removed the magnetized top. She shut off the water. She wiped her hands on the front of her apron.
"So, " she said, turning to me, "are you hungry? "
THE FIRST TIME I heard the word "divorcee" was after an American Legion baseball game. The coaches were throwing bats in the back ofa station wagon, and one of the fathers from the other team picked up my bat by mistake. I ran over and said, "That one's mine. "
"It is?" he said, rolling it in his palm. "Yeah. I brought it with me on my bike. "
He could have doubted that, since most kids came with their dads.
"OK, " he said, handing it over. Then he squinted and said, "You're the divorcee's kid, right? "
I looked back, wordless. Divorcee? It sounded exotic, and I did not think of my mother that way. The men used to ask, "You're Len Benetto's kid, right? " and I'm not sure which bothered me more, being the son of this new word, or no longer being the son of the old ones.
" So how's your mom doing? " he asked. I shrugged. "She's doing good. "
"Yeah? " he said. His eyes darted around the field, then back to me.
"She need any help around the house?
I felt as if my mother was standing behind me, and I was the only thing between them.
"She's doing good, " I said again. He nodded.
If it's possible to distrust a nod, I did.
STILL, IF THAT was the day "divorcee" became familiar, I remember distinctly the day it became abhorrent. My mother had come home from work and sent me to the local market for some ketchup and rolls.
I decided to take a shortcut through the backyards. When I came around the side of a brick ranch house, I
saw two older kids from school huddled there, one of them, a beefy kid named Leon, shielding something against his chest.
"Hey, Benetto," he said quickly. "Hey, Leon, " I said.
I looked at the other kid. "Hey, Luke. " "Hey, Chick. "
"Where you going? " Leon said. "Fanelli's, " I said.
"Yeah? " "Yeah. "
He released his grip. He was holding binoculars. "What are those for? "
I said.
He turned to face the trees. "Army gear," he said. "Bino's. " "Twenty times magnification," Luke said.
"Lemme see. "
He handed them over, and I held them to my eyes. They were warm around the rims. I moved them up and down, catching blurry colors of the sky, then the pine trees, then my feet.
"They use 'em in the war," Luke said, "to locate the enemy. "They're my dad's, " Leon said.
I hated hearing that word. I handed them back. "See ya," I said.
Leon nodded. "See ya. "
I walked on, but my thoughts were uneasy. Something about how Leon had turned to the trees, too quickly, you know? So I circled back behind the house and hid in the hedges. What I saw bothers me to this day.
The two of them were huddled close now, no longer facing the trees but facing the other way, toward my house, passing the binoculars. I followed the sight line to my mother's bedroom window. I saw her shadow move across the pane, her arms lifted over her head, and I immediately thought: home from work, changing her clothes, bedroom. I felt myself go cold. Something shot from my neck to my feet.
"Oooweee, " Leon cooed, "look at the divorcee ..."
I don't think I ever felt fury like that, not before and not since. I ran to those boys with blood in my eyes, and even though they were bigger than me, I jumped them from behind and grabbed Leon by the neck and threw punches at anything that moved, anything at all.
Walking
MY MOTHER PULLED ON her white tweed coat and shook her shoulders beneath it, letting it settle. She had spent her final years doing hair and makeup for homebound elderly women, going house to house, keeping their beauty rituals alive. She had three such "appointments"
today, she said. I followed her, still dazed, out through the garage.
"Do you want to walk by the lake, Charley?" she said. "It's so nice this time of day."
I nodded speechlessly. How much time had passed since I lay in that wet grass, staring at a wreck? How long before someone tracked me down? I could still taste blood in my mouth, and sharp pain came over me in waves; one minute I was neutral, the next minute everything ached. But here I was, walking down my old block, carrying my mother's purple vinyl bag of hair supplies.
"Mom," I finally mumbled. "How ...?" "How what, honey?"
I cleared my throat. "How can you be here?" "I live here," she said.
I shook my head.
"Not anymore," I whispered. She looked up at the sky.
"You know, the day you were born, the weather was like this. Chilly but nice. It was late afternoon when I went into labor, remember?" (As if I should answer, "Oh, yeah, I remember.") "That doctor. What was his name? Rapposo? Dr. Rapposo. He told me I had to deliver by six o'clock because his wife was making his favorite supper, and he didn't want to miss it."
I had heard this story before. "Fish sticks," I mumbled.
"Fish sticks. Can you imagine? Such an easy thing to make. You'd think if he was rushing so much, it would at least be a steak. Ah, well, I didn't care. He got his fish sticks." She looked at me playfully.
"And I got you."
We took a few more steps. My forehead pounded. I rubbed it with the ball ofmy hand.
"What happened, Charley? Are you in pain?"
The question was so simple, it was impossible to answer. Pain? Where should I begin? The accident? The leap? The three-day bender? The wedding? My marriage? The depression? The last eight years? When was I not in pain?
"I haven't been so good, Mom," I said. She kept on walking, inspecting the grass.
"You know, for three years after I married your father, I wished for a child. In those days, three years to get pregnant, that was a long time.
People thought there was something wrong with me. So did I. "
She exhaled softly. "I couldn't imagine a life without children. Once, I even ... Wait. Let's see."
She guided me toward the large tree on the corner near our house.
"This was late one night, when I couldn't sleep." She rubbed her hand over the bark as if unearthing an old treasure. "Ah. Still there."
I leaned in. The word PLEASE had been carved into the side. Small crooked letters. You had to look carefully, but there it was. PLEASE.
"You and Roberta weren't the only ones who carved," she said, smiling.
"What is it?"
"A prayer." "For a child?" She nodded. "For me?" Another nod. "On a tree?"
"Trees spend all day looking up at God. " I made a face.
