Lit_ A Memoir Part 27

Here comes the next guy in the line, who's made a yellow turban from police crime-scene tape.

Like your hat, I say.

I did it my own self.

I can see that.

You can make yourself one. There's a whole bunch of this ribbon up on Crouse.

He gestures with the sweeping open palm of an emperor.

There's an unbidden clap of grat.i.tude in my rib cage again. This must be what the people in meetings have been gushing about. (I once thought saying you were grateful was a nice lie, like saying Glad to see you Glad to see you.) He's pa.s.sed me by and is now stuffing dinner rolls down the front of his grease-streaked parka.

After cleanup, I stand at the pay phone regaling Patti with my trite everyone-is-everyone-else revelation. She says, Oh, that, as if she expected nothing else.

But my memory for joy is still uncultivated. Right before New Year's, my head's badgering voice announces what a loser I am without a New Year's date. But Dev comes home early from Warren's, and the next day we invite over anybody with nowhere to go-foreign students, a few neighbors, a sober ex-con-for red beans and rice with greens and corn bread.

Not long after, James Laughlin sends me an acceptance letter for the book of poems, along with a check for a whopping seven hundred and fifty bucks-about a third of my credit card debt and maybe the most I've earned aggregate on poetry in the previous fifteen years.

And that's how hard that was.

38.

Lord of the Flies All men would be tyrants if they could.-Daniel Defoe One winter afternoon, waiting for Dev to come home through the snow, I hear a thrash of banging against the storm door. Running out from the kitchen, I see him fumbling with the outside handle as s...o...b..a.l.l.s splatter around him. I yank open the door, and the kids scatter like mice.

Dev's cheeks are sopping and crimson, which only makes his black-lashed blue eyes brighter. They're fixed in outrage, staring past me. When I ask how many kids there are and he tells me five, I have to stop myself from busting out the door to chase the little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds down.

Over cups of cocoa, we sit in the tiny kitchen, and he says, Why is this happening to me? Why is this happening to me? in a voice so wholly exhausted, he might have been sixty. With his spoon, he's fishing the sodden marshmallow off his cocoa. in a voice so wholly exhausted, he might have been sixty. With his spoon, he's fishing the sodden marshmallow off his cocoa.

Because, I say, children are childish. You're new to school, relatively. They've all grown up together. You're the obvious choice.

He stuffs the marshmallow in his mouth and ponders this before asking, Why would G.o.d let this happen?

The question-the same I'd dwelled on in the past-maybe shows the effects of our nightly prayers.

Because, I say, when you grow up, you're gonna be so smart and good-looking that if something bad didn't happen to you now, you'd be a jerk then-one of those snotty kids who thinks he's all that.

Like Dan.

I'm thinking specifically of Dan, I say (I barely know who Dan is).

Dev picks at the foam atop his cocoa, saying, Dan knows karate. He only invited the cool kids to his birthday.

He studies the cocoa as if it were tea leaves foretelling the soggiest future. I get up and place a skillet on the stove for another supper of scrambled eggs. After a while he says, There are so many of them. I mean, the s...o...b..a.l.l.s just kept coming.

Isn't there a teacher or grown-up you can appeal to at school?

They act like they're my friends in school. Then they start chasing me.

I offer to start picking him up again, and he pins me with a tired look.

I'm not a baby, he says. All the other kids walk home.

I know, I know. Okay.

We sit there listening to the wind make the windowpanes shudder. You know, I say, some people think when somebody slaps you, you should turn the other cheek.

He says, face still chapped scarlet, I only have two cheeks.

That night, tucking him in, I tell him how I'd been the littlest kid in my neighborhood, and because I skipped a grade and had a propensity to mouth off, they beat me up all the time. I say, You know your grandpa Pete always told me to bite them.

This strikes Dev as hilarious. He says, He wanted you to bite them?

Yeah, if he wasn't around to help and they were bigger. He'd say, Lay the ivory to 'em, Pokey Lay the ivory to 'em, Pokey.

That's funny, Dev says.

I kiss his shampooed head, and later, standing in the doorway as I click off the light, I briefly pray for a car that I might track down and smash the little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds like the toads they are. I tell him I'm gonna call some of the kids' parents, the ones I know.

Don't get them in trouble, he says. That'll just make it worse.

Downstairs, I call around but get no answers, and when finally I reach one mom I barely know, she harumphs into the phone, saying, Why do you think they're picking on him? You think he's innocent, I guess.

