Say That To My Face

Say

That

to

my

Face

F I C T I O N

David Prete

FOR MY SISTER

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

No King, No Puppy

Not Because I’m Thirsty

The Biggest, Most Silent Thing

Four-Foot-Six

Self-Respecting Neapolitans

Bleachers

After We Left Yonkers and Before We Came Back

The Itch

Green

Say That to my Face

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

NO KING, NO PUPPY

This was the part of the ride I loved the best. It was my part. When I got up to a good speed and pulled the skid brake, it made the back wheels of my Big Wheel lock and kick out to one side, which sent me into a spin and then a stop. If I got scared and tried to stop the spin with my limbs, chances were I’d get hurt: I could scrape up my feet or tip myself and go shitcan-over-teakettle onto the pavement. Either way, if I tried to stop what it was I had gotten myself into, I’d end up face-ass down on the street.

At four and a half, as I would fall asleep, I’d remember the rides I took that day. I could feel the motion of the skids playing themselves over in me as I lay in bed. Like spending the whole day in the ocean and that same night still feeling the waves going back and forth in my body as if the tide got stuck there. I’d hear the sound of the plastic tire grinding against the asphalt and feel my eyes watering from the wind. It was simply the best thing that ever happened to a kid since the beginning of kids. That’s what I thought about in my fifth year when I would fall asleep.

The other thing I would think about was why there were four different homes in which I was falling asleep.

WHEN MY PARENTS were married they lived in the Bronx. When they got divorced it was decided that my mother, my sister and I would move a few miles north, into my grandparents’ house in Yonkers. My mom was twenty-one years old and broke. Her parents’ house was small, so my sister, my mother and I shared a bedroom. It was a converted attic with a pitched roof and a crawlspace behind one of the walls. Just big enough for three beds and three dressers. The one decorative touch was an almost-life-size poster of Robert Redford playing the Sundance Kid. Our mother hung the poster directly over the headboard of her bed. We lived in that house with our grandparents from when I was one year old until I was six.

The address was 15 Verona Avenue. Verona Avenue was a long and steep hill. The bottom of the hill intersected Central Park Avenue, which was a major six-lane roadway that ran through all of Yonkers. During a hard rainstorm the water would come down that hill and overflow the gutters. That’s when my sister and I put plastic bags over our sneakers and splashed around in what all the adults were cursing the city about.

After dinner, before we would go to bed, I’d get up on my grandfather’s lap. Everyone knew what that meant. My grandfather would yell playfully but really loud, “Get the hell outta here! Now I gotta scratch his back?”

I’d play like he really wasn’t going to. “Ah, Gramps, come ooooooon.”

Then he’d slap me on the back and shake his head at me as if to say, Look at the prince here, sit me on his lap and scratch. We had a pretty smooth routine.

My grandfather was the best back-scratcher I ever knew. The guy was a butcher. He worked with his hands. He understood the force of cleaving and the subtlety of carving. He had thick heavy fingernails, which he kept very well. They were perfect for our routine. He had his clipper and nail buffer (not a file, a two-sided nail buffer), which he kept on his nightstand right next to the whetstone he used to sharpen his butcher’s knives. He took as good care of his nails as he did all of his tools.

There was also a paved walkway that ran from the front of the house all the way to the back, eventually connecting to the back patio. Hugging this walkway was a fence that separated my grandparents’ house from their neighbors’. This walkway was a long enough strip for me to get some pretty good speed on my Big Wheel and hit some nice spins. If ever I rode to the front of the house my mother would yell, “Stay away from the street!” then mumble to herself, “That Big Wheel scares the shit out of me.”

The house at 15 Verona Avenue was where I would fall asleep during most weekdays. House Number One.

If I wasn’t there on a weeknight, it was because I went with my sister to sleep at House Number Two—Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie’s place. They had two daughters, our cousins, Dina and Vicky. They were not our blood relations. They were self-declared family, friends from the Bronx who were so close they needed to be deemed Aunt, Uncle and Cousin. My mother and my Aunt Marie had known each other since grade school. They got married about the same time, had kids about the same time and moved not only to the same neighborhood in the Bronx, but to the same block. We lived at 2224 Grace Avenue; they lived at 2216 Grace Avenue. Some nights, if we were playing at the other family’s house and we happened to fall asleep on their couch, our parents would just leave us there until morning. We got breakfast no matter where we woke up. I guess they were better than family. When we moved to Yonkers, my mother would drive us down to the Bronx and Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie would take us in for the night. This happened about once a week. Our grandparents’ house didn’t lack love, but nonetheless my sister and I often gravitated back to Grace Avenue. Maybe we were leaning toward a type of normalcy or honoring a need we felt for some kind of completion. They had a house with a mother, a father and two kids. We couldn’t get enough of it.

