Getting Off Clean Read online

  Then suddenly he’s lost to me, sitting there, nudging the pages of the magazine into tiny dog-ears. I’ve been leaning behind the counter, hiding my body in shorts and Converse high-tops, carrying on this conversation. It’s ten past ten and I haven’t even mopped the floor. If my boss were to drive by and see the shop all lit up, I’d catch hell. He’s pushed his pizza and drink aside and I’ve got to ask him to leave somehow, but now he’s dog-earing those pages like a crazy man, like it’s his consuming project. He’s a million miles away again, and I’m anxious with the silence, but there’s something underneath my anxiety that’s making me want to sit down. It’s an activity in my stomach that I swear I’ve had before, but for my life I can’t remember when.

  “I’ve got to close up,” I say.

  He looks up, alarmed. “But what about you?” he says.

  “What about me?”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me your story?” He brings his cup and plate to the counter and hands them to me.

  “What story?” I say, taking care of his trash.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me your hard-luck blue-collar story—stuck in a dead-end town, and dying inside?”

  He’s got that deadly earnest tone in his voice again. “I don’t have any story.”

  He laughs curtly. “Oh, please. You must! Are you B.J.?”

  “No. That’s my boss’s father. He started the shop in 1966. But he’s got prostate cancer now.”

  “I see. Then who are you?”

  “I’m Eric,” I say. “Fitzpatrick. Who are you?” It seems only my privilege to ask in turn.

  He’s looking at me sternly on a sharp intake of breath. Now it’s like any time he spent ignoring me he’s put completely behind him and he’s looking at me like I’m an object of study, a stuffed thing. It’s hard to stare back; I try a wry smile but he doesn’t respond. So I just raise my eyebrows in alignment with his and wait. His face is hairless and matte brown, critical and severe, and I can’t seem to pull my eyes away from its cruel, unyielding cast. He puts his elbows up on the counter again and folds his hands.

  “It’s Brooks,” he says, careful and hushed. “It’s Brooks Jefferson Tremont.”

  “Oh,” I say, hushed as well. For a moment, neither of us says anything. I feel as though he’s just shared with me some monumental secret—but why? I’m thinking. It’s only his name. We’re face to face across the counter. The announcer on the hit radio station says it’s a quarter past ten.

  He looks down, looks up again. “Do you live around here?” he asks, still hushed. This feels like a prison visiting scene on TV, when they’re talking on phones through glass, low, because they’re planning an escape. Now I’m hearing everything. The buzz and tremble of the air-conditioning, the weather report on the radio, the hum of the refrigerator.

  “I live a few miles away,” I say.

  “Uh-huh. You’re in high school?” He keeps looking down at his hands, and up again, a funny kind of prayerful motion.

  “Yeah. I’m a senior this year.”

  “You gonna go away after that?” He’s slipping into some kind of slang, real quiet and a little slurred.

  “Yeah. I hope so. I really hope so.”

  He laughs a little, not cruelly though. “Oh, yeah? Where you gonna go?”

  I’m starting to feel a little drowsy, but pleasantly, as though I could go on answering questions like this all night, and without thinking much of it, I put my own hands on the counter, folded, across from his. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe Harvard. Maybe Yale.”

  He smiles again. “You’re real ambitious, aren’t you?”

  I smile back now. “I don’t know. I guess so. I just wanna get out of here, that’s all.”

  “Are you a homosexual?”

  It’s like, if my stomach has been ready to turn over—and it has been—it finally does, sickeningly, and I’m trembling. He’s half-looking at me, and I know he can see my eyes dilate and my face go chalk white.

  “I’m in high school,” I say. “I’m seventeen.”

  “I’m eighteen,” he says.

  “So?” I say. “I’m seventeen.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” I say, but it catches on the lump in my throat.

  “Well, are you?” He’s still half-looking at me, and for the first time I see that his folded hands are shaking, too, his knuckles like white marbles underneath his skin.

  “Well, no, I’m not.”

  “Oh. Well, neither am I.”

  “Good for you.” I’m nervous as hell now.

