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You and Peggy don’t agree on many things, but the communication strategy for this whole mess might just be the worst of it. Waiting for the gray of dawn to fall into your bedroom you are having tough time with all of it. And you want to cry, cry like a baby without having to pretend everything will work out. But you cannot risk Damian hearing you. You want him to know the things he will need to know, but even you are not ready to have the discussion just yet. How does it get to this point?

Peggy drove out to State College last night to spend the weekend with her parents. Explanation of your impending separation is her sole agenda item. “With intent to divorce,” you hear Peggy’s voice project into your thoughts. Fifteen years of marriage will do that for you. Peggy told you as if it were a done deal, that this would be good practice for your weekend visits. You want to scream at the insinuation that you need to practice being a father. You have more than carried your own in that regard. You are considering a stronger stance – maybe Damian should move with you – but your lawyer is doubtful. Seems that most courts think that fathers are less capable caregivers. You know that your case could be made, but not without some serious collateral damage. Something you would like to avoid. For the kid’s sake, if nothing else.

Damian, that one focusing element in your lives, is ten, almost eleven. Good kid, too. Still very trusting and genuine, though you expect the next several months will suck all of that out of him. He has strong facial features with locks of curly black hair atop his head. He is starting to take an interest in girls, or maybe they are starting to take an interest in him. Either way he refuses to get his mop of hair cut. Never bothered you, though. You have always encouraged his individuality. Unlike Peggy, trying to homogenize him into the pages of a Pottery Barn Kids catalogue. Soon he will slink into the room sleepily and fall down next to you. He will have forgotten that Peggy will be away. Might as well get that one ready now.

 

“You know how sometimes it feels good to be with your parents?” you inquire.

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s like that even when you’re older. Mom just wants to spend some time with her mom and dad. Does that make sense?”

“Uh-huh. I miss her though.” What about me? A strained voice whispers in your ear.

“She’ll be back Sunday night. Meantime, me and you’ll have a wild boy’s weekend. Right?”

“What will we do?” he asks.

“Well, the Eagles play tomorrow. I thought we’d get a pizza delivered and watch the game together. What do you think?”

“What about today?”

“Today? I don’t know. Any thoughts?”

“Something fun.”

“Alright. Bowling?”

“Maybe.” He seems surprised somehow that you have made this suggestion. “Anything else?”

“I need to run to Home Depot. But that won’t take long. I need new hoses for the washer.”

“Why?”

“One is ready to burst. Has a big bubble in it.”
“Why?”

“Over time things get worn out. It’s a good thing Mom saw the bubble before it gave out. It could have caused a ton of damage.” These words form slowly for reasons you do not immediately fathom. Damian does not seem to notice this.

“Can I see it?”

“Hmm?”

“Can I see the hose?”

“When we go downstairs.”

“Okay.”

 

Every conversation with Damian has become like walking on eggs. He is too smart not to know something is wrong. A point that you have repeatedly reminded Peggy. He is also too innocent to know what is amiss. The plan has been mapped out. Mostly by Peggy. In February you are moving to an apartment in the city. Something reasonable and reasonably near the office. As to not spoil Damian’s Christmas, you – both of you – would not tell him until the beginning of the new year. Peggy has a therapist all picked out, despite the fact neither of you has any idea how he might respond to the news. “No matter, therapy will do him good.” She states things like this with an irrefutable certainty, another thing that irks you.

You have lingered too long in the shower. Damian has subtly let you know this by flushing the toilet in your bathroom, siphoning the cold water from your shower. Sorry I forgot, he shouts merrily as he heads down the hall. You are left exposed to the cool air as you wait for the tank to refill, returning the needed cool water so you can rinse the suds from your graying hair. (Peggy has the habit of doing her business near every morning while you are showering, flushing without regard to your plight and offering a meaningless, daily apology of her own, leaving you – literally – steaming.) You quickly finish and dress for the day ahead.

 

“Eggs?”

“Nah.”

“French toast.”

“Uh-uh.”

“A Quarter Pounder with cheese?”

“Dad!”

“What then?”

“Pop Tarts.”

“Sure.”

“And orange soda.”

“Not on my watch.” This expression, one you might have used with him a hundred times, now staggers over your lips. Again you hope he does not notice.

“Mom lets me.”

You repress the urge to shout that you are not mom. “Does she now?”

“Sure. All the time.” You admire his poker face.

“Maybe you are confusing the words ‘soda’ and ‘juice.’ Could that be it?”

He is smiling at you. “Oh yeah. Juice. Thanks, Dad.”

“Busted,” you laugh. Damian laughs with you.

Damian pretends to be bothered by the Home Depot trip. This was supposed to be a ‘wild’ boy’s weekend, he nudges. He gets impatient when you start singing along with Tom Petty on the radio. Free Fallin. You turn off the music with a sincere, though reluctant, apology. Once in the store, everything changes, however. He has decided what he would like to do with his day.

“Dad? I’ve got it!”
“What?”

“What we can do while Mom is away.”

“And that is?” you ask, but you can already guess, as his gaze is fixed on and eight-foot tall air-filled snowman.

“Let’s decorate the house for Christmas.”

“Buddy, it’s barely November.”

“Who cares? This is awesome.”

It has been a while since you’ve seen that glow in his eyes. “Yeah,” you say, “who cares?”

“Really?”

“Really! Let’s do it. And do it up right too! Best ever.” This is so wrong you almost picture Peggy stopping whatever it is she is doing at the moment, instinctively racing to the car to intervene. But, alas, she is four-and-one-half hours away; if the Nits are playing at home it’ll be five and a half – at best. Much progress could be made in that amount of time.

“Can we get the snowman?”

“And the Rudolph.”

“Really?” He does not allow for a reply, “Awesome.”

You are both laughing to the point that you are drawing the attention of near everybody in the store, even those supposedly learning how install a chair rail. You have fully loaded a cart for Damian with outdoor lights of various sizes and colors, as well as several good quality electrical cords. You push a lumber dolly loaded with lawn decorations, including two white-light reindeer with bobbing heads. You were in the checkout line when Damian realized that you had failed to get the new washer hoses. You and he are far too noisy at this discovery, but every face you see seems to enjoy the irony of it all. If only they knew. The thought makes you laugh louder still.

Peggy and you were never really much for decorating the outside of the house. The inside, thanks to her expert touch, resembled a Crate and Barrel holiday display. Your first year in the neighborhood, you made a weak effort at outlining the porch beams in colored lights. The effort paled considerably to the efforts made by those around you, to Peggy’s embarrassment. You, reasonably enough, thought that all efforts were worthy. Peggy pointing out the deficiency in the end caused you to never want to decorate again. Let her, you remember thinking. That was six years ago. Nothing more than a wreath purchased from the local Boy Scout Troop and eight faux candles outwardly announced your spirit of glad tidings. This year would change all of that.

Every time an item is scanned, Damian announces the total cost of the sale. When it finally ended – just over seven hundred and eight dollars – the clerk is singing along with your son. You slap your Visa card onto the counter, holding back a fresh run of laughter. Inflatable Rudolph – forty-five dollars; outdoor Christmas lights and hooks enough to outline your house and shutters and two young apple trees – four hundred and seventy dollars; oscillating garage door shadow display – thirty-seven dollars. Seeing the look on your soon-to-be ex-wife’s face – priceless! You want to shout this out to the store. Or at least tell Damian; he’d think the knock-off humor was funny—except for the bit about the ex-wife.

 

Damian is more focused on this task than you have ever seen him with anything. He has a linear side that you would have never assumed, having navigated the disaster that is his bedroom. He is fixated on keeping the spacing of the lights spiraling up the apple tree trunks at an exact three inches. He has taken full responsibility for the tree trunks and lower parts of the branches – one in green and one in red – as you work your white-light magic on the house. He calls you off the roof when the higher branches need wrapping, but barks orders from the ground like an Irish foreman. The two of you are shouting pleasantly back and forth in the cool afternoon breeze. You warn him too often to be careful on the ladder despite the fact that he has jumped from branches higher than the six-foot aluminum A-frame. Because he is having such a good time he does nothing more than reply, Okay. The sun is hiding behind the house when you have attached the last icicle strip to the westward eave. Before you can see to the lawn ornaments, Damian coaxes you back to Home Depot for some more red lights. It looks stupid this way. I’ve gotten all of the main branches except this one. People will laugh. You are trying not to do the same. Though the branch in question is in the back of the deepest set of the two trees and well obscured, you agree, giving an accepted hair tousle and praising the amount of hard work put into the undertaking.

