Calling Home Read online

  16

  “You’ll sleep in here,” he said, turning on a light. A bed with a striped coverlet, next to a white nightstand. There were no pictures on the wall. It looked like the room had been built that very day. The air smelled faintly of fresh paint. This, plainly, was going to be my bedroom if I decided to live here. My father hovered in the doorway. I sat on the bed and felt the firm surface of virgin mattress.

  “It’s nice,” I said.

  “No, it’s not. It’s plain. Clean, but plain.” The implication was that I could fix it any way I wanted to if I lived here.

  “I like things plain. Simple. Straightforward,” I said.

  “So do I. The simpler the better. Nothing fancy. The world is too complicated.” His face was hungry, and he looked at once more lively and older than when I had sat across from him at the restaurant. “I like to keep things simple. Maybe that’s been my problem.”

  He left, announcing that dinner would be ready in a few minutes. I was glad to be left in the room, even though the smell of paint grew stronger with every breath, the sort of stink that sneaks up on you and pretty soon gets to work on your pleural membrane and your liver while you get drowsy and slip off into permanent brain damage.

  “We’re just a few blocks from the beach,” my father said, chewing the meat off a wing of barbecued chicken. “You can walk there if you want. Breathe a little salt air. I don’t intend to hang on you like a leech. You might want some time to yourself.”

  I shrugged, almost ready to swallow a lump of store-bought potato salad. I swallowed. “I don’t care. I can’t believe I’m here. It’s hard to get used to being shot from one place to another.”

  “Might as well get used to it. It’s the world we live in. Things happen fast.”

  “I’m a slow person. I like things to not be so fast. I should have been born in different times. When they had oxen cropping the front lawn. Things like that.”

  My father laughed so hard I was embarrassed, red barbecue sauce on his front teeth. “Cropping the front lawn,” he said. “That’s good. The point is, you appreciate things like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “History.”

  “I don’t know. I only took U. S. History. I took it last summer to get it out of the way. It was okay.”

  “U. S. history is very important,” he said with the smart expression of a man who doesn’t know what he is talking about. “The U. S. used to be nothing. Just so much land. Now look at it.”

  I wiped my mouth with a paper towel. My father was quiet while he wiped his hands, too, even though I sensed that he was still hungry. The light over the kitchen table was so bright that it was difficult to see the rest of the house. It was all semidarkness, but I knew that there was nothing to see. It was a fairly new house, carpeted with expensive beige plush, but with very little furniture aside from a television and a stack of stereo components. A single chair hulked in the semidark, facing the dead TV screen, and the chair did not look like a chair so much as a scoop, a tilted cup for my father to sit in when he wanted to watch a football game.

  My father folded our paper plates together and stuffed them into a paper bag under the sink. He rinsed the silverware and dropped it into a rack in the dishwasher. He wrapped aluminum foil around the lopped chicken carcass and put it on an otherwise empty shelf in the refrigerator. He took a package of chocolate cookies from the cupboard and fought the cellophane. Utensils rattled in a drawer as he found a long, thin knife and slit the package.

  He lay the ruptured package between us on the table. “What I’m saying is,” he said, selecting a cookie, “that I have come to a point in my life. You never think it will happen to you, but it does. You reach a crossroads and you absolutely must decide what to do with your life. If you ignore the crossroads, or if you decide not to decide, well, that’s a decision, too, a decision to be less of a man.”

  I bit into my cookie. It was too sweet, a punishing chocolate burst that hurt my saliva glands. I coughed the cookie down.

  My father poured us each some milk. He nudged the glass toward me like it was the gift of life. He licked chocolate crumbs from his front teeth and took a long swallow of milk. He squirged the milk around in his mouth, looking at me while he did it, then swirled it over his front teeth so that I expected him to spit it out.

  “So I reached this point,” he said. “And I realized that I should do something to help you. I don’t think your mother has what it takes to really be a parent to you at this point in your life. Or her life.”

