had it off. I don’t usually go around without a shirt. My skin was real white, but it was hot out and the sun felt good. Rudy had this galumphing walk, like he was always ducking something, except when he was balancing on the tracks. With his arms straight out from his shoulders, his back stiff and head tall, the transistor radio dipping and swaying in his fist, he was graceful, almost dainty, like a girl carrying a basket.

  He pointed out two white sheets billowing on a line tied to two posts and a skinny center tree about 200 feet away in the backyard of an old house. He turned off the radio and put his finger to his lips. “That’s the place,” he said, stepping off the other side of the tracks. We crouched low in the weeds and tried to peer between the sheets. “Did you see that titty?” he asked.

  I nodded, but I hadn’t. All I could see was a woman’s shadow on the sheets and her ankles and feet on the other side below.

  “I’d love a piece of that,” he said. He looked at me. “You would, too, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded but he kept looking at me so I punched his shoulder. “Sure!” I said.

  The sun lit the sheets up bright white. The woman’s shadow on the sheet didn’t move around much, just stood, hands on hips. She was talking to a bunch of girls I couldn’t see and they laughed all at once. The sheets rippled in the wind and then rose so I could catch a glimpse all the way up her thick thighs. I decided that they could be hippies or even just regular people standing in their backyard.

  “I haven’t seen much of anything,” I said. “They could be wearing bathing suits.”

  “They’re not wearing a thing. I guarantee it.” Rudy unzipped his pants. “I guarantee it.” I glanced at Rudy. He was rubbing himself with one hand, and still crouching in the grass, he steadied himself with the other. I looked away quick, but still I saw him in my head, his hair bright as the white sheets, his braces shining. The tip of his pecker was almost rose, almost blue. I kept my eyes straight ahead, and he started talking fast, “You know she’s built like my cousin’s friend, you know the one I told you about in the basement, almost fat like that, but really muscle, almost bigger than I am, but not really. I found this place on my own. It’s a gold mine, I tell you. It always delivers.”

  I stood up, looked around for my shirt, even though I knew I’d taken it off on deck. I imagined the women, rising up from behind the sheets. I felt lightheaded when I stood up, everything tunneling to black for a minute, and then wondered how many times Rudy had sat here in the weeds, jerking off by himself.

  “Why aren’t you jerking off?” he asked. “Go ahead.” He smiled, his eyes pinched, looking up into the sun at me, his head cocked. “Want to touch mine? Go ahead.”

  I turned around fast, and then I took off running. Weeds stung my legs. The sun made the world too bright; glass glittered up from the dirt. The world was so bright, it looked almost wet, shellacked, painted a loud new color.

  Rudy stood up and shouted after me, in a hoarse yell so that maybe the naked girls wouldn’t hear him. “God, I was just fucking around with you. You took it all wrong!”

  But Rudy’s pecker flashed in my mind, the bright prick and the women for some reason rising up, circling his head. I’d never thought of anything like it in my life, ever. Then I heard Rudy’s transistor radio. He must have turned it up real loud, but I was alr
eady far away. I tried to catch my breath but couldn’t. When I got to the dock, I bent over with my hands on my knees. It was like a giant clock sat in my stomach, ticking too loud. Each time I shut my eyes, women danced around Rudy’s head, naked. They had sunken white bellies and small powdery breasts that jiggled, their thin arms swooping as they circled faster and faster, bobbing until Rudy’s head was lost in a blur of their bodies: pointy elbows, skinny rumps, knobby white knees, and over and over again, Rudy’s dick, its reddish blue tip all sunlit. At the time I thought it was all Rudy, that he was the one acting like a faggot somehow, but now I wondered if he hadn’t seen something in me that I couldn’t see or didn’t want to see.

  Lying in bed that night, I felt sick all over again, and I hated my father for making me think of all this stuff. I was angry at him for not saving my mother the way he’d set out to do, but leaving all of that to me, and what could I do? I was his son, after all, maybe just as much of a fag as he was. And it dawned on me that I should have shot Dilworth, that maybe for some reason he deserved to be shot, and that I should have been the one to do it, not my mother, but me. I worried about not saving my mother the way she needed to be saved, about not understanding that night when she was young, the screaming and the wooden bat. I wanted to save someone, to save little Mitzie from the Worthingtons’ good healthy American living, to save maybe Janie Pinkering from her parents or Miss Abernathy from a dull life as an old maid English teacher—despite the information that she might be having fuck-me sex with her fiancé. I thought of saving Richard, in his thigh-high leather boots from his parents and his parents from him. I thought about saving my father. I imagined walking in on my father and his lover, the slow turn-around of their faces, the surprise of it. I imagined telling my father he was wrong, that he’d done everything wrong, but that we could fix it. It was fixable, if only he’d be willing to try, for me. And I imagined him saying, “Yes, Ezra, for you.” Finally, I lay in bed trying not to think of anything but Janie Pinkering’s peachlike knee and, on it, the blue butterfly, the hinges of its wings slowly opening and closing.