House Number Three was actually an apartment. It belonged to my father. And then there was his girlfriend’s apartment. My father saw my sister and me on weekends. That was the custody agreement. Saturday nights we either slept at his apartment in Port Chester (another suburb about twenty minutes from Yonkers) or we would go to his girlfriend’s place, where my sister and I would crash on a pull-out couch. House Number Four.

I HAD TROUBLE sleeping at that age regardless of where I slept. I never wanted to go to bed for fear that I would miss something. I remember lying in bed hearing adults talking or a newspaper turning or the television and I thought, I gotta get out there. What could they possibly be doing? There is definitely something goin’ on.

The other thing that would keep me awake was the sound of my parents’ voices. The ones that my mind recorded from when they were still married. Not conversations. Fights. And not the words they used to fight with but the sounds they produced while they were fighting. Theirs was not an amicable breakup. There’s a thing that happens to a person’s voice at the peak of rage. Vocal cords no longer become a free channel to express emotion. Vibrations become impeded and grate against the inside of one’s throat. This is what I knew to be the sound of my parents’ relationship ending. When that recorded noise would keep me awake, I would try to replace it with the sound of my Big Wheel. A plastic tire rolling over cement. This worked for me sometimes.

Even after I fell asleep, I didn’t easily stay asleep. I would often wake up in the night, usually from nightmares. And sometimes figments of my dreams would float around the room. This was terrifying, and the only way I knew how to snap myself completely out of the dream state was to run. I would run into the bathroom, down the stairs or out into the hall. Once I woke up and started running from something and crashed right into my mother’s bedpost. Nose first. My mother sat me up on the bathroom sink with a wad of toilet paper on my nose to stop the bleeding. “What the hell were you doin’?”

“Umm … I couldn’t sleep.”

“So you figured you’d run into a couple of walls? Knock yourself out?”

She made me laugh. This, she was good at.

Of the four different places I slept, there was only one constant: my sister Catherine always slept right beside me. She was either in the same bed as me or in the bed right next to mine for the first six years of my life.

There was a moment in the mornings, after my sister and I woke up and before we opened our eyes, when we weren’t sure which one of the four houses we’d woken up in. (If you’ve ever fallen asleep in your own bed with your head where your feet usually are, woken up and were so confused as to why your window was now behind you, then you get the picture.) So what my sister and I would do was keep our eyes closed and try to guess. We would try to listen for someone’s voice or try to smell where we were. There was always one place out of the four where we secretly wished to be, but it was never the same place every time. It depended on our mood. And sometimes, when we really, really wanted to be in one place and woke up someplace else, it was a drag. Oh, damn, I’m here? I wanted to be there.

IN 1975, WHEN I was four and Catherine was six, our mother, at age twenty-five, had a job at a department store. She worked weekends and some weeknights. That way her days could be spent with her children. The couple of weeknights she had to work were tough for us. I remember us crying a lot because we didn’t want our mom to leave. Our grandparents were great people, but we were already one parent short.

Not only was our mother young, she was also pretty. On weekends she would go to the beauty parlor with her friends. She always wanted to be attractive for herself, but since the divorce, and for the first time in her adult life, she also had the intention of being attractive for other guys. She started dating a few years after she and my dad split.

She brought a man to 15 Verona Avenue whose name was Raymond Canalli. He was a well-dressed guy who drove a new Cadillac Coupe de Ville and apparently was in the contracting business. Ray had pudgy fingers with three big rings. Which gave his hands a look of wealth and therefore security. I liked them. I liked them when they were holding my grandmother’s silverware at the dinner table and I liked them when he patted me on the head. One night, from our bedroom window, my sister and I watched my mother walk Ray to his car. Ray had one hand on our mother’s back. I liked that, too.

Our mother never stayed over at Ray’s place, nor did he ever stay at our grandparents’ house. Even dating was a bit tricky.

Catherine and I used to tie one end of a jump rope to the partition fence. While one of us turned the free end, the other one would jump through. One night, while my mother was out with Ray, Catherine was at the fence turning the jump rope and I was sitting at the iron table on the back patio with my grandfather. He was drinking a beer and I asked him if I could have some. He had a little more than half a beer left and gave it to me. Catherine said, “Joey, come jump with me.” It was a beautiful summer night; I was drinking beer with my grandfather and had my elbows on the table; I was feeling very grown up. Playing jump rope with my sister would’ve interfered with how cool I was. So I just sort of shrugged one shoulder at her, said, “Maybe later,” and finished the warm can of Miller High Life. It didn’t agree with me. Later on that night, I wound up in the bathroom throwing up, with my grandfather sitting on the edge of the bathtub watching me. With my head in the bowl, I heard my mother come home from her date and my grandmother yelling from the kitchen, “Your father gave him a beer, now he’s throwing up in there!”