  I wanted to defend my mother, but realized that my father was not a real threat. He was tired of my mother, he didn’t like her, but he wouldn’t hurt her.

  “We get along all right. She has a lot of imaginary fears about me.”

  “Every parent has fears about their child winding up in jail.”

  “There are worse things that could happen.”

  He looked at me with a little surprise. “Maybe. The point I want to make is: I want to help.”

  “Mother makes up stories to tell you. She’s just trying to make you feel bad.”

  “She doesn’t have to work very hard at it. I do feel bad about how I’ve treated you, and I want to make it up to you. If you moved down here, you’d find it a lot more fun. You could have a car.” He waited for a response. “A car. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? And a stereo of your own.”

  I bit into another cookie.

  “These are things that would lift you out of a dismal life in the middle of a crummy town, and put you right into a life of—well, not luxury, but at least—”

  “Oakland is not a crummy town.”

  “Oh, Christ. Don’t give me Oakland; I grew up there. There are worse cities, but it’s basically a dull, wasted city full of Chinese and blacks. Now, I have no fight with minorities; minorities are what this country is all about. But after your window gets jimmied a half-dozen times, or the third or fourth old person gets stomped by some kid on welfare, well, it makes you think maybe you don’t want your child growing up in that kind of environment.”

  “You’re afraid it will rub off on me.”

  He looked at me like he was an alley dog and I was a hambone juicy with fat. “I think it already has.”

  “Has what?”

  “Had a cheapening effect on you. You talk about your mother’s love life like it was some trash in some soap opera you were talking about, not your own mother.”

  “You should hear how she talks to me.”

  “That’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I mean. I don’t want you living in that snake pit of worry and frustration—”

  “And blacks and queers and—”

  “All right, you little twerp. Sure. Say it all. I’m afraid you aren’t working out at all well. I’m afraid you’re hanging out with sluts and teenage alcoholics and God knows what.”

  I tried to be offended, but my father wasn’t like my mother. He was obnoxious, but he was being frank; he wasn’t trying to irritate me into a fit of fury so that he could prove to me how immature I was, like my mother. He was goading me, but it was to make another kind of point. He wanted to give to me.

  “I’m all right. I really am. I’m a perfectly normal person.”

  “I know you are. I know. I can tell by looking at you. You’ve got a little of your mother’s coloring, but you’re a good, solid, healthy-looking young man.” He said “young man” like he was going to say “kid,” and his care in choosing his words offended me.

  “I am perfectly normal,” I said, like someone in a trance. “In every way.”

  “Maybe your mother has exaggerated. She talks about your friends like they were something that crawled out of Slime Mountain.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. She says you spend time with one or two very creepy characters.”

  “She doesn’t have any right to have opinions like that. My friends are good people. She’s telling lies.” I thought of Mead, and I found myself wanting to cry.


  He examined a cookie for a moment. He glanced at me, then said, like he was addressing the cookie, “I think that your mother is worked up over a lot of things. I think you frighten her.”

  “For no reason!” I began.

  My father smiled, and for the first time, maybe in my life, I liked him. I saw how a man his age looked at a person like me, and how the way I argued with him made me, in his eyes, a callow, foolish, but lovable animal.

  “For no reason,” I repeated dully.

  “There’s another reason I wanted you to come down here,” he said after wrapping the cookies in the slit cellophane. He did not continue at once, and seemed for the first time that evening to want to go slowly and take his time with language, instead of steering along like words had to be used fast or they might stall on you.

  “What reason is that?” I asked, but an insane flame flickered inside me, and I thought that he must know everything, that this entire conversation had been a sneaky game, and that the police would step out of the darkness of the living room like a troupe of trained bears and handcuff me to the refrigerator.

  “It’s something terribly important.” He nestled the package of cookies into a corner next to the toaster.

