The Miss America Family Page 6

  I passed the joint back and nodded, trying to hold the smoke in.

  “My mom told me that when they were young, they were crazy about each other. That once she asked my dad this question: ‘Would you have an affair with me if I was the other woman?’ What do you think the answer to that should be?”

  “No,” I said. “He should say no because, you know, he’s loyal.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s how my dad answered. ‘No.’ But my mom told me that she started to cry, that they were on a beach vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. It had rained for three days straight, and she locked herself in her bedroom. Do you know why?”

  I had no idea.

  “She said that he didn’t think she was sexy enough, you know, to take him away from his wife. As if his wife were just a ball and chain all of a sudden and not her at all. And so what did he do?”

  “He changed his answer?” I was guessing.

  “Sure. He said that of course she was beautiful and sexy enough to tempt him away, and, although this was really the answer she wanted, she never really trusted him after that.”

  “That’s crazy!” I said.

  “Sure,” Janie said. “That’s the point of the story. How crazy people are. Totally fucked up.”

  And I thought of Dilworth Stocker, how if he didn’t have so much to prove, he could be an okay guy. I pictured the way he seemed to love shaking hands, gruffly pulling the person toward him, always clenching too hard. Why does he have to go around shaking every guy’s hand so rough like he’s trying to nail everybody down to earth? I thought if only there weren’t all this handshaking bullshit, each man tethering himself to the next, each handshake saying, Still one of us, right? If we’d just let ourselves go, without all this bullshit handshaking and nodding, and then I imagined Dilworth Stocker dropping his nail clippers to the tiled floor, rising up, right out of the steamy bathroom, out the open window, up into the sky. I imagined all the men on our block at their lawn mowers and mailboxes, waxing their cars, suddenly lifting off the ground, swimming through the air. My stepdad’s towel now flying over his head like a flag, all of them rising and rising and singing, in unison, like choirboys.

  Janie went on, “And if they are happy, just happen to be by dumb luck, they will fuck it up on purpose. That’s what I’m trying to say. My mother says that a woman is never just one woman, but she’s sometimes all the women she’s ever known or thought about or heard of. That’s the only intelligent thing my mother’s ever said to me. I don’t really understand it, but I do at the same time.”

  By this point, I was stoned. I thought of my mother, how she was night and day, two women, at the very least, but also she’d been my dad’s wife, and then the opposite, Dilworth’s wife and in between the two, this woman dragging man after man into her bed, and Miss New Jersey, too, that she’d once been my age, her dad just newly dead. And I believed that Janie Pinkering was not only the most beautiful girl in the world but also the wisest, and I said that part out loud, stupidly. “You’re so wise,” I said.

  In any case, no matter how stupid it sounded, something about it was right and Janie said, “Let’s fuck in my parents’ bed. It’s way bigger.”

  Pixie

  Dreaming of Underwater Keys

  I wasn’t sleeping much. I could take pills and drift off, but then I would have the dream about my father and the keys, and I would wake up. When Dilworth and I were first married and I couldn’t go back to sleep after this dream, I would wake him, and he would drag himself up from sleep and say, “What is it, kitten? What’s got you so upset?” But he caught on soon enough that there was nothing that he could do to help and so he became a heavy sleeper, he learned to roll to his left side with his deaf ear up—the one blown out as a kid when he exploded a bike tire by over pumping it. I couldn’t lie in bed, listening to Dilworth snore, the deep rattle of his body. I got up and walked through the dark house.