My mother came into the bathroom and, having assessed the situation before she even put a foot in the door, slapped my grandfather on the back of his head, slapped me on the back of my head, and walked out shouting, “I’m gone for four hours and my son winds up knee-deep in bile?”

My grandfather laughed at that. My mother screamed some more from the kitchen. “It’s funny? It’s so goddamn funny that I’m twenty-five and I can’t go out for one night without coming back to this? It’s funny, right?”

My grandfather stopped laughing. I was wishing that I had jumped rope that night and my mother was probably thinking she shouldn’t go out to dinner for a while.

AFTER ABOUT SIX months into the relationship with our mom, Ray started showing up with presents for everyone. A couple toys for us kids, an expensive piece of jewelry for our mother. Then, one Wednesday night, in the middle of August 1975, Ray Canalli brought over a little something for the house. Like two television sets. One was a twenty-one-inch color TV for the living room and the other was a portable black and white number that we could watch outside on the back patio. A big color TV? For my sister and me? It sent our heads spinning. But the portable one? Now, that was something special. Plenty of people had regular TVs, but having one you could watch from your back patio? That was something to be contested. And that was exactly what Catherine and I felt on our grandparents’ patio, with our bowl of popcorn, watching our New York Yankees play on our brand-new portable television set—we were something to be contested.

That night, I woke up and, standing before me in our room, a witch was sharpening her cats’ claws on a whetstone. It made sounds that should’ve come off a chalkboard or out of a blacksmith shop. Two hateful and unyielding forces grinding against each other that sent my four-year-old ass running. When I got halfway down the stairs, I heard some kind of clanging noises and voices ahead of me. I stopped, trapped between two scary places. I looked back up the stairs. The entrance to our room was foggy and dark. The witch wasn’t following me, but I still didn’t know what those noises from downstairs were, so I wasn’t going anywhere. I dropped to a stair and held my blanket up to my mouth. I froze. Then the clanging in the distance began to sound familiar—ceramic cups hitting against saucers, maybe. I recognized the voices as my mother’s and Ray’s, coming from the kitchen. As my mind cleared, I realized they were just talking and sipping coffee. It was nothing.

“Ray, what are you doing?”

“Drinking coffee with you. What are you doing?”

“Trying to raise my kids right.”

“And you are. Look how happy they were tonight.”

“They were happy because of the TVs, Ray.”

“Yeah, and if a little TV can make them that happy, do you have any idea what a house of their own and swimming pool could do for them?”

Did he just say … swimming pool? Now I was awake. I poked my head around the corner.

“I’m not worried about what those things could do to them.”

“Are we gonna start with that now?”

“Yeah, we’re gonna start with that now. I don’t see you for ten days. I don’t get to ask where you were or what you were doing. Then you show up at my parents’ house on a Wednesday night with a dozen roses, a black eye and two TVs that don’t have a box or a price tag between them.”

“Why you wanna price tag? You wanna take ’em back to the store?”

“What store would that be, Ray?”

He laughed.

“You’re a shady guy, Ray.”

“That’s why you like me. Admit it.”

“I’m not gonna like you so hard the day they start shoving your meals through a slot.”

“Tough girl here.”

“That’s right.”

“No one is gonna be shovin’ my meals through a slot.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know that.” He punctuated that by knocking his rings on the table.

“Then I don’t know that.”

“I’m tellin’ you.”

“But Ray, you don’t know. You don’t, you don’t and you don’t.”

“I know how I feel about you. That’s what I know. Do you know how I feel about you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how you feel about me?”

“Yeah.” She was looking down at the table.

“Do you?”

By her chin, he brought her face up to meet his. Looking right in his eyes, she said, “Yes.”

“So, then?”

My mother stared at her boyfriend longingly, then a smile broke out on her lips. Ray smiled with her. She started shaking her head.

Ray said, “So whaddaya wanna do?”

“What, are you gonna walk me down the aisle wearing concrete boots?”

There was a pause. Ray grabbed her hand and leaned in closer. “Whaddaya wanna do?”

“I wanna drink my coffee.”

Carefully, I walked back up to our bedroom and stood at the side of Catherine’s bed.

“Rin, wake up.”

She was used to this. “What?”

“Ray wants to buy us a swimming pool.”

“Who said?”

“He did. I just heard him say it to Mommy.”

“Where would we put a pool?”

“In the backyard?”

“Is it small?”

“I don’t know. But you know what? You know what I think? I think it’s gonna be one like they have at Sprain Brook Park, only smaller.”

Up until then Catherine could’ve had this conversation in her sleep. But now she cleared the covers off her head and propped herself up on her elbows.

“A concrete pool?”

“Yeah, a concrete pool.”

“He said that?”

