Читать книгу A Meaning For Wife - Mark Yakich - Страница 8

3.

“Ma-ma! Ma-ma!”

You’ve woken up to these exclamation points before. Sometimes Owen does this in the morning: thinks his mommy is going to pick him up and smother him with kisses.

He screams again, with upraised arms.

“Who’s my favorite boy!”

“Ma-ma, Ma-ma!”

You hold him—“Da-da, here, honey, Da-da”—tight enough to squeeze out his breath. “Quiches!” you say, imitating your wife’s pronunciation of kisses. “Quiches!” and you kiss the boy’s head until he sleepily giggles himself out of hysteria.

You look at your watch: 5:53. About the standard time. In the dark, you carry him downstairs. He enjoys making coffee with you because he likes the smell of the grounds.

An hour of playing with toys and an hour of walking around the neighborhood and you expect your mother to be up and about, but she’s not.

Owen needs a change of scene and you want some air, so you decide to take your parents’ car for a drive. As long as you’re back for brunch around noon, nobody will care.

You head toward downtown. Twenty years ago, Algonquin wasn’t much of a suburb, and even though it’s grown from 3,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, it’s still not much of one now. You recall what Mom used to say about Algonquin—that it’s most renowned for once harboring Chicago’s mafia, including Al Capone who had a summer bungalow along the Fox River that runs north-south through town; and that it’s second most renowned for a long, sloping hill that runs parallel to the river, north up Route 31 to Crystal Lake. The mile-long hill at a 30 degree grade used to serve as a dramatic test run for cars in the 1920s. At least, that’s what she always told you.

Owen is asleep by the time you pull onto Route 31, the main thoroughfare which is a clogged single-lane in each direction, a way to creep from one Chicago suburb to the next. Not far from the hill, Route 31 intersects Route 62 marking the center of Algonquin. You drive past the old town hall, which now looks empty, on the corner. When you were a kid, the town hall, which also housed the library and had a pool in the back, was the downtown, excepting a couple of divey pubs, a greasy spoon, a gas station, and a used car lot. There was one McDonald’s in town, built when you were a sophomore, and the closest grocery store was ten miles away in the neighboring village of Dundee. You made that grocery run innumerable times, a seemingly long car ride without seatbelts, sitting in the back of the race-car red Duster, fighting with Elizabeth mostly out of boredom.

Elizabeth is such a pretty name. Whatever happened to the Elizabeth you knew as a kid, the one who read David Copperfield when she was six years old? Oh yes, she’s still your younger sister, and she still lives in a suburb forty minutes south, Geneva. Suddenly you’re aware of all the funny names of suburbs: Elgin (the forgotten clock and watch company), Palatine (something to do with the Romans?), Schaumburg (“mountain of foam,” if your German is correct), Cicero, Harvard, Homer Glen, Sleepy Hollow, Libertyville, etc. Algonquin might be the best of them, in name, if nothing else. The Native Americans and the famous roundtable of writers and artists in New York City. And yet, you don’t feel any special kinship to your hometown. It hasn’t been your home for ages, and with three big box stores, seven supermarkets, and miles of subdivisions, it no longer resembles the place you once lived in. So be it. Change is the only constant, they say, and they are always right whoever they are. And besides you enjoy change. Never living in one place for more than two or three years, you’ve moved eight times (last time you bothered to count) since graduation. Elizabeth, on the other hand, has lived in Geneva for more than a decade, and although she’s three years younger than you, she’s been married for almost fifteen years to her college sweetheart, George.

If you are going to go through with this blast into the past tonight, you might as well scope out the venue: Harry D. Jacobs High. You take a left onto Route 62, hit Randall Road, and it’ll be on the right about a mile down. Once in middle of a cornfield, it’s now surrounded by wall-to-wall tract homes, large, well-meaning tract homes, actually. You see the sign in the distance. Underneath Harry D. Jacobs High School, Est. 1978, there’s a stream of gold words on an LED sign…Welcome Back Class of 1988! ... Reunion Weekend!…September 12 & 13….

As you approach you realize the long driveway to the school is no longer there. You slow down to where it used to be and park the car on the shoulder. Cars drive past doing sixty-five. You turn around and check on Owen in the backseat; he’s snoring. Are you really going to do this? When you first heard of a possible twenty-year reunion, more than a year ago, you asked your wife what she thought. “You can go as long as I don’t have to,” she said, and then later when you brought it up again, “What—are you expecting to have the best moments of your life there?” You never answered her. You should have. You should have said that the best moments of your life were with her—especially that first year together and then right around Owen’s first birthday, when you and she finally felt like real parents, real adults and couldn’t get over how lucky you were to have such a sweet baby, and how you agreed wholly when one day she said, Sometimes it scares me how much I love our boy, sometimes I feel like I’m going to explode. The only other moments that come close to these are some great talks with The Professor in grad school in Memphis. Countless times you two pulled all-night drinking and writing sessions, feeding off each other’s giddiness. Wishing you could hold onto those conversations, one night you tape-recorded the whole thing. The writing ceased around midnight, then there was some driving around midtown and Beale Street, grocery shopping at the Piggly Wiggly, drinking on the rooftop of your apartment building, going out in a desperate effort to seduce a couple of Russian undergrads (or were they high school girls?) at a dilapidated mansion-cum-bar called The Castle, and finally passing out on The Professor’s front porch. You thought it’d be a terrible recording, a bunch of drunken nonsense, and most of it was, but there were some gems in there too—moments of “unbridled fucking genius” as The Professor calls them.

