Say That To My Face

THE BIGGEST, MOST SILENT THING

I can’t cook yet, she says. I hang out in the kitchen because I like food and because my mother always asks me to keep her company. I’m eight; I know how to cook. Maybe it’s an Italian thing. She turns the radio on to an oldies station and some guy is singing about taking his girl away into the moonlight, throwing her eyes into the sky, loving her in some deep moment of bliss forever and ever. Maybe it’s a fifties thing. She says, now I can cook, rubs her palms together and grabs me by the waist. Let me show you how we used to dance when I was a kid. You put your hands here like you’re leading, ’cause that’s how the guys did it, but really you’re gonna follow. Just follow me. You just kind of rock back and forth, that’s right. She sings along and hums when she can’t remember the words. She says, you know what I want for Christmas this year? I want a special gift. What? I ask. I want you to write a poem about me. A poem just about me. Then she says, oops, we can’t let this burn. She reaches to the stove and pushes the escarole around in the pan, her right hand still around my waist.

THE NEXT NIGHT, my mother asks me to go with her to pick up my sister from religious instruction class. I say it’s too early to go and she says she wants to drive slowly because the roads may be icy. On our way out the door we run into our neighbor Gloria, and my mother asks her if she had a nice Thanksgiving. Gloria went to her sister’s in Philadelphia and, she says, she’ll be going there for Christmas as well. My mother says, that’s nice. Three years ago, Gloria’s husband took off without notice and wrote her a letter explaining where he was and who he was with and served her with papers two weeks later. I am quiet. She says, hi, Joey. Hi, Gloria. Mom tells Gloria to stop by if she needs anything.

Mom says, give me your arm, Joey, there’s ice on these steps. They need salt on them. I told your stepfather to do it, she says, but who knows with him. She asks me if I’ll put some salt down when we get back and I say, yes. As we walk down the stairs, she sticks to my arm and tells me how sorry she feels for Gloria being alone during the holidays. I can relate to her very well, she says. Of course I can. She’s had two last names and I’ve already had three.

During the drive, she asks me if I’m excited to go to my father’s house for Christmas Eve. I say, yeah, and she wants to know what Patty, my stepmother, cooks for Christmas Eve dinner. I say, fish and things. Is it good? she wants to know. I say it is.

We pull up to the Catholic school twenty minutes early. We sit quietly in the car. My breath turns to vapor out the window. Mom tells me she’s cold and can I roll the window up a little. I leave it open a crack. She says the church looks like the one in the Bronx she and my father went to when they were still married. And that was the beginning of the history lesson. It dated back before I was born, when Mom and Dad weren’t having a good time. When, my mother tells me, my father wasn’t always nice. When he wasn’t nice to her. She tells me how he used to yell at her and hit her and how he started dating Patty while they were still married. I always figured it was that way. There had been many innuendos and opinions thrown around the house that weren’t intended to land in my ears. This is the first formal sit-down on the subject. I feel like the kid in class who’s terrified to get called on. I just take notes, ask no questions and try to be invisible.

When the history lesson is over, she brings us in to the present by talking about my last report card. It left a lot to be desired, she says. The kids start coming out of the Catholic school and Mom says we’ll talk more about it later. She starts up the car and I can see my sister Catherine walking toward us. I think maybe we can talk about the apostles on the ride home. My mother says, Joey, can you roll up that window, please, Mommy’s cold.

Later, I get the talk about the report card. My mother has trouble understanding why my sister does so well in school and I don’t. The thing is, it doesn’t occur to me to be a good student when my sister already is. That’s her calling. Why should I do that? There’s no reason for two people in one family to play the same part.

My mother tells me that no one is going to come along and just give me good grades. Or give me anything else, for that matter. She wants to know how I think the family eats around here and how I get clothes to wear. She says, what do you want to do when you get older? I tell her I want to be a baseball player. And what if that doesn’t work out? she says. Then what? What are you going to do then? I say, I don’t know. She says I have to know because life isn’t a game. I say, I don’t know, OK? I don’t know what I want. Then she explodes. Don’t say that. It just kills me that you could say that. She looks like she’s going to spit. You sound just like your father.