Back at Home Depot, Damian finds the necessary lights as you eye a reindeer-driven sleigh complete with Santa. You tell him you think it would look perfect suspended from the low roof to the higher. Cool, he agrees. You stop at Wendy’s on the drive home and break the news – over some deep-fried chicken strips – that the balance of the decorating will have to wait until tomorrow. You can tell that the strenuous day is catching up with him; he doesn’t even fake protest. Before the Eagles game, right? After breakfast you both will be back at it you promise, although you are certain you will be sore as hell tomorrow. At home, Damian showers then falls asleep on the sofa watching a Harry Potter DVD.

“Hello.”

“It’s Peggy. I left two messages this afternoon. Just calling to check on Damian.”

“He’s asleep.”

“Already? Is he sick?”

“No. Just tired is all.”

“From what?”

“We did some work in the yard today. He’s fine.”

“Can you get him?”

“Let him sleep, Peggy. How are your parents?”

“They’re broken up. I’m afraid they don’t know what to do.” Welcome to my world, whispers the strained voice.

You say nothing.

“I guess they’ll get used to it soon enough, though. They’ll have to, really,” Peggy says.

“I guess so.”

“Are you sure he’s asleep.”

“I’m sure. Have a safe drive tomorrow.”

“Lance?”

“Yes?”

“Never mind. I can tell you later.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

 

Damian bounds into the room. He wants to finish everything now. It is seven o’clock . Give a guy a break, Dame. Cook me some breakfast or something. Of course he cannot cook. He offers to ‘make’ you some Cheerios, an offer you respectfully decline. After a quick – and flushless – shower, he agrees to a Bob Evans breakfast. The balance of the morning will be dedicated to finishing the decorations. Over breakfast you share another idea. Tonight, after dinner, the two of you move the fire bowl to the front yard and light a fire. Together you can take in your festive handiwork while waiting for Peggy to return. Damian says he cannot wait to see her face. Me either, pal. Me either. Damian wants S’mores for the fire. Excellent suggestion, Dame!

The ascending Santa proves trickier than you imagined, but eventually he and his team are heading for the upper roof. Rudolph and Frosty are anchored in the front lawn and bobbling in the wind. Damian has positioned the oscillating shadow wheel perfectly, projecting a Christmas tree, a flying sleigh with Santa silhouette, and a trumpeting herald across the garage door. Wires are secured and duct taped at the point they cross the walkway. You put your arm on his shoulder and tell him, maybe more sincerely than you have ever spoken to him, that you are proud of him. He pats your shoulder and tells you that this is the best Christmas ever. And it’s not even Thanksgiving, he adds with a laugh.

The Eagles drub the Cowboys as the two of you eat Papa John’s. You are glad finally to have some down time. You allow Damian to drink Coke as you drink Michelob. You both are laughing at anything and everything, feeling free. Damian is more concerned with the progression of the sun than the football game. Every now-and-again he peeks out the curtain to measure the impending darkness. Is it time yet? Three, four, five times. The Pats are on the late game, but he will not let you concentrate. You take a glimpse outside, rub your hands excitedly together and announce that it’s time to get a fire started. Damian grabs the S’mores ingredients and races to the door. Maybe this really is the best Christmas ever. You insist he put a jacket on. You don’t want Mom to be angry with me, do you?

You were never one much for S’mores; sweets of any sort actually. But Damian likes making them, so you eat every other one. Dan Lipzowski, he who formerly presented the neighborhood’s most ornate holiday offering, is walking his Labradoodle. He stops by your fire with a thinly veiled look of disgust. “Bit early for all this isn’t it?”

“It’s six thirty , Dan. Dark enough this time of year.”

“I mean the season.”

“My Dad and I worked all weekend. Doesn’t it look great, Mr. Lipzowski?” interrupts Damian.

The man’s face softens, you fear in pity. “Sure it does, son. Never seen one look better. Just usually not in November is all.”

“My Mom is coming home soon. She’s gonna love it I bet.”

“It’s quite the display, Damian,” he offers before heading down the road, a soft grumble in his wake.

You and Damian sit wordlessly listening to the crackle of the firewood. Could Lipzowski know? Is that why he made that face at your son? Could Peggy have told his wife? Could the entire neighborhood know? How the hell can it be acceptable that this Labradoodle-owning nobody is made aware of your impending separation-with-intention-to-divorce before your own flesh and blood? Before Damian? Damn her! And all of the pain she has inflicted on you. She can play all the games she wants. You will fight her at every turn. And to hell with the collateral damage! She may win, but you will fight. He is your son as much as he is hers.

Staring at the embers, you smile. You are just waiting for her headlights to stream down the hill. Whatever else happens this moment will be yours. She will never touch it.

 

“Dad? Dad? You okay?”

“Huh? Oh, sure. Smoke in my eyes is all.”

“You think Mom is gonna like it?”

“Would I have done it otherwise?” you ask. “She’s gonna love it.”

“Yeah. This is the best Christmas ever.”

“And it’s not even Thanksgiving,” you laugh.

 Peter Cunniffe was raised in  Delaware County and has spent most of his adult years residing in Chester County.  He is currently completing a collection of short stories related to marriage set in the Philadelphia region.

 

[img_assist|nid=4309|title=Fish, Simona Mihaela Josan © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=151]There was nothing wrong with where we lived, except that the neighborhood was radioactive and the house was pitched at a sharp angle. When I was in high school and obsessed with my body, I used to lay my dumbbells on the floor, and they’d roll to the wall of their own accord. My room was small and cluttered then, and my bed was missing a leg, so I had to prop it up with a brick. My sister Margaret was a year older than me and had a job at a flower shop. She was a mistake, or an “oops” as my mom referred to Margaret’s conception in rare moments of kindness, and was born while my parents were both in college. The wedding was thrown together in under two weeks, and my parents held what passed for a legitimate reception in a dance hall called the Luau Lounge, which was famous for the massive fiberglass pineapple that teetered precariously over the front door. Then came the house and the mistaken impression that if they filled it with daughters and tasteless knickknacks, they could turn it into a home or, at the very least, distract themselves from the fact that half of it was sinking into the earth, a sign, my father would lament while Margaret was in earshot, visited upon him by God to let the world know that he had made it with the wrong girl at the wrong time.

My mom invested in commemorative dinner plates and porcelain figurines she saw advertised in the slick, shiny inserts of the Sunday paper. I wish I could say I was being facetious when I say she “invested” in these things, or that some finely tuned sense of irony had inspired her each time she shelled out four payments of $17.95 to the Dearborn Mint for an eight-inch statue of a baby in a bunny suit or a frog in a tutu or a lone wolf baying at the moon, but my mom truly believed that most, if not all, of her purchases would pay off in the end. After all, the ads always noted in block capital letters accompanied by charts and graphs, many of the mint’s limited-edition plates and figurines went on to sell at auction for upwards of ten times the original sale price. Despite their alleged worth, however, mom kept all of her collectibles out in the open—lined up on the narrow mantle over the fireplace, crowding bookshelves and windowsills, and competing for showcase positions on the dining room table or in the china cabinet.

In addition to Margaret, I had two younger sisters, Kathy and Rose, and none of us were allowed to touch any of mom’s collectibles because, in her words, they were our legacy. From dad we would inherit four guitars and a copy of what appeared to be every LP pressed in the United States between 1966 and 1987, a period he frequently referred to as the golden age of vinyl. Growing up, I assumed that everyone had armies of porcelain figurines and massive stacks of old records cluttering their homes, and I was always amazed and partially scandalized when I discovered they didn’t. It was like finding out that my friends and their families didn’t believe in God or flush the toilet or own a television. If they didn’t spend their weekends scouring flea markets and yard sales for hidden treasures, then what kinds of lives were they leading?