  “Isn’t it, though?” he says smartly.

  We’re silent, smirking dumbly at each other. “I’ve got to close up here,” I say, picking up my rag.

  He puts his magazine under his arm. “I’m going to buy some smokes.”

  “Great.”

  “Here.” He reaches into the pocket of his shorts and throws a crumpled five-dollar bill on the counter. “I forgot to pay. Ciao,” he says emphatically, and before I can make change, he’s gone, the bell on the door sounding dully in the shop. I can see him walking, fast, across the parking lot, his hands in his pockets, elbows out, heading in the opposite direction from Cumberland Farms.

  Faster, more precisely than I’ve ever done before, I sweep, mop, wrap, wipe down, and close up the shop, but it’s still eleven o’clock when I finish. The heat jars me in the empty parking lot, darker now for want of the light thrown all night from the sub shop. The turnover of the engine in my mother’s hatchback is loud enough to wake the dead, and in a moment I’m navigating the same streets on my way home, the funereal familiar shadows of roofs and trees. I can’t get the question out of my head; it keeps playing itself back to me in his exact pitch and cadence until it’s like a record snagging on the same phrase. And me, stupidly, I’m seventeen. I’m seventeen, I’m seventeen, as though that had anything to do with it. And his face, every minute posture of his face more deliberate than I’ve ever seen in a face before—every tic, like someone able to manipulate his own mask.

  I’m pulling into the driveway now, necessarily stuffing tonight away in the back of my mind, somewhere hopefully too remote to retrieve. From the den, like a slide show, come alternating shades of blue from my father’s baseball game, and more lights on upstairs. Well, here I am. It is now nearly Labor Day, 1986, in the town of West Mendhem, Massachusetts, and I am seventeen, a hard worker, full of plans and discipline and purpose.

  One

  West Mendhem is one of those old Massachusetts towns—north of Boston, just below New Hampshire—whose name corresponds to a place in England from which religious people fled, hating England, missing England so badly they named their settlements after the very places they came from. When you drive into West Mendhem over any one of its six borders, you pass the same municipality sign you’ll pass on your way into any Massachusetts town, announcing West Mendhem, incorporated sixteen-something-something, framed around a seal of Indians canoeing on the great lake upon which sit St. Banner and some very fine old country estates. There’s a study of West Mendhem in a book of anthropology I read once in a history class, delineating the patterns by which young men in old West Mendhem left their family homesteads to settle their own at a much later age than the young men in most New England towns. Young men here didn’t leave their homes until the unseemly age of twenty-one instead of the median eighteen, because West Mendhem was primarily a farming community, a turkey-raising community, and progeny were tied economically to the money-raising concerns of the parents.

  Not a great deal has changed; there are dozens of young men who graduated from West Mendhem High School ten years ago and you can see them around town operating the DPW trucks that vacuum leaves in the fall and blow snow in the winter. Maybe you can see them in their parents’ homes, ranches, and garrisons, getting stoned in the bedrooms where they grew up, listening to hard rock on WAAF, their wallpaper still the train or football-pennant pattern they chose when they were ten. You can see the girls as tea
chers in the elementary schools where they went to school themselves, or maybe filing cards at the library, running the concessions table at football games, or, like my sister Brenda, behind the counters of shops downtown. At night, you can see them all at the Hayloft, in work boots and Fair Isle sweaters and Irish claddagh rings, drinking Coors, listening to Steve Miller, anticipating their two weeks of vacation in a cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, screaming and bellowing, “Get outta heah! You fuckin’ queeah, you’re a wicked liah!” In a few years, you can see them marrying each other and starting all over again.

  There are three ancient burying grounds in West Mendhem, one behind the old North Church, designated by the state an official historic preservation site, contained by an old stone wall with a plaque dating the spot to 1666. The other two lie in neglect in the fields between the old houses on Scholarship Road, headstones lodged semirecumbent in decay, obscured by weeds and the warping of the ground. From the dates I witnessed when picking through them, I knew they were just as old as the official site, and there may be dozens more like them in town, but those I haven’t found.