  Last summer it was at its worst. I walked from room to room. I watched Mitzie sleep, knowing that if I woke her she’d put her chubby arm around my neck and stroke my hair, that she wouldn’t fall asleep until I had drifted off first. She has that kind of conscientiousness. Mitzie is the type of child who looks at your face wanting only to please. And if she makes you happy, she smiles so brightly you’d think there was a light glowing up from her stomach. It’s a dangerous need in her, but who knows how to stop it? I never woke her. Sometimes I caught Ezra in the kitchen, filling up his growing body. I thought that perhaps the past was coming back to me so strongly because Ezra was almost the age I was then, that he was reminding me of what it was like to be young, everything stretching out in front of me, and that may have been part of it. Ezra has known me forever, or so it seems, because I reinvented myself when he was born, became someone else in motherhood. When I was first pregnant, I couldn’t imagine a child inside me. I envisioned a landscape, an ocean turning in on itself, a moving mountain, a field that could fold and unfold, my body overtaken by a living map. I didn’t have the knowledge that life was simply passing through me, that the child wouldn’t be born as much as he would be taken from me, if you know what I mean. And maybe giving up Ezra, handing him over again to the world, this time as a man, I was losing a piece of my self-invention. I was becoming less of a mother and since there was no new role to slip into, I began to look backward for old ones. It isn’t a good idea to escape to a place you’ve escaped from. Like trying to dig your way out of a prison only to wind up having tunneled into the solitary confinement cell; it makes things twice as difficult.

  I watched Ezra hunched over a cereal bowl, his almost man-size hands dwarfing the spoon, and I imagine telling him things about my life. Every once in a while my mouth would open, but I didn’t know where to start. Sometimes I thought he already knew. I have always had the feeling that we are wound by the same infinite string, a cord that keeps us attached, that is always just taut enough for us to tell if the other is trembling. His relationship with the troublemaking Pinkering girl, for example, was obvious enough to me, even though I was barely holding on myself. We were both aware of a change in the other. Ezra knew that I was feverish. I think that he could see me trying to tip myself forward into my life. It’s hard to explain. I could be there with Ezra, and I would feel like if I could only take a deep breath, fill my chest with air, I could catch up with myself, my own existence, which seemed to sit just three inches in front of me. Sometimes I would clean in the middle of the night. I would scrub down the floors with a bristle brush on my hands and knees, because it was physical. It was real. No one could deny that I was a woman scrubbing a floor, and that afterward the floors were shining. Ezra would see the shining floors, the look of my eyes, a glaze, maybe, and he knew something. He could tell.

  The dream kept me up, made me sleepless, a creature pacing the house. I’d had the same dream ever since my father died. It was about my father and the man. These are not things you talk about, dreams of little bike-lock keys pouring out of my father’s mouth, my father underwater, his thin hair haloing out of his head, a fan of hair waving back and forth like seaweed. I’d never told anyone about them, especially not when I was young. I’d memorized a quote from Emily Post: “Don’t dilate on your own problems. Your audience has them, too, and won’t be entertained by yours.” But I don’t think that I’ve ever known anyone who dreamed about their dead father’s mouth spilling over with keys for nearly twenty years.

  In the dream, I was there with him, always trying to catch one key, just one, but there were so many he was coughing them up, and I was caught in a storm of them like in a game show, one of those windowed closets with all the money swirling around the contestant, who was always some panicked housewife. And the man was always coming toward us, swimming but with his arms to his side, like an eel, his hair perfectly in place except for that one greasy lock that fell on his forehead, even though he was swimming toward me and all his hair should have been back.

  Walking the house at night after these drea
ms, I missed Cliff singing to me when I was scared as a little kid. Often, in the quiet darkness, I took out a box of his letters and organized the envelopes, spread the pages out on the dining-room table. The paper was thin, their folds as comfortable and worn as a map’s. I’d try to hum the way Cliff hummed, but I couldn’t get it right. I’ve never gotten it right. Sometimes I can almost hear his voice, I can almost replay it in my head, but then just as quickly as it shows up, it’s gone.

  Cliff claimed as soon as he was on the plane he’d forget all about Bayonne, which he called “the shit-hole,” that he’d forget about my mother and me and my father, too. But in the first letter, he said that he saw us in his head even more than he had when we were all living together and Dad was there, too. He was feeling the same way I was last summer, divided between past and present. This was my favorite letter. “I can see us all together in the kitchen, shuffling around each other, sometimes talking, sometimes not. And it’s clear as a bell, as a drain at the bottom of a tub of water.” I read it again and again, and I could see us in the kitchen, just as he’d said it, shuffling, mumbling, a chorus of bodies that made up a family. The image of the tub stuck with me.