[img_assist|nid=4310|title=Top Spot, Alana Bograd © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=224]Another oddity about my friends was that their parents beat them far less frequently than mine beat me and my sisters. Not that they were monsters about it, exactly. I mean, they knew when to stop. The only problem was that we could never be sure of exactly what was going to set them off. Like the time dad whipped me for picking up a porcelain sailor mom had just received in the mail. Had it been mom, I would have understood—and did, in fact, understand when she let me have it for dropping the sailor as dad growled my name. Since it was dad who made the initial call, however, I couldn’t even begin to guess what I’d done wrong until he informed me (between applications of the strap) that little girls who played with sailors would inevitably grow up to be prostitutes. Though I wanted to ask him what a prostitute was, I kept my mouth shut because I knew the answer would only be more of the strap and that mom was already twisting her rings. Not only had I touched my legacy, but I’d broken it, too. The sailor had lost an arm, and there were still three payments pending on him. I was six years old at the time. Margaret was seven, Rose was four, and Kathy was still in diapers. Two nights later, curiosity got the better of me, and I asked Margaret what a prostitute was.

“The same thing as a whore,” she said.

“You mean like mom?”

It was summer, and our windows were open, so we had to whisper. Otherwise, our voices would bounce off the vinyl siding of the house next door and into our parents’ room.

“Mom’s not really a whore,” Margaret said. “Dad just says that when he’s angry.”

“So what’s a whore?” I said.

“It’s the worst thing in the world,” Margaret said.

“Like Aunt Gina?”

“No, she’s just divorced.”

“How ’bout Aunt Birdie?”

“She’s an abomination,” Margaret said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Worse than a whore, I think. It means she likes women.”

“I like women,” I said.

“Not like Aunt Birdie. She wants to marry other women. She wants to make babies with them.”

“How would that work?” I said.

“It wouldn’t,” Margaret said. “That’s why she’s an abomination.”

I already knew how babies were made, more or less, and the thought of it made me want to puke. The more dad drank, the more explicitly he discussed his failure to pull out of mom before the boys, in his words, rushed the field on the night of Margaret’s conception. Likewise, the more mom drank, the more willing she became to narrate their lovemaking using words dad grunted in her ear. Even with the windows closed, Margaret and I had to cover our ears to block out the sounds of their fucking and fighting. When they were done, there’d be snoring, and all I could do was wonder why mom let him touch her the way he did.

“Margaret?” I said, half hoping she was already asleep. “What if I wanted to marry another woman, too?”

“Mom and dad would have to kill you,” Margaret said. “And themselves.”

Lying awake, I considered my options. On one hand, I could pick up a sailor one day and let him make a prostitute out of me. On the other hand, I could marry another woman and try to make babies with her, and my parents would have to kill me. As far as I could tell, there was no middle ground, unless you counted what my mom had, but I really couldn’t see the difference between actually being a whore and only being called one, so I decided to err on the side of caution and swear off men forever. Not that it was really a decision so much as a revelation, learning the name for the thing I already knew I was. As long as Margaret kept her mouth shut about our little conversation, I figured, no one could kill me. Even if mom and dad did catch me trying to marry another woman one day, I could always plead ignorance. After all, dad had only warned me about sailors. Women were another matter altogether.

*

In the beginning, it was like having a secret identity, like being Wonder Woman or, better yet, Cat Woman. Ears perked and eyes peeled for any and all information pertaining to Aunt Birdie, I’d prowl around the kitchen, pretending to look for rubber bands, thumbtacks, tape or scissors in the junk drawers whenever mom talked on the phone on the off-chance that my fellow abomination’s name might pop up, or I’d page through old photo albums at my grandparents’ house, hoping for even the briefest glimpse of an abomination in the wild. To all appearances, Birdie looked like everyone else in her black and white universe—always a little taller than mom because she was older, always in a plaid jumper, always with her long, straight hair, fair skin and the wide, toothy smile that hid the secret longing she and I would always share: not a longing for the touch of another woman so much as a longing for the unconditional love of the people we loved unconditionally.

Birdie wasn’t my mom’s sister. They were cousins, a point mom clarified whenever she could. And her real name was Bridget. “Birdie” came about when my mom was two and couldn’t quite wrap her tongue around the right diphthong. When Birdie was in high school, she had a lot of boyfriends. Then came college, and the girls there made her go lesbo. At least that’s how mom told the story to our neighbor, Mrs. Reed, snorting derisively into the back of her fist when Aunt Birdie showed up with her “friend” Joanne to the barbecue my parents held to celebrate my first communion. Joanne wore a denim dress and a straw hat, and Birdie wore a pair of blue jeans and a white blouse embroidered with flowers. They didn’t hold hands, and they sure as hell didn’t kiss, but when their eyes met, it was like they were both in on the same joke, a special secret that, for all their half-muttered comments, sideways glances and raised eyebrows, the rest of the world would never understand.

Mom hugged Aunt Birdie and shook Joanne’s hand. Dad asked if he could fix either of them a hotdog, and Mr. Reed choked back a laugh in a paroxysm of hacking coughs he blamed on the smoke from the barbecue grill. All through the party I stole glances at Birdie and Joanne from behind my white communion veil, and all through the party I prayed to God to keep me from getting caught. If they beat me for saying hi to a sailor, there was no telling what my parents would do to warn me against going lesbo. But I couldn’t help myself. The looks that passed between Birdie and Joanne meant that I was right, that being an abomination was really something special, that one day maybe I could look at someone like that, and she’d look back at me, and we’d share the same secret Birdie and Joanne shared.

The first girl I ever wanted to marry was Katie Wilcox. She had green eyes and a gray tooth, and her mom drove a Pontiac Firebird. Our relationship hit a snag, however, when I realized that the only subjects Katie found interesting were kittens, her mom’s car and boys. That’s when I fell in love with Jennifer Schmidt, whose mother was the school nurse on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. But Jennifer liked boys, too, and so did Nicole Short, Kim Mifflin, Andrea Brady, Erin O’Connell and Elizabeth Nolan. In fact, the more time I spent in third grade, the more I realized that my life as an abomination was going to be one hell of a lonely ride if I didn’t at least pretend that I saw the boys from Menudo as likely suitors and Ricky Schroder as a potential husband. By the time I was in seventh grade, I’d gotten so good at the game that I took the strap across my newly pubescent bottom for letting a boy grope me under a cafeteria table at lunchtime. Then came high school and the beginning of my dumbbell years, an awkward period where I tried to like boys and starved myself to make them like me. I wasn’t an abomination, I told myself. I wasn’t a lesbo. In fact, I hated lesbos—hated them so much that one night I practically made my dad shit himself with laughter when Aunt Birdie called and I shouted upstairs to let my mom know that “the dyke” was on the phone. When she hung up, mom said that Joanne had been diagnosed with cancer.

Dad grunted and laid the needle on a Bruce Springsteen record, thus initiating a string of incidents that stick in my mind like a sappy montage in a made-for-cable coming of age movie: We skipped the funeral because Joanne wasn’t technically family. I started kissing boys. Birdie stopped coming to family functions. Margaret let a delivery boy make it with her in the back room of the flower shop. A girl at school showed me how to puke without putting a finger down my throat. The plumbing leaked. The kitchen ceiling caved in. Mom took in a cat. Kathy discovered needlepoint. Rose got caught smoking. One grandmother won a hundred bucks in Atlantic City. The other lost over three hundred to a bogus roofer. My grandfather stopped wearing pants. I learned how to get high using a paper bag and an aerosol spray can. Kathy gave a boy a black eye. Rose got caught drinking. Margaret was late three times in a row. Mom’s cat ran away. I turned eighteen and voted Republican. Dad bought a new guitar and wrote a song about New Jersey.