“Yes. He said a concrete pool.”

“No way.”

“Yes way! A CONCRETE POOL!” I started punching her mattress. “A BUILT-IN, CONCRETE POOL!”

“Shhh! Stop that. What else did they say?”

“I don’t know, but that would be the best thing ever.” The excitement was too much for me. I jumped on my bed and started beating my face into the pillow. “That would be the best.”

I pulled the covers up to my chin and held them tight. My eyes were darting all over the room and my heart was all over my chest. I looked over my mother’s bed and I struggled in the dark to make out Robert Redford’s face and hat.

THE NEXT DAY, my mother and Catherine were in front of the bathroom mirror. My mother had just washed Catherine’s hair and was now combing it out. I was pushing a Matchbox car along the rim of the bathtub watching them. Catherine said, “Mom, are you going to marry Ray?”

My mother said, “I don’t know, sweetie.” She was being very careful about how to answer questions on this subject and continued, “He’s a really nice man, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, he is.”

“What makes you ask?”

“Well, if you did marry him, would we get another house?”

“We probably would. But like I said, I don’t know if Mommy will marry Ray.”

“If we got another house, would I have my own room?”

“I wish you could.” Her carefulness slipped away for a moment.

“And would Joey have his own room?”

Whoa. Hold on a second. This was the first I ever heard about having to sleep alone. A horrifying idea that my mother seemed to like.

“Um, yeah. I guess you could both have your own room.” She drifted into a fantasy about it, then caught herself. “But listen to me, Catherine, that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that we all stay together. Me and you and Joey. Whatever happens, the three of us have to stay together.”

That night, my sister and I were jumping rope by the back patio light. Inside, we could hear our mother turning the pages of a magazine. I spoke to my sister in a whisper.

“Rin?”

“What?”

“Do you think Mommy and Ray will get married?”

She kept turning the rope even though I’d stopped jumping. “I don’t know. Do you want them to?”

“Umm …” Now that she asked, I wasn’t sure. I needed her opinion. “Do you?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.” She was sounding very old for her age.

We heard a car pull up to the front of the house and the kitchen chair our mother was on slid on the linoleum floor as she stood up. Catherine and I went inside. My mother spoke through the screen door. “Ray, it’s kinda late.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry. I saw the light on.”

I scrambled to my mother’s legs and said hi to him. He said, “Hey, buddy Joe. Look what I got for you.” He pulled out a miniature car. “Joey, this is a 1954 Porsche. James Dean used to drive a car like this. You know who James Dean was?”

“No.”

“He was the coolest movie star there was.”

My mother said, “Come in for a minute,” and opened the door. I grabbed the car as if it were my first meal in a week.

“What do you say, Joey?”

“Thank you, Ray.”

I started to drive the car all over the living room as Ray produced a can of bubbles for Catherine. Mom said, “Joey, don’t wake up your grandparents.”

“How’d you like that movie the other night?”

“You drove over here just to ask me how I liked the movie we saw last week?”

“Yeah. That, and I thought maybe you could do me a favor.”

“What?”

“What night did we see that movie?”

Our mother was getting a little annoyed. “Um, Wednesday. What’s the—”

“Are you sure it wasn’t Tuesday?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talkin’ about the movie we saw last Tuesday.”

“You’re not being cute, Ray. What’s the favor?”

“I was thinking—here’s the favor part—if someone was to ask you what night we saw the movie, do you think you could tell them—”

“Someone? Who is someone?”

“Joey, didn’t me and your mother go see the movies last Tuesday night?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s a good answer, Joe. If you tell ’em nothin’, they ain’t got nothin’ on you.”

My mother cut him right off. “Joey, take your car and go upstairs. I’ll be right there to put you to bed. Catherine, go with him.”

I said, “Why?”

“Upstairs.” There was the tone we didn’t argue with. Catherine and I got halfway up the stairs when we heard our mom hiss at Ray. “Outside.”

The screen door shut. Catherine and I could still hear them.

“This is not fuckin’ funny, Ray. Who the hell is gonna ask me what? And why?”

“Look, look. Sorry I ever said anything about it. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal.”

“A big deal? You come in here, try to turn my four-year-old son into an accessory, and now—”

“I did not.”

“You asked my son to lie for you, and now all of a sudden I’ve got ‘someone’ who might ask me ‘something’ about where you were last week. Where are they gonna ask me this? Are they gonna show up at my job? Are they gonna come here? To my parents’ house? Where my children live, to ask me?”

“It’s probably nothin’.”

“It’s already somethin’ and I don’t want it. And another thing, these kids don’t need another guy to come and go.”

“That’s not me!”

“Oh, no?”

“No.”

“Then tell me the truth, Ray. Tell me the God’s honest truth, even if this thing is nothin’, and it’s probably not—”