  When I was a freshman in high school, our history class took a field trip to the official site to coincide with our study segment on colonial America. A woman from the historical society gave the tour, a rich woman with a clear, deliberate voice who owned a horse farm on the border of West Mendhem and Boxford. She herded us away from the separate places where we were creating stencils of the headstones with pencils and tracing paper and directed our attention to a tiny headstone isolated on a little rise in the ground. “Here lies the body of Charity Bradstreet, daughter of Samuel Bradstreet and his confort, Mary, b. 1684 d. 1686.” There was also a biblical quote about children that escapes me, and above the script, the rendering of a tiny skull, the cavity of the mouth carved into a frightened, perfect O, and the skull was framed by the delicate wings of angels. The woman from the historical society squatted down sturdily in her horsey-smelling overalls by the headstone, pointed to the little winged skull with her pinky, and said, “Now, my question to you kids, with your video games and MTV and fancy New Balance shoes, is, ‘How did West Mendhem progress from this incident of a little dead two-year-old girl to all the technology and modernity that’s around us today?’” Nobody, including me, had an answer. “Maybe that’s an essay question your teacher wants to assign you.” Our teacher, in the back of the group, laughed and shrugged.

  But later that night at home, I couldn’t stop noticing the modernity—the microwave oven, the VCR and the cable hookup, Brenda’s stereo, Joani’s digital watch (because she has a hard time with a traditional face watch), my father’s electronic adding machine, my mother’s shiny manmade-fiber sweatsuit. I looked around my own room—books, bed, magazines, duffel bag, tapes, and a small cassette recorder that sat atop my night table. I was largely exempt from modernity, I thought. But it was November, cold that night, and the heat had come on. I thought about the yards of coils and wires and pipes underneath the house and below the streets that brought us heat and water, light and ringing phones. And I still couldn’t trust the resiliency of the line of progress that brought us from then to now. It seemed like at the center of West Mendhem there was still a barren cavity where Charity Bradstreet lay, and for all the high fidelity of beeps and clicks and buzzes I could hear the moaning sound of wind inside this perfect O, a few leagues below everything else.

  * * *

  When I wake up the next morning, Joani is pulling at my sheets and chanting, “Wake up Erky, Wake up, Erky.” She’s nearly twelve now, but as recently as two years ago, she couldn’t say my name properly and called me Erky. Then one day my mother found Joani sitting in her room, pasting a picture of me onto construction paper to make me a Valentine’s Day card, saying over and over again to herself, “E-ric, E-ric, E-ric.” That night at dinner, my mother said, “What do you call your brother, Joani?” And Joani looked up and said, “Erky Fizzpatrick,” just like she always had. She’s been calling me that ever since.

  I look at my radio clock and crash back down into the pillow. “Joani baby, it’s eight-thirty.”

  “I can’t sleep in the other room. Grandma’s snoring. Lemme lie down with you.”

  I know Joani isn’t lying, because I’ve heard our grandmother snoring and she sounds like the apocalypse. I look up at her. She’s got short, easy-care hair that’s mussed up from bedhead and she’s wearing her favorite Strawberry Shortcake nightgown, which is covered with pills. If you just glanced at Joani fast, you might not put it together that she has Down’s syndrome; you might just think she had two wandering eyes and a chubby face. You probably wouldn’t put it together that she’s that different at all, until you talked to her a little bit. When we were both younger, I was more aware of how different she looked, especially because other kids would gladly bring it to my attention. But after all these years, I’ve settled into her face; I can see how she looks like my mother and I can see how she looks like my father. It’s only when I see some other kid with Down’s that I’m startled a little bit.

  I sit up in bed and put my T-shirt back on; it was muggy last night and we only have little window fans, because my father thinks air-conditioning is a waste of money and putting up with humid weather builds character. He thinks any kind of “putting up with” builds character.

  “You can sleep with me if you let me go back to sleep,” I say.

  “Okay. I’ll let you sleep. Go back to sleep.”