One night when I was a freshman in college, I asked Margaret what sex with boys was like, and she told me it was like sticking a balloon in yourself if the condom wasn’t ribbed. She was still working at the flower shop, but the delivery boy was long gone. There were other boys now, with pencil-thin mustaches, and men with hairy chests. Margaret rarely slept at home anymore and didn’t care when dad called her a slut. Or said she didn’t, anyway, but I knew what the emptiness insider her was like because it was my emptiness, too. The only difference was the balloon. At least she had that to fill her up from time to time. All I had was my secret identity and a straw hat I bought at a flea market.

*

I wish I could tell you I’d been confused by my sexuality and that was why I tried to starve myself through high school and slip through college stoned, but I always knew I was an abomination. Or a lesbo, to use mom’s word. Or a dyke, to use dad’s. I wasn’t gay- or bi-curious, as some women claimed to be in newspaper ads for women seeking women. This wasn’t dabbling or experimentation. It was who I was, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I’d hear dumb sorority girls speculating that every woman would have at least one lesbian experience in her lifetime, or that everyone was at least slightly homosexual, or that it was probably okay (in theory) to “dyke it out” with another girl in front of your boyfriend if that was what he wanted, or that it would be really cool to have a friend who was a hardcore lesbian as long as she wasn’t the kind who hated men and refused to shave her legs.

I rode a trolley and two buses to hear gems like these every day—in the library, in the cafeteria, in the classroom. As if being gay were a merry-go-round and you could get off whenever you wanted, or having a gay friend was like knowing a well-behaved badger or a talking moose. It wasn’t cool, I wanted to scream. It was lonely. Yes, there were plenty of “resources” on campus for those of us who wished to “embrace alternative lifestyles,” but then there was always the prospect of going back to my sinking radioactive house and trying to convince my parents that my sudden interest in rainbows and pink triangles would in no way impinge upon their collective right to continue amassing vast quantities of porcelain and vinyl. Not that I thought they’d kill me anymore. They’d just throw me out on the street with no place to go. Or, if I were really lucky, allow me to live out the rest of my days with them under a dark cloud of silence and disgust. My only real option, as far as I could tell, was to let scruffy boys continue to grope their way through my bases as I grew increasingly intimate with the mind-numbing effects of household cleaners and other chemical solvents.

By the time I was a junior in college, Margaret had left for good, and the responsibility of getting Kathy and Rose off to school each morning had fallen squarely on my shoulders. Between signing permission slips, writing absent notes and pretending to be my mother when any of their teachers called, I barely had time to dwell on the fact that if they ever learned my secret, my sisters would turn on me as viciously as I’d turned on Aunt Birdie. Rose probably knew that I was sneaking hits off the blackened pipe she left on her dresser, but she never said anything (I’d like to think) because she was concerned about my health. In her own sweet seventeen-year-old way, Rose saw pot as a healthy alternative to Carbona and never stopped to think that I might be mixing the two before heading out the door in my wide-brimmed straw hat and dark glasses to ride the trolley and two buses to an American Lit class where the professor would try to scandalize us by revealing that Herman Melville may have thrown his wife down a flight of stairs or that Emily Dickinson might have been gay. This was the first class I shared with a girl named Allison Kravitz.

Allison had red hair and an overbite and always sat near the door. When she raised her hand, other students would roll their eyes. The problem wasn’t so much that Allison was particularly disruptive or held extreme political views as much as the fact that our professor, Dr. Eck, had a habit of deflecting all questions put to him back upon the class. This strategy kept him from revealing how little he really knew about anything and had the added advantage of conditioning his students to keep their mouths shut. But Allison didn’t seem to get it. Despite the murmurs and groans of our classmates, she always demanded to know why the rumors about Melville mattered and how questions about Dickinson’s sexuality were supposed to help those of us living in the here and now. Even if Emily Dickinson really was gay, she once demanded, did that make her poems suck any less?

Okay, so she was a little disruptive. But in a good way, a way that made me feel like maybe I wasn’t alone, and I liked to think I’d be asking the same kinds of questions if my brain weren’t so fuzzy all the time and I wasn’t so scared to reveal too much about myself. I was still an abomination after all, and even if Allison’s notebooks were all decorated with the appropriate geometric figures, holding on to my secret was—for me, anyway—still a matter of life and death. Which is probably why I couldn’t stop thinking about her. When it came to her sexuality, Allison was cool. Not in the dumb it-would-be-cool-to-know-a-lesbian sense, but in the sense that she didn’t wear her orientation like a badge. In fact, I never once heard her refer to herself as a lesbian. She was just Allison, and if you couldn’t deal with it, then fuck you. Although this attitude didn’t do a whole lot to improve her social life, at least she could look people in the eye, which was a lot more than I could say for myself.

Back at home, Margaret’s name was never mentioned. Dad was trying to resurrect the singing career he’d abandoned when he found out that mom was pregnant, and no one even raised an eyebrow when he introduced the delivery boy who had taken Margaret’s virginity as the new bass player in his band. Of course, Rose was too busy scoring weed off dad’s drummer to notice much of anything, and all Kathy seemed to care about was rescuing her share of the legacy from imminent doom as dad’s friends set up their instruments and amplifiers in our living room. In the kitchen, mom was making sandwiches for the band and asking over the thump of the bass drum if I thought she had to worry about dad and groupies.

“I don’t think that’s an issue, mom.”

“You don’t think he’s sexy?”

“He’s my father.”

Mom smiled as if to say she couldn’t see my point but was willing to let it slide. Dad was going to be big, she said. Maybe not like the Beatles or Bob Dylan, but that was only because he’d taken time out to raise a family. If not for the “oops,” we’d already be millionaires.

Wondering how much luck Rose might have had with the drummer, I turned away from my mother and her sandwiches only to feel her fingernails digging into my wrist.

“You’ll take care of me, won’t you?” mom said, pulling me toward her. “When dad runs off with his groupies and the other two move out?”

“I’ll take care of you, mom.”

“Promise.”

“I promise, mom. I’ll take care of you.”

“You were always my favorite,” she said, releasing my wrist. “You were the only one I wanted.”

In my mind, I was already telling Allison about the terror in my mother’s eyes, the abject fear of heartbreak and loneliness and groupies who would never materialize. Which isn’t to say that I’d actually spoken to Allison yet. To the best of my knowledge, she didn’t know me from Adam. Even so, I’d already had about a million imaginary conversations with her and held her hand through countless imaginary walks across campus, both of us stealing glances at each other the way Aunt Birdie and Joanne once did. Fuck the world, these glances said. Fuck anyone who can’t let us be who we are or love the way we want to love.

Allison lived, or so I imagined, in a tiny apartment with a single window that overlooked a gray alley. When the rain fell, heavy drops of water would pelt the glass, and we’d hold each other against thunderclaps. I’d tell her about breaking the sailor’s arm and my Aunt Birdie’s heart, and she’d say it was okay. I was just a dumb kid, she’d tell me. Dumb and scared, like my mother and sisters and even my father the first time mom broke the news of Margaret’s imminent arrival. Then Allison would say that she loved me, and I’d say I loved her, too, and I’d promise myself I’d stop getting high.

When I wasn’t busy trying to construct an imaginary world for Allison outside of class, I was doing my best to gather data on her real life. HISTORY major, the back page of my American Lit notebook read. Germantown. Bartender? “Corporate rock sucks!” Dog=Snickers. Soft pretzel w/mustard. Snapple (raspberry). Parents okay with “it.” Toyota Corolla (tan). Lunchbox!!! Strawberry Shortcake (ironic?). Presbyterian. Dead Milkmen. “Beam me up Scotty! There’s no intelligent life down here!” The list went on and on. It was Aunt Birdie all over again, the spying and the strategizing.