  I was queasy, and the tang of cookies in my mouth was sour and almost toxic as I understood how quickly my life had changed from a normal life, filled with simple fears, to a blasted waste. “What?” I croaked.

  “I’m getting married.”

  17

  I stumbled on a train track in the dark, and scratched my hand on a tumbleweed that grew out of the sand like a huge, shaggy head. Sand filled my shoes, so I sat on a short wall and took them off. I took off my socks, too, and carried them in my hand toward the surf.

  The spray glowed in the dark as the waves crashed and grumbled at each other, and flattened quietly. I sat in the sand where it was only a little damp from the spray and eased the bottle out of my jacket pocket. It was a full liter, and carrying it down the sidewalks lined with porch lights had been like carrying a small cannon in my clothing, but now I was where no one could see me, sitting, I realized with pleasure, at the very edge of a continent, with nothing between me and, say, Japan. The wind shivered my clothing from time to time, and a whisper of spray would touch my eyes and make them weep. I fit the top of the bottle in the cup of my hand and turned the cap, loving the crisp rip of the tax seal as the cap unscrewed.

  I drank hard, until my eyes crossed and my throat wriggled like a hooked fish. The rum smacked of faraway islands, and sun so hot people couldn’t stand to walk in it, but had to sit in the shade of trees watching an ocean like this one break and flatten with the kind of regular, gentle crunch that is better than silence. It also had that tough-guy throttle-hold of straight liquor, like it said to your body, “I taste good, but I also taste terrible, too, because that’s exactly what life is all about.” Out on the water, across a stretch so dark it was like a canyon of outer space, a light blinked on and off with the movement of the waves. A boat, I reasoned, perhaps a fishing boat, although what did I know about anything like that.

  Nothing. I didn’t know anything. I drank again, hard, and looked at the bottle when I released it from my lips. It was a line of light, a reflection of the yellow lights of the house behind me across the beach, and the streetlight near the railroad tracks, but aside from that, it was invisible, like a hand gripping a thing that wasn’t there, lifting it and drinking from it, liquor out of nothing.

  When a wave broke, and the flat shelf of water petered out and withdrew itself, so much feebler than it had arrived, it left little holes, bubble holes, it looked like, that winked and shivered. They grew still within seconds, and then another wave broke, and there they would be again, in different places. I watched the surface of the sand, wondering why there were no shells, and no stones, either, just sand.

  After a while, I did not think of Mead, or of my father and his empty, needful life, hungry to have things in it: a son, a wife, maybe new children, and certainly some furniture. He needed a lot of things, my father, but he knew he needed them. I had the feeling that whatever happened, my father would think of me as something he used to accept as a thing to be ignored, but which now had become important through some change not in me, but in him. Maybe, I thought to myself, drinking, my father wanted too much. Maybe a person can’t stop his life and reorganize it like someone deciding to remodel a guest house.

  A pair of headlights wobbled and jerked over the darkness, making two spears of light across the footprints and bits of charred wood. Imagine, I thought: a car driving along over the sand. I shook my head and sighed. The world was composed of wonders. I managed to get the bottle into my jacket as the headlights stopped beside me and the sound of an engine buried the sound of the surf. The headlights backed away, and a jeep turned sideways so a face could look at me.

  “Beach closes at ten,” said a voice.

  “What time is it now?” I said, climbing to my feet, ready to correct any misunderstanding that might exist between me and the world, or between me and the clocks anyone might have available.

  “Eleven-thirty,” said the voice, and I could think of nothing to say.

  I thought, for a moment, of running into the surf, plunging into the face of a breaking wave, and swimming. I would swim hard, toward the place in the water where the light had appeared, but I would not reach it, or, if I did, I would swim on by the fishing boat, with its distant murmur of Spanish and scent of cigarettes, and swim until I could not move my arms, and then I would sink.

  “I’m just leaving,” I said, and stepped closer to the jeep. The driver was a young man with white teeth. He wore a T-shirt, and I was surprised for a moment that the police dressed so casually. “I don’t live around here,” I said. “I’m visiting my father.”