When you recently asked him about the reunion, he said, “Why not go, it’ll be a kind of experiment.”

“What kind?”

He mock-scratched his chin, a telltale sign that he was nearly drunk. “Social psychological—no—social anthropological.”

“What?”

“Oh come on, it’ll be like traveling in time but without the time machine. Think of the ramifications of examining your life narrative as compared to others’ life narratives. A real biological confrontation. A fucking pivotal intertwining of your carefully constructed self identity vis-à-vis socially preponderant standards of success and accomplishment. Your situational identity and your personal identity will be at loggerheads.”

“If you say so,” you said and finished your beer. “By the way, wasn’t your thirtieth a couple of years ago?

“Last year, actually.”

“I don’t remember you going.”

“Of course not,” said The Professor, “you think I wanted to subject myself to some asshole’s, no, some group of assholes’s Durkheimian-cum-Peter-Panian trip down memory lame.”

“I’d have thought you’d want the experience for research material?”

“Anecdotal at best, and I have enough from my tenth and twentieth. At the tenth, people had barely gotten their personal identities established—a lot of poorly veiled one-upmanship. The women who were hot in high school were still hot and the men who were fated to go bald were already bald. Frankly the men were uniformly boring and mostly wanted to get their pee-pees wet. Anyway, by the twentieth, people were well ensconced in their situational identities—”

“Their what?”

“Their lives, friend. Lives. I’ll admit there were anthropological issues concerning community and a great deal of souls in need of community and trying, ever so slightly, to get some by mining their high school days for a community that never really existed. All this, mind you, around a table of raw vegetables, ranch dip, and Danish butter cookies. Fucking light beer. Everyone expressed happy indifference toward each other. If they were truly happy with their lives, their spouses, the kids, then they were happy and didn’t need to talk to you to compare notes. If they were unhappy, then they’d learned to accept their situational personality, knowing that it was too late to get out. In the end the best piece of data I sequestered had to do with interpersonality and alcohol. As in high school, when a couple of friends would sneak a beer or two before class, folks acted drunker than they were. Like drinking was still the epitome of cool.”

“All right already,” you said, “I won’t go.”

“No, I think you should go. I want you to verify my experience.”

Experience, you think, is not something you want more of at the moment. You’d prefer a nap. No sooner do you close your eyes and begin to fade away, when you hear mild squawking from the backseat. You don’t mean to, but sometimes you forget Owen is there. It’s probably the occasional bursts of noise from the semi-trucks and the lack of movement that are beginning to wake him. His eyes are still closed, but his little lips are smacking together slowly. If you get moving again, he’ll stay asleep. You give Harry D. Jacobs the middle finger and pull back onto the road.

There’s still an hour and a half to kill before brunch. You head south on Randall Road, noticing the newest stores to go up in the cornfields you used to run along in cross-country practice, and soon your thoughts turn again to Alex Mueller. He was your closest friend and rival on the cross-country team. The moment that sticks out most is when he told you about how his grandfather and a few other teenagers in Auschwitz chipped in to get a prostitute so they wouldn’t have to die virgins. “So what do you say?” Alex asked you and a teammate, “it’ll only cost fifty bucks each.” You declined, hoping you wouldn’t have to die before actual sex would take place with Lane.

You heard from a friend of a friend that Alex is going to be in Chicago on business and plans to attend the reunion. You told this to The Professor last time you saw him at the gym.

“Are you gay?” he said, loading the bench press for you.

“What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t have suspicions.”

The weights felt heavier than usual. Weightlifting was one of the first of The Professor’s suggestions. He kept saying that the tension would find a detrimental outlet if you didn’t give it a healthy outlet.

“He’s just an old track buddy,” you said, putting down the bar. “I don’t know what the fixation is. He was a friend, not a best friend. I just have this intuitive feeling he’s done something interesting, something—”

“You’re not going to say profound, are you?”

“Take off some of this weight. Are you trying to kill me?”

“Let me do a set, then I’ll change it.”

In between breaths, The Professor stammered out, “This… latent…homo…sexuality…When do…you think…it began?”

“It’s not homosexuality. I’m just curious.”

He sat up and wiped his forehead. “A serious disparity lies between who or what you think you are and what or who you think other people think you are. It’s a matter of performance. To put it in layman’s terms, it’s like you’re the director, the actor, and the audience of a play. And that play is being filmed from backstage by a voyeur.”

You had no idea what he was talking about, as usual, but it did strike you as vaguely poetic.