The class met on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On Mondays and Fridays, I’d sit right behind her. On Wednesdays, I’d sit to her left. The trick was to get Allison to notice me without being too obvious about it, to strike up a conversation that didn’t sound forced or desperate or just plain crazy. With boys, it had always been easy. I just had to drop a hint or two that I was willing to let them touch my breasts. Allison, on the other hand, had breasts of her own and wouldn’t be so easily swayed. Besides, I had no idea where to begin as far as letting her know I liked women was concerned. It wasn’t as if I could just walk up to her and say hey there, Allison, I’m an abomination, too! Want to go for some coffee?

Or maybe I could. I didn’t know. How to talk, how to laugh, how to be who I was. All I knew was that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life alone. The image in my head was me at fifty or sixty, still living with my parents and sneaking hits of paint thinner while mom dusted her porcelain, dad listened to his vinyl and the house sank further and further into the ground. In all honesty, I knew that Allison could never live up to my expectations. I knew that pinning all my hopes on her was completely unfair, that one day Allison and I could very well end up screaming obscenities at each other the way my parents still did, that we’d open ourselves up and make ourselves vulnerable and possibly live to regret it. But it was the kind of regret I was willing to live with, the kind of risk that could lead to something better, so I called her name one day on the way out of the classroom and said something dumb about liking her lunchbox.

Maybe we could have lunch together sometime, I said, and she said that would be fine.

Maybe today, I said, and she said yes.

We walked to the quad. We sat beneath the bell tower. We unwrapped our sandwiches.

Allison asked if I was hitting on her, and I said that I was.

I was happy and nervous and scared as hell.

To think, she could have been a sailor.Marc Schuster teaches English at Montgomery County Community College. He defended his doctoral dissertation at Temple University in May of 2005 and is a founding member of the Elliot Court Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in After Hours, Schuylkill, Redivider and Weird Tales.

[img_assist|nid=4306|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=150|height=106] It’s very hot here. Hotter than I’ve ever liked. Even when I was a kid. Growing up, summer was only good for me because school was out. Swimming’s okay but I don’t go crazy for it. I like camping to get out into the woods where it’s a little bit cool, ‘cause those nights when you can’t sleep for being all sticky sweaty, that’s not for me.

What I especially don’t appreciate is being able to see the heat. Sure, back at home we had hot summer days when you could sometimes see it rising off the road – notice I said sometimes. Here, everything’s distorted by the heat every day. Yeah, there’s sand everywhere, but that’s not what gets you. It’s the asphalt. Asphalt and concrete. You go outside around here and it’s the roads that pack a real wallop. All they do is soak it up then throw it right back at you. They’re long and wide, and they melt away into heat waves long before they ever reach the horizon. And they are waves, really. The roads, the farther out you look, it’s like they move, swells at sea, rolling up and down, just a little bit, and then they’re gone. After that, it’s all desert.

This is what I think about lying on my cot every night. And every day. Not much else to do. That and pray. Yesterday, I knew something was up. Abdul – I have no idea what his name really is, we’re not on a first- or last-name basis. I just call him that ‘cause it’s better than thinking “that guy with the fucked up eye.” He should wear a patch but he doesn’t. It’s not good to look at. It’s like he was burned or something, and some of his eyelid got shriveled off and can’t quite close the whole way. And then there’s always something seeping out of it. As I said, it’s not good, so I call him Abdul. I figure that’s better than tying up his whole identity with something that probably happened in a split second and wasn’t one of his best moments.

But anyhow, Abdul, when he came to drop off my bread and water, didn’t smack me across the head as hard as he usually does. When he barked out some orders – or insults – at me, I thought I noticed a little touch of hesitancy, almost like a look of sympathy in his good eye. I tried to grab its focus for just a second. I said, “Hey, can you tell me what’s going on in the world?”

He said something then pointed at the food. That’s when I noticed a small dish of peaches – canned, in syrup. I hoped it was extra heavy. I wanted him to know I was grateful. I put my hands together in front of me, prayer-like, and gave a quick bow of my head. I thought I might have seen him give just a little nod back. Then, I couldn’t believe it, he took out a cigarette, put this down on the tray, and threw a matchbook down along with it, after showing me its one remaining match. He spoke again and this time it came out sort of like a mumble, maybe even an apology. That gave me hope. I wanted to speak with him, have him speak back to me.

“Tatakalm Alingli’zia? Sadik. Me sadik – friend. Kobry. Kobry. I build kobry.” I gestured wide with my hands trying to demonstrate a bridge, cars zooming over top of it.

Abdul looked nervously out the hallway, again said something that I didn’t understand, then began to leave.

“Telephone?” I said, louder than I had intended. I knew I sounded like I was begging, and thought maybe it was time for that. “My family – can I call my family? Usra, usra,” I yelled. That reached him.

He stepped away from the doorway, walked right up to me and shoved his face in front of mine, his bad eye an inch away from my good two. His voice, rapid but contained and intense. Well, seemingly more intense than usual – he always sounded intense to me. Then he smacked me good. The hardest one yet. I fell back against the wall and didn’t see anything for a while.

 

[img_assist|nid=4307|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=136]The fall. My favorite season here. Joey – that’s my best friend, since second grade we go back. Him and me and the other kids on our road, we’re up on Shaeffer’s farm field. It’s perfect for football and so’s the weather. Cool, not cold. Sunny, but not blinding. Today, we cut to the field through the cow pasture. Joey has to be home early for some special dinner so we don’t go through the woods that come up on the one side. It’s longer that way but that’s how you avoid the patties. Today, though, we take the pasture because we want to get a full game in.

We do. My side wins by 16 points – two touchdowns and one safety. The safety’s courtesy of Joe. He’s almost always good for at least one per game.

We’re twelve years old. Seventh grade. Joe’s five foot eight, weighs at least 190. He always plays the line – offense or defense, because he don’t have speed but he has power. We’re winning too good to quit with the sun, so Joe has to make it home quick as possible through the pasture.

We fly down the hill. I tell him good game before I split off right up the road toward my house. Lucky for him, his is right there because he’s lumbering and puffing just from rolling down the hill. I’m still sprinting but pause a minute to yell back, “Hey, don’t forget to kick off your shoes.” He waves his hand like he hears me.

 

Joe’s late, by over two hours. He goes in through the back door, into the kitchen. He doesn’t turn on any lights but still sees that the dinner dishes have already been washed and put away. The only signs of life are coming from the living room, voices from the TV set. He figures he just has to make it down the hallway, past the living room, where his mom and dad are sitting, probably steaming, get up the stairs to his bedroom and he’ll be safe. Well, remember Joe’s stats – chances were pretty good he wasn’t sneaking anywhere past anyone, besides he’s still breathing hard from his downhill flight. So there he is in the hallway. He takes just a couple steps past the living room archway, and his mom’s on him, yelling, “Joe, is that you? That better not be you. I told you be home by five.”

Does Joe stop and take his punishment? No, that’s not Joe. He still thinks there’s a way out of it. So he takes off down the hall trying to get to his room as fast as he can, as if that’s some kind of sanctuary or something. He gets to the steps, does this quick pivot to launch himself up the stairs, but all of a sudden his feet fly out from under him and he goes into this massive slide. Like, what? there’s something on the floor or something? And wham! he goes down, slams his mouth against the first step, big time.

Pop! his mom turns on the lights, and there’s Joe bleeding from his mouth real bad, one of his front teeth is hanging by a thread. He starts crying. His mom, she’s ready to start yelling, but there’s blood everywhere, so she’s all worried instead. By now his dad’s up, too, all grouchy ‘cause something’s interrupting his Wheel. His dad rounds into the hallway and you hear this “What the” and he takes a slide too, but doesn’t go down, thankfully. That would have been real bad if he’d gone down, too. But anyhow, that’s when his mom sees it. First, right there beside Joe and then all the way down the hall. She marches into the kitchen and there it is, beginning at the back door. A trail of cow poop right through the house. Idiot Joe, it was all over his shoes and he didn’t kick them off outside the door, like I reminded him to. Yeah, he’s still bleeding and all but the trail of cow you-know-what is too much for Mrs. Zupanic to handle. She’s mad, real mad. She’s there yelling at him about the cow crap. His Dad’s all moaning that his back’s gone out. He’s slapping Joe upside his head, his Mom’s ranting up a storm while she’s trying to get the dentist on the phone. Buster, their dog, he’s sniffing all over the place and then starts licking it up.