My face gets hot. I say, I have no doubt that Dev is as savage as any grade school boy, but this is five against one. This is Lord of the Flies.

Well, he must be doing something, she says.

Out of the blue, I say, I'm from the state of Texas.

What's that supposed to mean?

I know my son is gonna survive these a.s.s-whippings no matter how many of them there are. But when it's five against one and there's not a grown-up to intervene, I'm gonna instruct Dev to pick up a rock or a stick and leave a mark on somebody. Let's hope it's not your kid.

My uncle's a lawyer, she says.

My daddy's Pete Karr, I say, and hang up.

Over breakfast the next day, I tell Dev the strategy's this: if he's away from school, and there are that many of them, he should turn and fight. Throw down his book bag and just accept the fact that he's gonna take an a.s.s-whipping.

Slipping his backpack on, he looks completely defeated.

One a.s.s-whipping hurts once, I says. Running home afraid every day hurts every day.

Why would they ever stop? he says.

Because you're gonna pick out one of them-the closest one you can get to-and you're gonna leave a mark. Bite the dog dookey out of him. Lay the ivory to 'em Lay the ivory to 'em.

He tries to grin, but a cloud pa.s.ses over his face as he pulls his royal blue watchman's cap on.

What? I say. What's the matter?

Dan does know karate, Dev says.

Do you know, I say, what would happen to Dan if you hit him full-on?

What? Dev says.

He'd topple like a pine. He's a pipsqueak of a thing. You've got a leg as big as Dan.

Dev grins all over his face. He says, Really?

Absolutely. Karate or no karate. You're twice his size.

He's out the door when he turns and hollers back, You swear I won't get in trouble?

If you hit first, you've lost TV for a month.

That afternoon he comes in shucking off his backpack. He'd run for about a block before turning to face the pack. Dan had said he was gonna karate Dev's block off, and Dev had said, You go ahead and hit me first, adding, When I hit you, you're gonna topple like a pine.

End of discussion.

Come March, after I've been praying for a solution to our transportation woes, a professor I've met once or twice through mutual friends approaches me in the quad. She's going to Italy and heard I needed a car. Maybe I could keep hers through the summer; she'd consider it a favor.

And that's how hard that was. Such unearned gifts feed the growing faith that some mystery is carrying me.

The snow's just melting when I take out the fourth credit card I can't pay-one with a five-hundred-dollar limit and a fat percentage interest rate. That same week the university flies the creative writing profs to New York for a program fund-raiser.

Once the dinner's over, the writers cross the street to the Pierre Hotel to hang out. With its checkerboard floor and ornate armchairs, it's like entering a Fred Astaire movie. That night Toby and his pals sing in loud harmony the old seventies. .h.i.t "Helpless," swaying side to side like a grade-school choir.

I'm just finishing my c.o.ke when who should come kneel at my seat but Toby's agent from almost a year back. Where, she says with both charm and ent.i.tlement, is my d.a.m.n memoir?

I'm shocked she remembered me and even more shocked when I hear myself tell her the truth: I'm in the middle of a divorce and haven't done that much-less than ten pages.

She says, Send me a proposal. Maybe we can get you an advance.

Here's where grace comes in. Had I been drinking, I would've pretended to know what a proposal was, then lived in crouched fear, maybe trying to find out or not-being too afraid in my drinking form to fail at a proposal. Instead, I hear my mouth spill another truth: I don't know the first thing about writing a proposal.

She waves her hand like it's the easiest thing in the world, saying, Maybe a hundred pages. Three or four chapters.

In a poet's mind, a hundred pages sounds like two thousand. I haven't published a hundred pages in twenty years.

How long do you think, she asks, before I can get those chapters?

My head's scrambling. I figure when Dev goes to stay with his dad mid-June, I'll have a month to work, so I say, Mid-July.

Great, she says. Then just add a letter saying what else you might put in the book.

I must have a stunned look on my face.

I'll call you Monday, she says, and walk you through it.

To write the stuff down is no cakewalk, since memories from that time can ravage me. But after I get home, I start getting up mornings at four or five, praying to set down words before Dev comes down. When Dev's with Warren, I unplug the phone and apply my a.s.s to a desk chair. Some days, I actually hear my daddy telling me stories, almost like he's risen up to ride through the pages with Mother and our whole wacky herd.