I GO OUTSIDE to throw salt on the front steps. I see Gloria’s TV on and I watch my breath turn to steam again. I wrote a poem once, when I was six. In the first grade I went on a school trip to the Museum of Natural History. The intention for most of the first-graders (at least all the boys) was to see how much trouble they could cause. But something in me didn’t want to. The museum didn’t feel like the kind of place where we should’ve been causing trouble. I thought, Don’t fuck around. See if you can learn something. Go somewhere and learn something. It was the first time a thought like that had ever occurred to me. So I went to the butterfly exhibit and learned how they camouflage themselves. They hold the top part of their wings—the bright, colorful side—together so only the underside of the wings shows. The underside is covered with browns and grays, which allow them to blend in with dirt and branches. They become invisible in their own surroundings. They hide their beauty for safety. This is known as crypsis. I took a Magic Marker and wrote “crypsis” on my arm and covered it with my sleeve.

Then I saw the blue whale they have on the ceiling. It was the biggest and most silent thing I’d seen. All the other big stuff I knew was so damn loud—our house, the school, my parents’ divorce, dinner. Even my mother’s new marriage was loud. My stepfather was a very low-key individual. The longest conversation I ever had with him went like this: What time’s the Yankee game on? Seven o’clock. When my mother would fight him, he would never fight back, so she would have to fight herself. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, yelling at my stepfather through the door. She’d scream about the life he had promised her and how good things were supposed to have been and how it was all bullshit. That’s how she fought him. He never screamed back. The loudest thing I ever heard my stepfather say to my mother was, “No, I’m not like your ex-husband. I don’t beat you.”

That was really loud.

So I wrote a poem about the blue whale on the ceiling at the Museum of Natural History. The poem said that the biggest thing I ever saw was also the quietest. Mom hung it on the refrigerator. Also, I took my blue Magic Marker and I drew a picture of the whale on the bottom of my kitchen chair. Then I would lie on the floor and look up at my picture, so the whale could be over my head, just like they had it at the museum. Also, no one else would see it there.

When I come back in the house, the report card discussion continues. She says, Joseph, I know you’re a smart kid. I know you can do very good in school, that’s the only reason why I get upset, OK? She throws a hug on me and my head lands in her stomach. She plays with my hair and asks me if I’ve locked the side door. I say I have. See, she says, and holds me tighter, poor Gloria, she doesn’t have a man around the house anymore. It’s scary. God forbid someone tries to break into her house at night, what’s she gonna do?

LIKE EVERY SATURDAY morning, our father comes to pick my sister and me up at our mother’s house and then we stay with him for the weekend. I sit in the back and my sister in the front. He drives a Volkswagen Bug and the gears are tight, which makes for a jerky ride every time he shifts. It’s not something that’s happened to me before. I’ve never peed my pants in my mother’s car. But I feel it rising up now as soon as I get into his car. This Saturday morning, I get a tender feeling below my stomach when we stop at the light. It gets worse when he starts to drive, then he throws it into second, the car jerks and it happens. My sister notices first and says, Daddy, Joey needs help.

My father looks at me in the rearview mirror and says, what’s the matter, Joey? You OK?

When he realizes what’s happened, he stops the car, gets a towel out from under the hood and spreads it out on the seat next to me. He says, Joey, it’s OK. You’re not hurt. It’s OK, Joey. Sit on this now and we’ll put on different clothes when we get home. That’s all. It’s OK.

When we get back to his place, my stepmother cleans me up. I wear my pajama bottoms while I wait for my jeans to dry. I walk out of the bathroom to the living room, where Dad’s sitting in an armchair.

Come here. Sit with me, Joey. Sit with your old man.

He lifts me up. My father has hands that feel solid as two pieces of teak furniture. My butt lands on one arm of the chair and my feet on the other. He goes, sit here on the big chair like a man. There we go. You feel better?

Yeah, I say.

See, no big deal. He drags his thumb across my neck. It feels as big as the barrel end of a baseball bat. What happened to your neck? he wants to know. You wrestling with someone?

No.

Then who grabbed you?

I say, someone in class. I was hoping he would drop it there.

Who? he asks.

Kerri.

Kerri? Oh, yeah? This, he is very interested in. Kerri who?

Gallagher.

Huh. An Irish girl. Is she nice?

Yeah.

He says, you like her? I smile. He pokes me in the ribs with a finger. I’m sure she’s very nice. She cute?

I think I’m not supposed to tell my dad how cute I think girls are. So I keep it shut and hope he puts this subject to sleep.