Next day at lunch, kids fight to get a seat at our table, all morning whispering and wondering what happened to Joey and his front tooth, knowing that him telling about it at lunch time will be the highlight of the day, probably the week. This is one of the things that makes Joe real popular at school. He can make one story last through a whole lunch period, in between bites of sloppy joe and tater tots and the extra deserts kids give him. And it doesn’t matter he’s been grounded for a month, and that he’s going to miss that tooth until he’s old enough to get a permanent implant. He looks at anything happening – good or bad – as just another chance to be the center of attention.

So now we’re at lunch and Joe’s telling us all about it, every cow-poop covered step of the way. We howl. Me sitting on Joe’s right, Jerry on the other side, Rob and Stanley across the table from us. When he gets to the slide, I laugh so hard my chocolate milk comes squirting out my nose. I’m laughing so hard I wake up, uncomfortable for some moments with the sensation that these memories are really only a story, figments of someone else’s imagination that have somehow played themselves into my head without having any real connection to me.

 

I could tell it was coming on evening. Not because I had a window in my room but because I could see through the bars at the door the failing light in the hallway. My neck ached. I’d passed out crumpled against the wall, my head at a bad angle to my body. It took a few minutes to get a sense of where I was. The ache in my neck and shoulders resonated down to my empty stomach. I hadn’t had the chance to eat yet that day. The tray was still there. But not the cigarette or the single match. Then I saw the peaches, too, but they’d been thrown across the room, lay scattered about the floor. I ate them, anyway. What’s a little dirt gonna do you? The syrup was all gone, though.

As I was crawling over to the peaches, I tried to pull back those memories of Joe. I wondered why that cow poop story had come to my dreaming mind. Then I realized it was always the cow poop story that came to mind when I thought about Joe. I was reminded of it for years, every time he took out his false tooth, which he liked to do a lot especially when there were girls around.

Joe was plenty of things to me. My best friend, since the second grade. A teammate. Partner for a while when we thought we’d have a try at selling insurance. He’s plenty of things to a lot of people. A husband now, a father, businessman – he works in a car dealership, makes good money. And I’d bet he’s up to 300. A real Santa. There’re few people I’m as close to and shared as many laughs and worries with as him. In fact, he’s the guy I talked to most seriously about whether or not I should come over here. He tried to tell me that if it weren’t for his family he might have come to – the money was real good, what’s the chance something would happen? Yeah, he’s a lot to me – we go back twenty years. So why is the cow poop story the first thing I tell you about Joe? Then it occurs to me that in a person’s life, it seems like there are some stories that get attached to them more than others, and for me, that one will always be a part of Joe. I always wanted to be there for that one, ‘cause I really wish I’d seen that slide.

 

The peaches were good, if dry and dusty. The syrup, I guessed, had been extra heavy. I wished there’d been some left. They tasted especially good after a couple of weeks of just bread or rice and water. It didn’t give me a good feeling, though, to be eating them. With every bite, I kept getting a deepening sinking feeling that peaches and a cigarette weren’t a good sign. Why would they show kindness now? I didn’t like it. Panic started rising up off my body like the heat from the roads, but I couldn’t allow it. I knew if once I let it go, that’d be the end. If I had any self-control left, I’d have to put it to work now.

The hotter it got in the room, the more visions of Shaeffer’s farm came to me. I’d close my eyes and sometimes could almost feel the breeze coming over the field. I’d see Joe, and Jerry, Stanley, Rob. Nine years old. Then ten, twelve, into our teens. Running around up on the field, or in the woods.

Growing up in my – I can’t really say home town, because it was so spread out, just a whole bunch of roads, and houses along roads and then farms, acres and acres of farms, so I guess neighborhood is better. So, anyhow, growing up here, you tended to hang out with the guys you lived closest to. I was lucky that Joe lived right down the street. And Jerry Miller, Stanley Kukovich, Rob Belaski. We all lived on Pleasant Valley Road . In elementary school, we were walkers. Our school was just up at the far end of the road, at the top of a big hill. Sunrise Knoll Elementary School . When I found out later on in high school, or whenever it was, that “knoll” was another way of saying “small hill” I was kind of pissed off. I mean, who came up with that name? Our school was not at the top of a small hill – it was a full-fledged mountain; at least it was to a seven-year-old. I guess the guys who named it weren’t the ones who had to climb it every day. Four years of trudging up that hill – the school didn’t open until we were in the second grade – and I never once got to the top without puffing, at least a bit. At the bottom, you would get just the slightest feeling of queasiness looking up, you know, like that twinge you get at the bottom of the first hill of a rollercoaster. So there’d be like this pause and a gulp, a squaring up of your shoulders to get inside what you’d need to make it all the way to the top, then you take that first step.

That’s when Joe, Jerry, Rob and Stanley and me got to be good friends. It was funny how some days we’d do nothing but complain the whole way, but on other days – without a word between us – we’d decided that we wouldn’t show if we were having a tough time. It was always hardest for Joey – he was fat even in the second grade. You know, when I saw that Harry Potter movie with my nieces, the brother or the cousin kid, that character, he reminded me of Joe – not because Joe was ever mean like that or because he was spoiled, not by any means, but because he was fat like that and just couldn’t not eat. Especially the sweets. That kind of skewed my take on the movie. I knew I wasn’t supposed to like this fat kid, but I felt bad for him, because he reminded me of Joey.

 

Being heavy got Joe teased when we were younger. But once we got past gym class’s scooter soccer and tumbling and building pyramids, which Joe couldn’t stand because he was always at the bottom getting someone’s knee right in the middle of his back, once we got past that kind of stuff and got down to playing real sports, especially football, Joe was the best. All he had to do was stand there and he’d knock you down. Starting from about fifth grade on, our football games got going up on Shaeffer’s farm field. It was kind of magical how they came together. No one ever planned a thing. But after school, kids would just show up. Some of them we didn’t even know. They’d come in through the woods or over the pasture. And always enough to pull together a game; almost never too many – just the right number for a couple of teams, everybody got a chance to play.

Joe, Jerry, Stanley and Rob and me, we stayed tight right through middle school. We survived our first bouts with girls and all that stuff. And that probably came a little later for us, ‘cause we were such good friends, we didn’t need girls around.

Once we got to high school, yeah, there were some changes. Stanley , he didn’t want to be called that anymore. We were only allowed to call him Stan. He joined the band, played alto sax, and he started getting pretty weird, dying his hair and all that. You know, whenever it was just the two of us it was okay, but our crowds didn’t fit together anymore and it’s hard to get past that in high school. By junior year, all we did was say hey to each other; sometimes not even that. At a reunion today, I bet we’d still be friends. But we drifted apart back then. It was okay, I didn’t mope about it or anything, it’s just looking back you feel bad when a friendship kind of dies.

But then something real bad happened. Rob’s dad kind of wigged out and he shot his mom and then himself. He died, but Rob’s mom lived. They say it was a miracle. But Rob … I know this is a terrible thing to say but sometimes I thought it might have been better if she had died too, ‘cause then maybe he would have gone away and started over somewhere – things were never right for him again at our school. Nobody could look at him without thinking, “there’s the kid who’s dad went crazy.” And even us, me and Joey and Jerry, we tried to stay tight with Rob, but what had happened to him, that was always somewhere in our minds. You couldn’t shake it off. Even now, no matter what I remember of Rob in all the years we spent together – all the games, the camping, just walking to school every day – when I think of him, the first thing that pops into my head is when his dad shot his mom and then killed himself. The face I see of Rob is him at the funeral – dead blank, like he’d been killed, too. We went for Rob, my mom said, “because no earthly prayers could ever forgive his dad for what he’d done.” But we went to show our support for Rob, she said. He did move away a couple of years later, once his mom got back on her feet. That was a good thing, because it was never right again for him at home. He knew it, we all knew it. And it hurt him, I know, that this stood between us. So they left and started life somewhere new. I never heard from him again. I hope things worked out for him. And I guess I hope he kind of knows now how we felt back then, because of what’s happened here. He’ll have heard about it and I don’t think he’ll ever be able to think of me without this popping up in his head. Maybe he’ll know now how hard it is to put some things out of your mind.

