The Beautiful Miscellaneous Page 22

thirty-seven

  At the library I shelved books and showed public safety and archival films to the public. Mr. Rawlings, the town historian, came in on Wednesdays to see Fourth of July parades and inaugurations involving mayoral ribbons. I worked with the middle-aged wives of college professors. My boss, Birdie Peters, wife to a classics professor, was a fine-boned woman of denim skirts and tennis shoes. She drank instant coffee all day long and soundly scolded fine payers: “Mrs. Jervatis, you seem to be borrowing and returning on the Mayan calendar.”

  After work I went to movies by myself. Our town had a movie theater that had been built in a time of flashy optimism—a cascade of lights, an Art Deco awning with neon trim, an oversize ticket booth with a chrome guardrail in front of it. Inside it was more of the same. Pendant lights swayed from the ceiling plaster, balconies jutted from the walls. I went to the cheap movies, the long runs and revivals. For a dollar I could watch movies that were edging onto video. Their target audience was unemployed, transient, and retired; men in gravy-colored coats, women who peeled oranges during the show.

  I always sat near the back, positioned so I could see the moviegoers as well as the film, and from that vantage point, in a darkness more brown than black, it seemed like we were all underwater—the screen was a rippling surface above us. Movies played themselves out, swam toward me through the grainy air: manhunts and murders, car chases through bawling traffic, illicit sex in Vegas hotel rooms. Violence and sex seemed strange to me now. Their images barreled in from somewhere else, a tawdry outpost where people had lives involving vengeance and lust.

  I drove the Oldsmobile Omega into the ground, endless miles of browned-out dairy land, hatched greenfields, unsealed market roads. Movies and taking photos and driving made me feel anonymous. Sometimes I felt old memorized lists forming somewhere in my mind—notable disasters and Miss America winners—but I refused to let them in.

  Toby and Teresa wrote to me, frequently at first, then less so. Toby was a rising star at Juilliard, giving recitals to packed auditoriums, going on tour with this composer and that philharmonic. Teresa lived in a bungalow a few blocks from the hospital where she worked in Connecticut. She worked part-time, mornings, and had afternoons to herself. She’d taken up painting. They had given her an office and she saw patients face-to-face. She burned incense and laid out cut marigolds and daylilies; she played ambient music while the sick told her stories about their illnesses, gave her metaphors for what was really the matter. She had developed a bedside manner, taken some of the edge off her diagnostic revelations. She said she was learning empathy and that, for the first time, she felt useful.

  I FOLLOWED PEOPLE AND TOOK their pictures in secret. I borrowed my mother’s old camera and tried to capture the essence of what I saw. A new side of my hometown was revealed to me. There were territories and enclaves I hadn’t known: a vacant lot by the old meat works where migrant workers gathered in the dawn kicking the gravel, waiting for farmers to drive up looking for help; a deserted foundry that was now a studio belonging to an exiled painter; a nameless topless bar, set above the drugstore; a patch of dirt and mailboxes and trailers on the east side of town that was called the Oasis. I followed old ladies returning from bingo at the United Methodist, factory workers coming home from double shifts, delivery boys making their rounds, a priest riding his bicycle to the cemetery. I watched a man named Bing Peabody, who owned a shoe store, return home to a disheveled house that was full of the shoes that didn’t sell—dusty boxes of oversize and undersize and out-of-style shoes that cluttered his living room and hallway.

  I saw Leonard Spatz, the deli owner, sit in his store past midnight, mouthing along with a German dictionary. Then I drove past his house and understood by the car in the drive, by the shadow play from an upstairs window, that his wife was having an affair and that this was what he did on those nights. He muttered syllables—the stop-throat staccato of German—while she undressed for another man. It happened twice a week and he obviously allowed it. I watched college kids replace the hoisted flag outside the campus chapel with a stained sweatshirt. Through a fence, I saw a young boy bury his toys for safekeeping while his parents shouted violently from inside the house. I saw a man chip golf balls into his empty swimming pool. I watched an old man sweep his sidewalk with a stiff wire broom, the scratch like a blade on whetstone.