“Voyeur?” you said, “do you mean I’m starring in my own porn?”

After another set, he said, “I hadn’t thought about it like that, but sure. Okay, yes, in that milieu, I suppose we could say you’re trying to have intercourse with yourself via Alex Mueller. Boomerang autophilia is the proper term.”

Before you know it you’re halfway to your sister’s house. In an effort to turn around and after a U-turn that nearly clips another car, you get confused and end up on I-90 West. You consider “West” for a moment—the Heroes and Anti-Heroes course you taught last spring, how Huck Finn lit out for the West; you consider not going back to your parents’ house, driving out to your dead grandmother’s hometown in Iowa, four hours away; you consider not stopping there either and continuing to Colorado, hell, all the way to California, visit some old college friends in San Francisco. But you know you can’t do any of this; you don’t really like San Francisco anymore and Owen is going to be hungry when he wakes up and pulling over to feed him would interrupt your momentum and you’d never make it farther than the Mississippi.

Coming up Randall Road again you see someone with a backpack walking on the side of the road. It looks an awful lot like Alex. Mirage?

Suddenly an enthusiastic Daa-daa! rings out from the backseat.

You can’t slow down to get a better look anyway, not in this traffic.

“It’s okay, hon, we’ll be at grandma and grandpa’s soon. Have to stop at the grocery store first. Grandma needs butter and eggs.” Not true, but running around the aisles will keep the little guy occupied. You’re still ten minutes away from the store, though, and Owen is definitely awake and grumbling. To keep him happy in situations like this, where you can’t play or read a book with him face-to-face, you often engage him in conversation about whatever is on your mind.

“Tell me again,” you say, hitting the gas, “how much do you think about Mommy? No, I won’t take notes this time, and you’re not obliged to stick to your answer in subsequent interrogations. Yes, I know you didn’t know her for very long, but she was a beauty and a mensch and she loved you like the dickens.”

You adjust the rearview mirror so that you can see his face better. He’s staring at you, sucking his thumb, which is not a habit except when he wants to feel especially comforted.

“How often do I think about her, you ask? Well, the answer to that would take more time perhaps than we have before our arrival at the store. In any case, I knew Mommy very well—you’ll have to take my word for it—and… oh…I see…an afterlife? I don’t know if there is one—I mean, maybe you can tell me since you were there recently—is there a beforelife?”

Owen makes his noise for what a bird sounds like.

“I guess it is a strange question, but you see my point. Even if there is a beforelife or afterlife, without who you are now, without that beautiful little body of yours, my sweet prince, it won’t matter. What matters then? My best answer—and I don’t mean to be glib as I know you take things to heart, and perhaps you are a bit too sensitive at times, if I may say so—but my best answer is that she still lives inside of you. Yes, that’s right, in your DNA. What—how does she live inside of me then? I know I don’t have any of her DNA, except as you well know the strands of her hair which I keep finding in odd places around the house and storing in a plastic baggie in my sock drawer. I know, I know, it’s foolish if not cliché. But she lives, to answer your question, in my mind.”

You check the rearview. He’s looking out the window in a daze at the subdivisions racing by.

“It’s not the answer you wanted, I can tell. It’s all right if you want to be mad at me. I can take it. I am really tough that way. Besides I realize your ears must be tired. I know from years of experience that your grandma can talk an ear off. On those once-a-month, two-hour phone calls, I get cauliflower ear—in both ears! Yes, my mother, not Little Ma. Did I ever tell you the story of my mother making me pay for long-distance? Before cell phones when I would visit your grandma, say, around a holiday, I would occasionally make phone calls to whatever girlfriend I had at the time. A month later your grandma would send me a photocopy of her phone bill with my calls highlighted. She would then expect a check for $12.56 or whatever it was. I suppose I should have predicted this, as it came from the same woman who avoided the unlisted phone number fee by using her maiden name in the phone book.”

He looks back at you in the mirror with a funny face.

“I am sorry I raised my voice.”

He continues the face.

“Really, you sympathize with her?”

He continues the face and now gives you his intense eyes look.

“What is it, my lad? Oh that, under my lower lip? That is a nice scar, isn’t it. I never think about it or notice it until someone else does. Shape of a cosign wave, you’re right. I think, it could be a sine wave—I don’t remember much math. I got that when I was about your age. Your grandpa was carrying me down the stairs—and oops!—he tripped and out I tumbled. No, I don’t remember it. But that is at least the story they tell me. Of course I believe the story, I’m not trying to insinuate abuse, far from it. If anything, I think your grandma and grandpa loved me too much as a kid. Me? Yes, I love you too much too. But I assure you I am extra-careful on the stairs. Your grandma wouldn’t let your grandpa carry me after that little incident for a couple of years, which, yes, now that you mention it, may have influenced my relationship with him subsequently.”

Wheeling around the parking lot in a cloudburst of rain, you finish your discourse just in time to find a spot near to the front door of the grocery store. You lift Owen out of his seat and shuttle him inside. It’s impossible to tell which one of you is more relieved to be out of the car.