 

That was the last thing I remembered thinking before falling asleep. No dreams or memories came to me that night, but still I woke up feeling good, if a little bit empty. Was it a trick of my wishful mind or had the air turned cooler? There was a quiet all around me, too, but whether this was coming from my insides or the outside, I wasn’t sure. The sun was up, as usual making its rounds, its light slowly finding its way into my cell. I pushed my brain to recall Joe, Mom and Dad, my sister Jill and her kids. Forced myself to see their faces, remember their stories.

My self-control had won. I was calm and at peace when Abdul and two other guards came to get me. They took me, not to a courtyard or somewhere outside, but to a place that seemed more like a conference room. Okay – so it’s not a firing squad. Okay, I thought, okay. There was a raised platform at the far end of the room – a stage. Lights, a camera. A podium off to the side. A dozen or so men, outfitted as soldiers, were preparing for something, looking so serious about it all – putting a microphone first here then there, moving the camera around. I half expected to see a director calling out shots, carrying a megaphone, wearing those old style puffy pants, what are they called, jodhpurs? This suddenly struck me as funny and a short snort of laughter escaped from me. That earned me the sharp butt of a gun in my back. They were leading me up to the front of the room, to the stage, and I thought how I wished I had a report prepared, something to talk about. After all, maybe they were just finally giving a nod to my expertise on bridge building, wanted to hear my thoughts on the plans for reconstruction. Slowly, though, an old but familiar queasiness came to me. I was looking up the hill leading to Sunrise Knoll Elementary School . That one step – just that one step up onto the platform was as hard as that climb had ever been.

Microphones, the camera, the panel of speakers. It’s a press conference, I thought. They’re sending a message. I’ll have to say something for them, I guessed. Lay out their demands. That’s what this is, I said to myself. And as much as that idea made sense and me trying to hold onto it as being what was really going on, my stomach knew otherwise.

It was when they pulled my hands behind my back and bound them together that I could admit to myself what was happening. A guard I had only seen a couple of times pushed me down so that I was kneeling. Then Abdul waved him aside, and knelt down to meet my eyes, my two good eyes. For once, I wanted him to really see me. I hoped that something of who I was would get through to him, through that good eye as blind to me as the other one. It could have been a lifetime that we stared at each other, but it probably wasn’t even ten seconds. I remembered the last time I had uttered the word for family, what it had got me, but I didn’t care. I said it again. “Usra,” I whispered, just to him. That was the closest Abdul and me ever came, when I dared to say the word for family one more time. His mouth relaxed a bit and he nodded – just the slightest motion, barely perceptible, but to me it felt for a brief second like a blessing. But from somewhere in the background another word was said and his eye got hard. He spat something out in Arabic, then spat on the ground in front of me. Someone else jerked a blindfold down over my eyes, tied it tight. I could feel the light of the camera, heard its quiet whirring. Words, many words were said. I knew none of them but felt their meaning. I tried to will myself back up to Shaeffer’s farm, feel the cool fall breezes, smell wood fires, see trees and rolling grass-covered fields. Hands grabbed my head and shoved down. Then something sharp and cold and silent.

 

I was gone, really, before I could have told you what had happened. The next thing I see is the look of anguish on Mom’s face when she finds out. Dad looks like he’s about to be sick but he keeps it together and holds Mom up, her legs giving out she’s about to fall down. Jill walks into the girls’ bedroom. They’re giggling, flipping through a teen magazine but stop cold when they look up and see her face. And Joe – he sits alone in his garage with the door closed, on a stool in the back corner and he lets it go, cries for hours, mopping his face, shaking his head no and no and no. I hear the news play in their heads. How they find out. I hear it told over and over again for days and days to friends, to strangers, to people who will never know me any other way, and all I can wonder is how is this my story? And was it told from the very beginning, even when my mother brought me into this world, held me in her arms for the first time, me all pink and defenseless? Was this always the end, mocking everything good and right that ever happened in my life? Because how will anyone ever be able to think about me and not think about this? Joe, will you ever again be able to talk about me with a laugh and a joke? Because, really, that’s what I would like you to do. No matter how hard it is for you, that’s what I’m asking. Don’t let this be what pops up first in your mind. Dig down hard and deep and remember something else. Don’t let this be my story. Kathleen Donnelly works as a writer, actress and teacher in her hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her play A Restoration Comedy, secured her a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. “How Is This My Story” was performed at InterAct Theatre’s Writing Aloud Fiction Performance series.

The Glock has one bullet in the chamber and fifteen in the magazine. Roy’s got it cocked and ready. He bets me twenty bucks he can fire all sixteen while the target’s coming at him, but that’s not all. He says: “I’ll alternate – head shot, body shot, head shot, body shot, squeeze out all sixteen, and make fourteen, before the target’s five yards out.”

“You’re an idiot,” I tell him. “You can’t shoot that fast. Nobody can shoot that fast.” I tear the cellophane wrapper off a box of .38’s.

“Fuck you, you want to bet or not?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say. I drop the wrapper into an empty ammo box and I load my .357 for when it’s my turn to shoot. “If you’re gonna be a jerkoff about it, I’ll take your money from you.”

He puts the Glock down on the tray with three of our other pistols, a couple rentals, and about a dozen boxes of ammo. He wipes his hands on the front of his gray hooded sweatshirt. He adjusts his goggles, his earplugs, and his oily old Phillies cap. Then he picks up the gun and aims at the target at the end of the range, twenty-five yards away.

The target’s a life-sized photograph of a mustached terrorist armed with an Uzi. Not that we’re allowed to shoot at moving targets, by the way, but the rangemaster is outside catching a smoke. It’s a slow day here; there are only two or three other guys shooting. And they’re like six lanes away, so we’ve pretty much got the place to ourselves. It’s Tuesday afternoon. That’s one of the decent things about working 3:30-to-midnight at the bubble gum factory: I’m home every day when Jeff and Shelley come home from school; I can stay up late, get wasted, and watch ESPN after Peggy and the kids go to bed without worrying about being late to work the next day; and I can shoot when hardly anybody else is here.

Roy says, “Let her rip.”

I press the green button. The guy with the Uzi comes whizzing at us and Roy fires away. First, he completely forgets to alternate his shots to the head and body. And that was his idea! Second, he misses so many, it’s a joke. I swear three ricochet off the ceiling. Never mind firing at a moving target which it says all over the place you’re not allowed to do. If the rangemaster had seen Roy shoot up the ceiling, we’d be totally fucked. And third, if a guy with an Uzi was coming at Roy in real life, Roy would be dead.

But that’s not why we shoot. That’s not why we come here every week. And when Roy looks at that target, he doesn’t see a terrorist anyway. The twenty bucks won’t even cover the cost of the ammo and targets. But that doesn’t matter. We come here because of something Roy said after the first time we came to this range three months ago: “That felt pretty good, man,” he said. “I guess it beats blowing that motherfucker’s brains out – or my own brains out for that matter.”

And considering what he’d been through, I took him seriously. So I was like, “We should do this again.”

And he goes, “Fuck yeah.”

We used to shoot with my dad at a range near where we grew up. But we stopped on my eighteenth birthday. That was seventeen years ago. That was the last time we shot together until we started coming here – which does not in any way excuse Roy from his shitty aim today.

“You suck,” I tell him.

“You moved it too fast,” he says. Roy fishes a twenty from his wallet.

“It’s a button, retard,” I say, taking the twenty and jamming it in my pocket. “There’s just one speed – there is no faster or slower.”

“No,” he says. “The problem is it picks up speed on its way down.”

“Nah,” I laugh, “the problem is you suck.”