  I read all the letters, although I didn’t want to, although I wanted to stop right there, before they became ugly. I read about the wetness, that they could hardly ever get dry over there what with the constant rain. He was in places I didn’t remember ever hearing of: Laik He and Phu Cong and then Highway 15; I imagined the American slice of highway running through jungles and old-world villages. He slept in rice paddies and pea fields that seemed to have rising tides. He talked about the leeches that they had to burn off with cigarettes or, sometimes, lighter fluid. There were rats, too, that would run right over his face while he was lying down at night. And when they did get dry, they’d do anything to stay dry. That was how they lost a soldier named Briggs. Cliff didn’t know Briggs very well. But when my brother got there, everybody was dry. The rain had stopped for a couple days. They’d moved camp uphill; that’s where he joined up. He became good friends with this black guy named Jamison from New York City, and all Jamison could talk about was how fucking glad he was to have dry socks. They’d hung them on tree limbs to dry out with what little sun made it down through the wide leaves. But it didn’t last long and soon they were sent down toward the swamps, and that night there was gunfire and a few of them were on patrol, Jamison and Briggs and Cliff. And an older soldier told them to jump in the swamp, for cover, and my brother did and Jamison, too. But Briggs didn’t. He couldn’t get wet again. He stood there with his gun just loose at his side. Cliff turned around to yell at him. And Jamison’s face was a dark purple, the cords of his neck standing out, he was screaming at Briggs so hard. But Briggs didn’t move, just shook his head, and the bullets kicked into him, his stomach first. He folded to his knees, and then his shoulder, his legs out straight, and he was dead, that’s how Cliff put it. Just writhing with all that bullet fire and then nothing. I thought about these things last summer more than I did when I first read about them. I went over them in my mind. I was stuck, the way I get sometimes, like a needle in a record groove, a hitch in the song played over and over. I imagined Cliff replaying our lives, too, as he tried to sleep. He was just a kid for Chrissakes! Not much older than Ezra.

  In an early letter Cliff wrote that he hadn’t killed anybody yet, which had been a surprise to me. I’d thought that he’d open fire the minute they let him down off the plane he’d been so angry. But he told me he was ready. He said it was his job, his duty. He said he was an American more than anything else. More than he was a Kitchy. He said that anyone could tell he wasn’t much of a Kitchy, nothing like our father. But that wasn’t true. Everyone always said that he looked like our father, aside from Cliff’s girlish mouth. He said he was an American, first and foremost.

  And I remembered this letter better than the rest, because it made me sad, much sadder than when he’d left that afternoon with his suitcase for basic training, because, I guess, I’d felt like he was really gone and that maybe he hadn’t ever really been there anyway. I knew that Cliff was doing the only thing he could do, and even though I hated people killing each other, I hoped he did get to kill someone and that he could come back home to us having done what he needed to do, still alive.

  Meanwhile I was living with my mother, the two of us alone. After my father died, my mother drank coffee, smoked cigarettes every night, and then she went to work with the Chinese women who chattered like a horde of mice when she walked into the room. My mother rarely spoke, and I never saw her cry. We were quiet, not even polite. Once I remember she told me to get out of the bathroom and stop staring at myself.

  She was standing outside the bathroom door and she said, “You’ll cross your eyes, staring at yourself that way, and they’ll stick. A curse!” The truth was that my mother could stop going to Mass if she wanted, but she couldn’t stop being superstitious. It’s how she was raised. It’s the way thoughts occur to her in her brain.

  And I started to cry because I hated her and I believed she was never a beauty. I hated her bent shoulders and the way she wiped her nose with the back of her hand. The only person who ever looked at her was the butcher, Mr. Graziano, with his belly as round as a rump roast. After my father died, I was the one who went to the butcher, and he looked at me like I was the saddest thing he’d ever seen. He gave me an extra side of beef for free. He said, “How’s ya motha doing? She needs her strength.” He was married to a pug-faced woman and had three kids, older than me and Cliff, daughters that he couldn’t marry off. But aside from him, no one even glanced at her. I always knew that there was something about the butcher, but what exactly I couldn’t say. My mother grew up in the mountains of West Virginia, dirty and barefoot. She wasn’t a beauty, but she had some other kind of power that I’ve never been able to put a name to. But I knew that she didn’t understand what it was like to be beautiful, to be me, and I thought of Christina the Astonishing in a tree, in an oven, soaring to church rafters like an angel—anything to escape these awful dirty, heavy bodies. Twenty years now and sometimes I can still smell the man on me.