"I know." She lifted her hands in surrender. You're so corny, Mom. "
She touched the bark again, then made a small bmm sound. She seemed to be considering everything that happened since die afternoon I came into the world. I wondered how that sound would change if she knew the whole story.
"So, " she said, moving away, "now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted."
She straightened and smoothed her coat. I wanted to cry. A wish granted? How long had it been since anyone referred to me as anything close to that? I should have been grateful. I should have been ashamed of how I'd turned my back on my life. Instead, I wanted a drink. I craved the darkness of a bar, the low-wattage bulbs, the taste of that numbing alcohol as I watched the glass empty, knowing the sooner it got in me, the sooner it would take me away.
I stepped toward her and put my hand on her shoulder; I half expected it to cut right through, like you see in ghost movies. But it didn't. It rested there, and I felt her narrow bones beneath the fabric.
"You died," I blurted out.
A sudden breeze blew leaves off a pile. "You make too much of things," she said.
POSEY BENETTO WAS a good talker, everybody said so. But, unlike a lot of good talkers, she was also a good listener. She listened to patients down at the hospital. She listened to neighbors in beach chairs on hot summer days. She loved jokes. She would push a hand into the shoulder of anyone who made her laugh. She was charming. That's how people thought of her: Charming Posey.
Apparently, that was only as long as my father's big hands were wrapped around her. Once she was divorced, freed of his grasp, other women didn't want that charm anywhere near their husbands.
Thus my mother lost all of her friends. She might as well have had the plague. The card games she and my father used to play with neighbors? Finished. The invitations to birthday parties? Done. On the Fourth of July, you could smell charcoal everywhere–yet no one invited us to their cookout. At Christmastime, you would see cars in front of houses and mingling adults visible through the bay windows.
But my mother would be in our kitchen, mixing cookie dough.
"Aren't you going to that party? " we'd ask. "We're having a party right here," she'd say.
She made it seem like her choice. Just the three of us. For a long time, I believed New Year's Eve was a family event, meant for squeezing chocolate syrup on ice cream and tooting noisemakers by a TV set. It surprised me to learn that my teenaged friends used the night for raiding the family liquor cabinet, because their parents were dressed up and gone by eight o'clock.
"You mean you're stuck with your mom on New Year's?" they would ask. "Yeah," I'd moan.
But it was my charming mother who was stuck.
Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother
I have already given up on Santa Claus by the time my old man leaves, but Roberta is only six, and she does the whole routine: leaving cookies, writing a note, sneaking to the window, pointing at stars and asking, "Is that a reindeer?"
The first December we are on our own, my mother wants to do something special. She finds a complete Santa outfit: the red jacket, red pants, boots, fake beard. On Christmas Eve, she tells Roberta to go to bed at nine thirty and to not, whatever she does, be anywhere near the living room at ten o'clock–which, of course, means Roberta is out of bed at five minutes to ten and watching like a hawk I follow behind her, carrying a flashlight. We sit on the staircase.
Suddenly, the room goes dark, and we hear rustling. My sister gasps. I flick on my flashlight. Roberta whisper screams, "No, Chick!" and I flick it off, but then, being that age, I flick it back on again and catch my mother in her Santa suit with a pillow sack. She turns and tries to bellow, "Ho! Ho! Ho! Who's there?" My sister ducks, but for some reason I keep that light shining on my mother, right in her bearded face, so she has to shield her eyes with her free hand. "Ho! Ho!" she tries again.
Roberta is scrunched up like a bug, peeking over her fists.
She whispers, "Chick, shut it off! You'll scare him away!" But I can only see the absurdity of the situation, how we are going to hare to fake everything from now on: fake a full dinner table, fake a female Santa Claus, fake being a family instead of three quarters of a family.
"It's just Mom, " I say flatly. "Ho! Ho! Ho!" my mother says. "It is not!"
Roberta says.
"Yes it is, you twerp. It's Mom. Santa Claus isn't a girl, stupid.” I keep that light on my mother and I see her posture change–her head drops back, her shoulders slump, like a fugitive Santa caught by the cops. Roberta starts crying. I can tell my mother wants to yell at me, but she can't do that and blow her cover, so she stares me down between her stocking cap and her cotton beard, and I feel my father's absence all over the room. Finally, she dumps the pillowcase of small presents onto the floor and walks out the front door without so much as another "ho, ho, ho. " My sister runs back to bed, howling with tears. I am left on the stairs with my flashlight, illuminating an empty room and a tree.
Rose
WE CONTINUED WALKING through the old neighborhood. By now I had settled into a foggy acceptance of this what would you call it?–temporary insanity? I would go with my mother wherever she wanted to go until whatever I had done caught up with me. To be honest, not all of me wanted it to end. When a lost loved one appears before you, it's your brain that fights it, not your heart.
Her first "appointment" lived in a small brick home in the middle of Lehigh Street, just two blocks from our house. There was a metal awning over the porch and a flower box filled with pebbles. The morning air seemed overly crisp now, and the light was strange, making the edges of the scenery too sharply defined, as if drawn in ink. I still had not seen another person, but it was midmorning and most folks would be working.
"Knock, " my mother told me. I knocked.
"She's hard of hearing. Knock louder. " I rapped on the door.
"Knock again. " I pounded.
"Not so hard, " she said.
Finally, the door opened. An elderly woman wearing a smock and holding a walker pushed her lips into a confused smile.
"Good morning, Rose," my mother sang. "I brought a young man with me. " "Oooh, " Rose said. Her voice was so high it was almost birdlike.
"Yes, I see. " "You remember my son, Charley? "
"Oooh. Yes. I see. "
She stepped back. "Come in. Come in. "
Her house was tidy, small, and seemingly frozen in the 1970s. The carpet was royal blue. The couches were covered in plastic. We followed her to the laundry