The whole time Roy and I didn’t go shooting, we basically didn’t talk to each other. We didn’t go to each other’s weddings. I didn’t take Roy out and get him drunk when he got his divorce. You know, shit like that. It was crazy, because we’d been best friends since first grade and we lived three blocks from each other, in the same neighborhood where we grew up. I’d run into him at Cricket’s Hoagies or Eagle Hardware or whatever, and it was always like, “Hey, how’s it going? Alright, how’s it going? Take it easy. You too.” It was fucked up, but not saying anything would have been more fucked up. It’s not like we were strangers. You know?

We started talking again four months ago at his son’s funeral. At first I wasn’t even going to go, but Peggy said I should. She said if I didn’t I’d probably regret not going. But if I went, I probably wouldn’t regret going. She was right, as usual.

I felt so bad for Roy. I didn’t know what to say to him at the wake. When I walked in it was intense. Roy was in the kitchen opening a beer. At first we were like, “Hey, how’s it going…” But that was insane because we both knew how it was going. And it was different because it wasn’t just running into each other at Cricket’s. You know? It wasn’t the same old bullshit. “I’m really sorry,” I said. I put out my hand.

Roy grabbed me and hugged me. He started crying. “I’m sorry too, man,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” Then I was crying too. His shoulders shook. For a split second it seemed like he could have been laughing, but I knew he wasn’t. He was crying like he never cried before. Times like that, what can you say? I just held onto him for a while, and we cried together. Then, it being a wake and all, we got ripped as hell.

After that we were best friends again. Up until then I figured I might go the rest of my life without ever getting together with Roy again. The thing of it is: you never know what the fuck is going to happen; and you can take that to the bank.

* * *

On the night of my eighteenth birthday I got in a fight with my girlfriend, Denise Brady. That night my mom and dad took Denise and me out to dinner down in South Philly. So after my parents went to bed, we go down to the basement where I had my bedroom. We were watching MTV. I tried to get Denise either to smoke some weed or give me a blowjob. I don’t remember; maybe both. I was like, “Come on, it’s my birthday!”

And she said, “We have to talk about something serious.” That’s when she told me she was leaving me, going to college in some dumb-ass place in the Midwest.

I was like, “What the fuck!”

And she was like, “I told you. I’m going.”

She told me there was nothing to discuss; her mind was made up. That’s what really got me. She’d made up her mind without even telling me what she was thinking! And she wouldn’t listen to what I had to say. I snapped. I pushed her, and she pushed me back. It got worse and worse, you know? Finally, I got so pissed I hit her; I smacked her in her face.

After that, Denise bolted. She ran upstairs and out. She ran three blocks, all the way to Roy’s house – not for Roy, but for Roy’s sister Liz who was Denise’s best friend.

Roy answered the door. He took one look at Denise’s bruised face and he knew I did it. I mean, he knew Denise had been over my house, and it’s not like girls got mugged in our neighborhood. And the thing of it for Roy was his dad didn’t live with the family anymore on account of beating the crap out of Roy’s mom. That situation had gotten way out of hand before the old man finally left. Once he put Roy’s mom in the hospital. And more than once social services showed up at their house.

So that night, on my eighteenth birthday, when Roy saw Denise all banged up, it’s like Peggy says: that must have pushed his button, because he flipped the fuck out.

After I hit Denise and she ran away, I stole a bottle of vodka from my parents. I went down to the basement and drank about a quarter of it. Denise and I had been going together since tenth grade. Here it was the end of twelfth; we were supposed to go to community college together, and bam! She dumps this on me. I was supposed to take business classes at community. We were supposed to move to this place on Lake Michigan – she had family there. I was going to save up and buy a fishing boat, be a charter captain, take people out fishing for lake trout and salmon and shit. We had it planned.

I sat in bed drinking the vodka, thinking about Denise, and feeling like crap. I cried like a baby for about an hour, and I guess I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was dark. I was on my back; my forehead felt cold, like someone was holding an ice cube against it. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw somebody standing over my bed, pointing at me. Jesus fucking Christ! A gun! A burglar! No. It was Roy, holding a .38 revolver to my forehead. I tried to say something, but nothing came out. I thought I was going to throw up. I looked up at him. I moved my lips; I could hear my teeth chatter. But I was so freaked out I swear I couldn’t even talk!

Roy goes, “Close your eyes.”

I shivered.

He shouted, “Close your fucking eyes!”

I thought, this is it – Roy’s fucking crazy and this is how I am going to die. I scrunched my eyes closed. There was nothing; just dead silence.

“Please don’t kill me,” I managed to say. I couldn’t breathe.

“Three…” said Roy.

“ Roy, please, man, I don’t want to die…Please, don’t…!”

“Shut up!” he said. And then he said, “Two…” and then he said, “One…”

Then there’s nothing, except for me shivering and slobbering like an idiot. And finally, Roy goes, “If you ever lay a hand on her again, you’d better never fucking fall asleep.”

I didn’t hear him leave. But when I opened my eyes he was gone. I ran up the basement steps and opened the kitchen window in the back of the house. Roy was two houses down, almost at the end of the alley. I grabbed an empty beer bottle from the kitchen counter and threw it out the window at him. It missed him and smashed against the Fitzgerald’s garage door. “Motherfucker!” I yelled into the darkness. By then Roy was gone. I know I shouldn’t have hit Denise. After that night, I never hit anyone again – never even spanked my kids. So it’s not like some good didn’t come out of it. And like Peggy says, it wasn’t really me he was pointing his gun at. But at the time – and for a long time after – it was like, what the fuck was that about?

* * *

I never saw Denise again. Before the next Christmas break her dad died and her family moved to the Midwest, where her mom was from. Community college sucked. I dropped out after the first semester and got a job at the bubble gum factory. It’s pretty decent, good benefits and that’s where I met Peggy. She worked there summers and Christmas breaks while she got her teaching degree.

Roy and I pretty much avoided each other until I heard about his son. That poor kid got run over by some dumb-ass drunk driver out on Route 1 where he lived with his mom and her new husband. For the first couple weeks after the accident, Roy was on some heavy-duty drugs to help him keep his shit together. Even then, just about all he could talk about was killing the guy who killed his son. And when he wasn’t talking about that he’d talk about “just fucking ending everything, everything…” Roy’s mom told me her brother was going to take Roy’s guns out of the house. That definitely sounded like a good idea. I told her I’d keep an eye on Roy.

A couple weeks later, when we started talking about the old days, about the old shooting range, and Roy said he wanted to try out the new range, I figured it would be good for him to blow off some steam, you know?

* * *

I load the .357 magnum with .38 bullets, because the .357 ammo has way too much kick for a little guy like me. Hell, Roy’s already done enough damage to the ceiling of this place for one day. And besides, the rangemaster’s back in his booth, so we can’t do any more stupid shit. I tape up a new target – a standard bull’s eye – and move it out 15 yards. I raise the pistol, set my sites on the bull’s eye, take a deep breath, let it out slow, squeeze the trigger, and blast a nice big hole, right through the middle of the target.

“Good shot,” says Roy.

I answer with five more rounds – BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! – emptying the revolver.

Now the range is silent. It’s that buzz in your head after there’s noise – guns, jack hammers, packing machines or whatever. You hear it even after it stops. You feel it against your eyelids and your temples.

The guys in the other lane pack up their stuff. The rangemaster flips through the Daily News. Roy wipes his Glock with an oily rag, and I reload my .357.Louis Greenstein’s one-act plays, Smoke, Interview with a Scapegoat and The Convert, have been produced many times in the U.S. and abroad. Louis is the co-author of With Albert Einstein, a one-man show about the life of the great scientist, which has enjoyed critical and popular success at the Walnut Street Theater, Princeton University, and schools and science museums. Louis is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts playwriting fellowship. His fiction and haiku have appeared in Muse Apprentice Guild and Dream Forge. Currently, he is working on a new novel. Louis lives in Lower Merion with his wife Catherine and their children, Raven, Hannah, and Sam.