  A radio spat static and numbers from somewhere under the dash, and I understood that conversation was no longer required, or even smart. “So I’ll be heading back,” I said.

  The jeep’s engine spoke and sand arced into the air where the jeep had been one moment before: the jeep fishtailed across the sand and then I could see only the tiny spark of a taillight. “Gone to get help,” I said to myself.

  And then I understood that he had not gone to get help. The conversation had ended. The man talked with his jeep. The arc of sand from his rear wheels had said something, something that I did not like.

  I drank some more rum, but the fun was gone. I was a rum drinker on the run, now, and I had no sense of belonging where I was. The ground grew hard as I left the hiss of the surf, and I was careful not to stumble on the train tracks.

  18

  The next afternoon, my father let me pick out a tie. An ugly one with poodles on it draped across my hand. I asked, “How about this one?”

  “Oh, Christ. Someone at work gave me that as a joke. Pick out a normal tie. How about this one?”

  I took an Ivy League tie, a wool tie of the sort a pipe-smoker might wear if he were an extreme conservative. My father tied it for me, muttering about how difficult it was to knot a tie on someone else. “What difference does it make?” I said. “I won’t wear one.”

  He snapped the knot tight like he wished I would strangle on it, but as he did so, I studied his face up close, the lines of determination around his eyes, the pores in his nose that seemed put there to show how his skin worked, that he breathed through these little holes the way an orange breathed through its skin.

  I had worn a tie only once or twice before in my life, and I craned my neck around trying to be comfortable. “She wants us to live together as a family,” my father was saying, “because she knows how important you are to me. She wants me to be happy.”

  “Does she want me to be happy?” I said, sitting on his bed.

  “I suppose so,” he said, combing his hair. “She doesn’t know you. Except what I’ve told her.”

  “Which means she’ll be packing a gun.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Of
course, there’s no way it will work. My presence would poison your marriage. You might as well start out a marriage with a kangaroo in the house. A kangaroo would be a much better bet than I would.”

  He ignored me. He drove quickly through streets that were bleached, like the sun was too much for them and all the color was long ago blasted away. The houses were all stucco, cheap stucco that had lost its color, too, a jumble of houses, parking meters grimy with salt air, and the long, thin stalks of palm trees. People dressed like poolside winos: bare feet, tight swimsuits, faded sweatshirts. Only their dark glasses looked expensive, and their cars, if I saw a person getting out of one.

  My father was driving faster, now, leaning on his horn from time to time, chewing gum, the jaw muscle bunching in rhythm. He swung the car crazily to avoid an old lady in a straw hat that hung shadows of straw fringe over her face so that she looked like an elderly monster. My father drove like we were terribly late, almost so late we might as well not even bother going. The car lurched around a Cadillac convertible making a left turn, and my father floored the accelerator, forcing his car to make a raspy roar as it left behind a restaurant with a painting of a swordfish, and a bay forested with naked masts.

  G forces pressed me back into my seat as my father careened up a hill, and I lurched into my seat belt as we whistled to a stop before a green duplex. “Here we are,” my father said.

  I stepped out of the car like the survivor of a crash. The front yard was covered with a layer of snow-white gravel, and a spiky cactus grew out of the only exposed patch of dirt. The air, now that we were away from the ocean, had a flat, old-beer smell to it that made me not want to breathe.

  My father stepped up to the front door, looking gawky and too old to be anyone’s boyfriend. I did not want to be visible; I willed myself into the shape and size of a lizard and crept along the sidewalk to the gutter, where a fingerwide stream of water pulsed. It didn’t work. My body remained human. My muscles bunched with tension as my father glanced around to see me standing there, wearing the semblance of his own face. He looked away again. I took my hands out of my pockets and craned my neck, appalled that humanity could have devised an article of clothing as uncomfortable and useless as the necktie.