Come June, I send the agent pages on a Thursday, and she signs me the following Sat.u.r.day, has an auction that week, and a few days later-while I'm chopping basil for supper-I hear the overnight envelope with payment hit my porch.

In the steamy kitchen, I draw the check out and sit studying it before I even throw pasta in the bubbly water. It's in no way a ma.s.sive check, but it's the biggest I've ever seen, and it's fallen from the sky just in time to get us through the summer, plus making a down payment on a used Toyota.

Saying thanks to the invisible forces that brought it, I sit looking at the check. On the table before me, there's a giant pickle jar Dev's filled with torn gra.s.s and crickets. The bent-legged bugs are whirring to fill the room, one or two trying to climb up the curved gla.s.s. Dev bursts in, saying, Mom, let's set the crickets free tonight. And I tell him that's just what I was thinking.

39.

G.o.d Shopping Lord, You may not recognize mespeaking for someone else.I have a son. He isso little, so ignorant.He likes to standat the screen door, callingoggie, oggie, enteringlanguage, and sometimesa dog will stop and come upthe walk, perhapsaccidentally. May he believethis is not an accident?At the screen,welcoming each beastin love's name, Your emissary.-Louise Gluck, "The Gift"

If you'd told me even a year before I start taking Dev to church regular that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself c.o.c.keyed. More likely pastime? Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. a.s.sa.s.sin.

One Sunday I'm eating a bagel with a smear and reading the paper when Dev, age eight, intensely blue-eyed in his Power Ranger pajamas, announces he wants to go to church.

I barely look up. Despite my prayer life, organized religion still strikes me as bogus. Though Mother had pored over sacred texts of every kind, she was-as I've said before-no more able to commit to a faith than to a husband. She quoted Marx calling religion the opiate of the ma.s.ses. So I'm suspect of the hierarchies.

Idly asking Dev why he wants to go to church, I'm confident that no sentence he utters will rouse me from my Sunday loll. But he says: to see if G.o.d's there to see if G.o.d's there.

The phrase straightens my slouchy spine. Some native faith lets him stare out the window at the aluminum sky and see a scrim before heaven.

Okay, I say, and I ring up a sober Episcopalian (an oxymoron, he alleges in the car), the only guy I know who goes to church. If I'd had a pal attending a mosque or temple or zendo, we'd have gone there.

So disinterested am I, so devoid of curiosity, that I climb into my friend's car toting a paperback, like the one I carry to soccer fields stiff with frost, to pa.s.s time.

It's a capital-C Church, with gray stones right out of some horror-movie castle. It sits amid red maples between the university on one side and housing projects on the other. Soon as the engine dies, Dev bolts for the huge oak doors, his loafers slapping up the leaf-strewn walk. He has on a hand-me-down sport coat. With his green clip-on bow tie, he looks like some refugee from a 1950s wedding. Going in makes me a little watery.

In the foyer, I expect to find some Ozzie and Harriet Ozzie and Harriet episode in progress, the women in pillbox hats and white gloves and ear bobs, the men in lizard-green jackets and wing tips, everybody in that old fluorescent light the color of cuc.u.mber that makes white people look so seedy. But this parish is half black, with people wearing jeans and khakis. Even the ancient blue-haired ladies have pants on. episode in progress, the women in pillbox hats and white gloves and ear bobs, the men in lizard-green jackets and wing tips, everybody in that old fluorescent light the color of cuc.u.mber that makes white people look so seedy. But this parish is half black, with people wearing jeans and khakis. Even the ancient blue-haired ladies have pants on.

Organ music starts in the sanctuary, and we drift into a barnlike structure with tall stained gla.s.s windows where saints I don't know are doing saintly things I can't figure out. We stand and sit and pray for over an hour. People take turns talking at the granite altar. Dev belts out hymns in his bra.s.sy alto while I flip pages. Afterward, people eat pastries in the foyer. Kids streak around. A few parents from Dev's school say hey. Somebody brings me coffee like I like.

This uninvited niceness seems like a trap. I keep waiting for them to ask me for money. In the car, I ask Dev whether G.o.d was there, expecting him to be as cynical as I am. Instead, he c.o.c.ks his head and squints, as if saying, Where were you you?

We stop going to the Episcopal church after a few weeks because I find it too cold-not emotionally but physically. To heat that vaulted s.p.a.ce would cost a fortune, I guess. Still, the scalding baths I take to get blood back into my feet after service feel like penance.