  Every life contained a secret gesture and I tried to capture it on film. It never felt like spying, like prowling, and I never watched women undress or lovers park outside a restaurant at 3:00 a.m. I thought about Arlen and Teresa; they were seers of a kind, watching other people and knowing from a smell or a bloated kidney something that it would take a lifetime to know. They knew suicidal tendencies before the person even knew it, about self-loathing while it was still in the stages of throwing up after meals. I’m not pretending that I had any of that, but I began to see people differently. I was observing from the outside, walking up to the shiny rooms of the living and looking in.

  thirty-eight

  Dear Dad,

  The Oldsmobile Omega is holding its own. Did you ever change the oil? Not long after you left I changed the oil and the air filter. Both were ancient.

  Did you know that Melville Dewey, inventor of the Dewey decimal system, was the Einstein of the library world? Before him they had “fixed location” for books and he made it “relative location”—a little bit like quantum theory. Now books were numbered according to their intellectual content instead of their physical address on the shelf.

  Love,

  Nathan

  thirty-nine

  Sometimes, at night, after Whit retired to his radio and my mother called her friends—churchly women who did the potluck-hospice-Levart circuit—I took a nightcap in the parlor. I poured myself a gin and tonic from the antique cabinet and sat down on the couch. My mother oiled the leather upholstery so that it smelled like a saddle. In the dimness the urn caught the light from the stairs, giving it a glowing white sheen. In death my father commanded the house in a way he never had in life. In life he’d been a boarder, a hotel guest showing up for meals before retiring to the galleries and curtained rooms of his own mind. He knew we would forgive his eccentricities, his distraction, if he remained relatively inconspicuous and undemanding. Now my mother had made him a patriarch, an ancestor watching over a shrine.

  “I’m getting drunk,” I told the urn.

  Later, I walked past the guest room, where Whit was getting ready for bed. Before retiring he did a regimen of sit-ups and push-ups in his boxers and undershirt. As I watched him huffing in his underwear, I wondered, yet again, about the nature of his relationship with my mother. I could not have broached any discussion in which my mother had a sexual identity. In my mind, sex between my parents had been reduced to an abstract enterprise, my father more puzzled than aroused, silently theorizing about hip-curve coefficients, and my mother wondering if she’d left the oven on. I wasn’t about to ask Whit whether he had designs on my mother.

  He stopped, mid-push-up, and stared at me. With his crooked arms and quizzical head, he resembled a praying mantis.

  “Want to join me?” he asked. “A little roustabout for the ticker before Z-time.”

  “Big day tomorrow. Nursing home is coming. There’s going to be a run on large-print Danielle Steele.”

  “Roger that,” he said, dipping to the carpet.

  I walked up the stairs, trying not to hear his out-breath.

  forty

  I chose the most normal-looking family I could: a house with a porch swing and wind chimes, a minivan in the driveway. Normal was something I knew nothing about. I’d grown up with a particle physicist, an astronaut, and a woman who kept house with the pluck and verve of a gymnast. Normal could be studied just like anything else. I was an anthropologist sent among the mortgaged and the salaried, the narrowly happy. The name on the mailbox read “Donovan.” Opposite their frame house was a tall elm under whose branches I parked the Oldsmobile. It had turned cold. I idled th
e motor, vented the heat, and watched the business of the household. There was a wife, a husband, a teenage son and daughter. They all arrived home in time for dinner each night.

  On a Tuesday evening I crossed the street to stand on their lawn. Their house was dark except for the kitchen and dining room in the rear. I suspected the father was on a conservation kick because I once heard him yell at the kids, “I still don’t own shares in the power company!” There was a brief pause after that, a light switched off, then the sound of a hair dryer from the upstairs.

  I walked toward the rear of the house. The dog was inside. They spoiled it rotten, calling it Laddie. The house sat on a pier-and-beam foundation, with a crawl space beneath it. I shimmied my way underneath, inching toward the voices. I could see splinters of light between the floorboards above me. The sound of feet, the metallic clack of the dog’s toenails on the hardwood. There was enough room to sit upright. I craned one ear to the joists. I seemed to be directly underneath their dining room table.