Aaaah, Joey, he says. Girls … they’re different than guys. If only women understood that, less marriages would go into retirement. Patty, she understands. I’ll tell you something, it’s like this—you like this girl Kerri, and maybe there’s another girl that you like also. Right?

Um … no.

No? No one? I shake my head. Well, someday there will be. And you’ll find yourself trying to understand why you like them both, you’ll start to feel a lot of things and you’ll get confused, but let me tell you, it’s simple. There are some things that guys need that ladies do not. And this is the whole difference between them. A guy needs the kind of thing he can keep his feelings out of. And this is the thing that your stepmother understands what many women—I don’t mention names—don’t understand, and that is why a lot of marriages go south. You know what I mean?

He continued.

Look, a guy needs the kind of thing that he can keep his feelings out of. And I don’t think women can do that, they’re too emotional. A woman can’t fall down an elevator shaft, for instance, dust herself off, then have sex with you ten seconds later. If they don’t feel it, it’s not gonna happen. Period. But guys can get into a plane wreck and lose limbs. Two hundred fifty dead bodies floating in the ocean, sharks are eating the survivors and in the life raft as the helicopters are coming, the guy will hit on the stewardess. And this is true. Some women don’t understand how we could do a thing at a time like that. If the stewardess is hot, then we can do it. It’s simple. So what, she may have lost a limb. We’d still do it. Even in the face of death. They think we’re just pigs. Let ’em do their claptrappin’. I’ll tell you the truth, son, we’re not pigs, we’re just different.

The only thing I’m sure of is that his lips are moving and sound is coming out of them. Sharks? Helicopters? Pigs with no arms? He could be conjugating Cantonese verbs into Sanskrit, for all I know.

He goes on.

And this is what Patty understands that many women do not. She doesn’t judge. And who should? Who should be able to judge a thing like that? It’s not the kind of thing … Your Grandfather used to say, “He who casts the first stone who lives in glass houses … you shouldn’t do it.” Your stepmother understands that we’re different. You understand, Joey?

What if you like only one girl? I ask. Then what?

Then that’s OK. It’s OK if you like only one girl for now. I mean, you’ll see. There will be plenty, is all I’m saying. Someday you’ll have your own place, you’ll have your own stuff …

My father gets introspective. It’s unfamiliar to me. When he comes out of it, it’s hard for him to look me in the eye. He speaks slower and deeper than he has been. Joey, he says, when you get older—sometimes I think, probably, you might think of me and you’ll say, “You know, my dad was a real jerk-off when it came to certain things, but then other things he was OK with.” I hope.

Now he tries to lighten himself up.

Don’t tell your mother this, he says, but secretly I can’t wait for you to get older so we can get dressed up and go out—you’re gonna look sharp. Always look sharp, Joey. It’s important. You see, my father, your grandpa … he used to go out alone. And I think we can do better than that.

There is a heavy pause.

We all work with what we have, he says.

Another one.

You know how to listen, Joey. It’s a good thing to know how to do.

He grabs my arm and pulls at what little muscle is there and says, Jesus, look at you. When did you get so big?

I try to figure out how to break away from those hands. It seems he wants to be friends, something I think parents aren’t supposed to be. I understand the way dogs feel when they want to walk one way and their leash is getting pulled the other.

I say, I’m hungry. Can we have lunch now?

Sure we can. He calls to the kitchen, Patty, can you fix the kids something?

She says, I got ham sandwiches.

He says to me, you like that, right?

Happy to have a destination, I say, I love ham.

He kisses me on the top of my head, lifts me off the chair and as I head for the kitchen, one of his palms catches me square on the ass.

THERE’S A RUNNING joke in my mother’s house. For years, she’s been talking about this mink coat she’s gonna buy herself. We say, “How’s the mink coat fund comin’, Ma? You save enough to buy the claws yet?” She says, “Yeah, you watch. The day I get that coat I’m gonna be laughin’ hard. You watch.” She works nights at a department store and her husband delivers bread. Where does a mink coat fit into that picture?

But this night, December 17, 1979, she calls us on our joke. We’ve just finished dinner. My sister, my mother, my stepfather and myself linger over empty dishes and I pick olives out of the salad with my fingers. Our mother says she has an announcement to make. Announcement? My sister and I make faces and validate each other’s confusion. We hardly ever have anything to talk about in this house. Who makes announcements?

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