  I opened the door and said, “I’m not staring into the mirror,” even though I had been. I said, “I was in here crying because Daddy’s dead. Why don’t you cry? How come you’ve never once cried?”

  She stared at me, shocked, the color drained from her cheeks. Her eyes looked like they might cry. They were suddenly wet and shimmery. And then she narrowed her eyes and she spoke in this deep, low voice that I’d never heard before. “Women can’t chain their hands behind their backs and jump into a river. We can never give in. One day you’ll know that I never once gave in, not even in the smallest way.”

  I have held on to this all my life. That’s what I do. I remember all the things that I don’t understand. I remember them vividly, hoping that one day they’ll become clear.

  I didn’t talk to anybody about these things, not even Jimmy Vietree, who talked all the time when we met by the train tracks. He talked about geometry class, his dog’s gimp leg, his brother’s sleeper hold. And he told me to say something, to tell him anything, but I didn’t. I wanted to tell him that my family—what was left of it—had given up on religion, that my body wasn’t meant to genuflect like the nuns taught us. My head wasn’t meant to be bowed, that my body arched naturally like all those blades of wet grass blown back by the passing trains. My knees were naturally weak and my head got heavy with something just as simple as wanting, and mostly that I wasn’t anything like my mother: afraid of pleasure, afraid to be happy because she couldn’t stand the loss of it. I could have told him about our vacation at the Jersey Shore, how my father caught a golden, gold-eyed fish and held it up over his head, its scales shiny, polished-looking in the sun, that my mother cooked the fish in our cottage, but how she couldn’t wear the hat, couldn’t just make him happy and put it on her head. I should have said all these things and more. I needed to, but couldn’t.

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nbsp; With Jimmy I didn’t have to say anything. I just looked at him, his freckled face, his rumpled hair. He was plain and dull. I didn’t think anyone would believe him even if he told people about us. We stretched against each other, almost like two pale cats. At school, the nuns kept it up, filmstrips of dirty loveless girls, lessons in how to say no, because everyone should say no, but all I could think about was how I tried to shake my head when Jimmy pressed against me. I mouthed no, until it became a breath, a whisper, until it felt like my hips rang with it, no, no, no, as mechanical as the train’s churn and above it, I could always hear its whistled moan rising.

  Cliff’s letters spread out on the dining-room table, its dim chandelier overhead, I remembered lying on top of Jimmy Vietree, almost hearing myself say that I wanted to live someplace else, anywhere else than with my mother, the smell of her cabbage, limp from being cooked and cooked, meat boiled till it had no taste and how, if I walked into the room she pretended not to see me, that it would be easier for her if I was gone like my father and Cliff and even God, too, since she’d kicked Him out. I’d been the only one left to remind her of what used to be true. She said things like, “Do you have to walk so loud, like a horse clomping in a stall?” and “Don’t slurp your broth.” She said, “Why do you practice accordion? It’s too hard for you. It just comes out squeaks.” I knew what she really wanted. She wanted me to disappear, to no longer exist, to drown, to fall to consumption, to go to war. She would turn the television up, and the house filled with the beeping sounds of a game show, of happy, happy people cheering. I remembered her saying once that she couldn’t love me, that it was for my own good, because I’d just be taken away, that life was a giant scale of good and bad, and that if she loved me too much, the scale would have to tip. I remembered her words, the idea of her words pouring through me, maybe even the sound of water rushing in from somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where we were or when. And despite herself, despite all her efforts to keep that scale balanced, I thought she did love me, in some way that she couldn’t help. But what I didn’t realize, in my thin nightgown on those sleepless summer nights, was that I finally was giving in to her. After all these years I was finally disappearing.