  “Coach says I need to gain weight,” the boy said.

  “Gain, lose, nobody is happy with their weight,” the father said. “Hey, could you stop eating like a goddamn pig! Shovel, shovel.”

  “Can we eat dinner in peace for once?” the mother said.

  “Is that a question?” the father asked. “Because if it’s a question it should be addressed to your son.”

  “Dad, I’m starving, all right.”

  “I don’t care if you’re ready to slaughter your own Holstein heifer. I demand some manners at this table.”

  A pause.

  “We forgot to say grace again.” That was the daughter.

  “Shit!” the father said.

  The mother said, “It’s your idea, Max. But you always forget.”

  “Fine. I’ll say the thing. Hey! Matthew, bow your goddamn head and keep your peepers shut.” The sound of a throat being cleared. “Heavenly Father, bless this food which we use for work and play and fun. Help those who are needy. Help us if you can.”

  “Amen,” the mother said.

  “Amen,” Max said.

  “Can I eat now?” Matthew asked.

  “You may,” the father said.

  The daughter said, “Do I look fat to you guys?”

  “See, here we have it, the weight fixation,” Max said.

  “She’s sensitive, Max,” the mother said.

  “I think my hips are fat,” the daughter offered.

  “There is not a goddamn thing wrong with your hips,” Max said.

  Matthew said, “I could use your fat. Coach says I need fifteen pounds in a hurry.”

  “Eat your steak and pipe down,” Max said. “Whole damn family wants to be something they’re not. Fat, thin, smarter, better-looking. See this mug, it’s mine. Big nose, jowls, sure. All of it, mine.”

  The clink of silverware, the dog’s paws pattering around the table—was someone feeding it on the sly? There was little conversation. I could make out a TV, low and muffled, from an adjacent room. At one point somebody belched loudly, the daughter giggled, and the mother said, “Matthew!” to which Matthew rejoined, “In China and those poor places burping is considered a great compliment.”

  Max said, “Great. Now you want to be Chinese.”

  “Eat your steak,” the mother said.

  So this was normal. Dinners that consisted not so much of conversation but altercations, speculations about body weight, a mutt of a dog scampering around for scraps, a prayer offered in the same tone as the admonishment of a dinnertime belch. At our dinner table my father floated conversation about whether a vortex had infinite mass. I crawled back toward the lawn, but just as I was about to get out I heard the back screen door open. Max appeared holding a pack of cigarettes. I crouched behind one of the piers. He stepped out onto his lawn and lit a cigarette. While he smoked he padded around the yard, singing “American Pie” in a low-set croon. I watched him until he burned out the cigarette and went back inside.

  When I arrived home that night, my mother announced that she had closed the parlor. From the kitchen I could see that a yellow ribbon had been taped across both entrances.

  “I’d like to keep the parlor and the study out of bounds,” she said.

  “Less maintenance,” Whit attested.

  I said, “But it’s part of the house.”

  “Well, perhaps just for a while. I’m tired of vacuuming in there. And you’re wearing the rug out with all that pacing in front of the urn.”

  I thought about it. Some nights—all right, most nights—I spoke to my father a little before going to bed. What was so strange about that? Whit radioed an albino man in St. Petersburg before hitting the hay.

  “We think it best if you stayed out of the study and that room for a while,” she said.

  “Is this some kind of intervention?” I asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, tightening her apron.

  “Because I’m not jogging and whistling? Because I have a job whose main requirement is having a pulse and understanding the alphabet?”

  “Stop.”

  “No. Please, Mom. Let me tell you that there are nuances to the alphabet. The McC elements, for example, or having to go back three to four letters. Multiple authors can be a horror. It keeps me on my toes, I can tell you.”

  “I thought we could go bowling this Saturday night, just you and me,” Whit said in a mild swagger.

  “I have plans, Whit.”