  She climbs in under the sheets and I give her one of my pillows, grudgingly, because I like to sleep on two. I turn around and try to go back to sleep, but pretty soon she starts in with her sighing—long, theatrical sighs, mimicking my mother, which means she wants to talk. At first I ignore her because I really want to sleep, but then I start to feel guilty, as usual, then I start to feel angry with her for making me feel guilty. Then finally I feel guilty for feeling angry with her. It’s not her fault that she likes me the best.

  “What’d you do last night?” I ask her, half my words muffled by the pillow.

  She stops mid-sigh. “Eddie came over last night.” Eddie is her best friend from special ed at school. They’re in the same Aptitude Group, which as far as I can tell means they’ve both mastered the alphabet but are still grappling with Green Eggs and Ham.

  “Oh, yeah?” I ask. “What’d you do with Eddie?”

  “We played Atari. We played Pac-Man and then we played Ms. Pac-Man. I won the whole times.”

  “You won the whole time,” I say automatically.

  “I won the whole time,” Joani says. We do this constantly. I correct her, she repeats back, and we go on. I’m the only one in the family who picks up on all her speaking errors, even the small ones, so I feel like it’s my responsibility to set her straight.

  I flip my head over and face her. She’s picking pills off her nightgown and flicking them in the air.

  “Why you doin’ that, Joani?” I say.

  She stops, blushing, and clamps her hands on top of her head. “I dunno.”

  I lean over and try to smooth down her hair. I like it; it’s fine, like a baby’s. She closes her eyes and sighs, smiling. “Are you and Eddie in love?” I ask.

  She flops over and hides her face in the pillow, laughing. “Erky, shut up!”

  “Are you? You can tell me, Joani.”

  “He loves me,” she says into the pillow. “I don’t love him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s weird. He sucks his fingers and he’s always singing the Happy Days song.”

  “So what’s wrong with that? He’s eccentric.”

  “What’s that?” She’s serious now.

  “Eccentric. It means somebody who has unusual habits. Like how Grandma used to wear wigs all the time. Or how Ma can’t sit in the back of the car without getting sick. Or how you pick at the little balls on your clothes.”

  “I don’t do that all the time!”

  “Yeah, but you do it sometimes, s
o it makes you eccentric. It makes you an individual. That’s okay.”

  “Ex … trick … extrick … extra. What is it?”

  “Eks-sen-trick,” I say slowly, breaking apart the syllables.

  “Eks-sen-trick,” she says back to me, singsong.

  “That’s it. That’s what you are. That’s what Eddie is. So now you guys can be in love.”

  She laughs, dropping her elbow and smashing her face back into the pillow. Her little chubby white hand is clenched around the sheet. To see those hands for the first time, when they brought her home when I was six, was a sight. They sat down me and Brenda, who was nine, and told us we had a sister. Nothing was wrong with her, they said, but she was different. She was going to progress slower and we had to look out for her and be nicer to her than we were to each other.

  “Do I have to take her everywhere?” Brenda barked. She was big for her age, broad-shouldered, and preoccupied with her first year of judo classes at the YWCA.

  “You don’t have to take her anywhere right now,” our mother said. “But in a few years it might be nice if you got over yourself and showed her a little support.”

  Brenda scowled. “Am I gonna have to beat up people that give her crap?”

  “Watch that kind of talk,” my mother said, perched on the edge of the couch, her arms crossed combatively across her chest. Back just two days from the hospital, she looked ashen and exhausted. She would be away from her job as nurse at the Prospect House Nursing Home for three months, and the thought of long days alone with a third child—a problem child—was already making her edgy. Then, “No one’s gonna give her crap.”

  “You just said crap yourself!” Brenda screamed, outraged.

  “Shut up,” my mother said wearily. Meanwhile, I was trying to formulate a question, wondering if I might spare my parents by looking it up in the World Books, which they had ordered more for me than for anyone else. As we sat, I could see them on the mantel, gleaming in fake gilt and wipe-clean leatherette, all twenty volumes flanked by twin casts of The Thinker. Under what would I look? “C” for children, “B” for babies? Did the little baby have a disease? What was it called? Would she live?