  “Excellent. What are they?” my mother asked.

  “I’m going to stalk our neighbors.”

  I left the kitchen. As I walked toward the stairs, I grabbed the yellow ribbon that had been taped to the parlor archway and yanked it free. It was back up the next morning.

  A WEEK LATER, I LOADED the metal trunk of family films into the back of the Oldsmobile and drove it to work. By now I had been given a key, and I let myself in an hour before I knew Birdie would arrive for her ritual first cup of Folger’s. I hauled the trunk downstairs to the projector room. The film canisters were labeled in my mother’s hand: “Chess Competition,” “Chemistry Quiz,” “Nathan Goes to School.” I grabbed one marked “Nathan: Early Days,” loaded the film into the projector, ran the motor, and switched off the light.

  I had never seen or heard of this one before. Jostled shots of my parents in our house carrying a small bundle in a white blanket. My mother nursing me on the sun-trapped divan, a Mexican shawl across her lap; my mother singing to me in the bright kitchen. At first it seems my father is the sole cameraman, the documenter, but then there is a sequence where he is huddled over a white, plastic baby bath. A spindly arm reaches up from the water and grabs his beard. He grins at the camera, pinned. He breaks free and washes me with a cloth as my mother moves in for a close-up. I am all baby—dimpled and milky-pale, veins spread across my body like inky-blue nets—yet my parents seem to be enraptured. My father’s face is brimming and in the grain of film I think I can see a glint in his eye. I pause the film; the motor hums through another gear. It’s a tear, trapped by the light. I start the film again. Sequences of my father building things, wielding hammers and wood saws, and in these jittered montages his wrists are bare; he’s forgotten to wear his wristwatch. He’d mentioned his watchlessness and the household mending in the hospital, but here it was—proof that my arrival had loosed him from his normal routine.

  Just then Birdie Peters and Mr. Rawlings arrived at the projection room door. Birdie opened the door a little dramatically, as if she suspected I might be showing snuff films before regular business hours.

  “Oh, you startled me, Nathan,” she said.

  “Good morning,” I said, killing the projector motor.

  “Mr. Rawlings is here to watch the July parades from 1975 to 1980. Like we discussed.”

  “Of course. I have them right here.”

  Birdie lingered a moment, waiting for a complicit silence. Finally, she said, “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” and disappeared.

  Mr. Ra
wlings, a heavyset man with a homburg, eased into a chair. “Let’s see some fireworks and marching bands. Some bandy-legged girls wielding trumpets,” he said. He put one hand on his paunch.

  “No problem,” I said. “But first I want you to see something, sir, if you don’t mind. I’d like to ask your opinion, see whether you can spot a man crying in this film.”

  Mr. Rawlings took off his homburg and laid it on the table. He was the town historian. He knew the past bit at the heels of the present. I threw the motor into gear and switched off the light. Pales of light threw themselves against the screen; my father trotted across the frame.

  “He’s not wearing his watch,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” Mr. Rawlings exhaled heavily. “That your father?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. Now, here’s the part where I think he might be—”

  “Crying, you said. Let’s take a look.”

  I slowed the motor. My father at the tub, his hands basted in light, as he turns toward the windows. I stopped the frame.

  “This is it, do you see?” I asked.

  Mr. Rawlings leaned forward, extended his lower jaw. “Could be a tear. Is that you? The fat little baby?”

  “Yes. Is that a tear on his face?”

  “What year is this? Seventies?”

  “Winter. Nineteen seventy. It was about the time that one of the Apollo astronauts chipped a golf ball on the lunar surface. There were elections in India.” A few historical facts still lingered faintly in my mind.

  Mr. Rawlings looked at me a little warily, then his face brightened; we’d established the context.

  “Is that a tear on his face? Shining,” I said.

  He took out a pair of bifocals from his top pocket and perched them on his nose. He peered up at the screen, mouth open. “Plain as day,” he said. He took the glasses off and rested his elbows on the table.

  “Now I’ll load the parade reels,” I said. I stopped the motor and put the film reel gently back in its case.