When Skateboards Will Be Free (9 page)

It is at this point in the story that Jack Barnes’s missing left arm moves from character description to plot point. The portrait that unfolds is of a handicapped man who knows full well he has little chance of being hired even to mop a factory floor, exhorting his membership to abandon all for the glory of industrial life.

My father, the mathematics professor, also managed to dodge the requirement of manual labor. “If I could do it all over again,” he has promised me on more than one occasion,
“I would be a factory worker, but unfortunately it’s too late for me now.…” The statement is always succeeded by a pause that I assume is my cue to reflect on the fact that I, a young man, sit on a cushiony chair in an air-conditioned office owned by a tall blonde named Martha Stewart. My father is a living example of what everyone else in the party could have been: a middle-class, white-collar comrade with summers off. That he has managed to remain such a beloved member is a testament to either his charm or the party’s hypocrisy, or a little of both. It doesn’t matter, though. The idea that he would ever take a job that demanded he stoop and sweat is absurd. That is not why my father became a member of the party. Lenin’s famous maxim, “Every cook has to learn how to govern the state,” does not work in reverse and suggest that Lenin was desirous of being a cook.

My brother and sister, however, spent their youth working their way through sweatshops and auto plants and cookie factories. I have a box full of letters with postmarks from places like Winston-Salem, Harrisburg, San Jose, Detroit, as they were continually on the move to the city with the industry that the party had come to believe was now the essential industry for galvanizing the working class. There was something exciting and heroic to me about my brother’s and sister’s adventures with machines and tools. Each time I saw them at Oberlin or in their rare visits to Pittsburgh, they would look like they had been transformed yet again, older, stronger, more worldly. I would ask them to tell me stories of where they had worked. And they would laughingly describe the factories and the bosses and the assembly lines they toiled
on upward of twelve hours a day, fitting this small piece into that other small piece, over and over again until their brains went numb.

My mother, the secretary, did not participate in the party’s turn to industry: She was a secretary before and a secretary after. It is the only instance I know of where she resisted what was expected of her. As a young woman she had traded in her dream of being a novelist for what she believed was the more significant work in life, but now, nearly forty-five years old at the time of “the turn,” she was not willing to sacrifice again. And while her job as secretary in the fine arts department of Carnegie Mellon University was certainly thankless and unchallenging, there was still something of substance to be gained by being in such close proximity to all those young musicians, actors, singers, painters. Her affection for and attraction to the arts had never been fully extinguished. Nor had her desire to be a writer, and every now and again she would sign up for a writing class—free of charge for university employees—and write a short story. In bed at night I would hear her typing away at the kitchen table, followed by lulls of silent rumination. The stories, which she would ask me to read for her, were almost always about a single mother and her son facing adversity and were written in a tone of unprecedented optimism where the hardships they endured were not so terrible after all.

On days when there were no pressing political demands, she would go to plays, or museums, or movies, sometimes taking me along with her. Together we would sit in the theater as if on a date, watching movies that were far too advanced
for me.
Vertigo. Annie Hall. Casablanca.
I was often bored, sometimes frightened, occasionally entertained. She loved books, of course, and she read constantly and then was filled with guilt because of it. “I don’t have time to be reading this now,” she’d say, but she’d read it anyway, letting her
Militants
and pamphlets and Pathfinder books wait until tomorrow. If I ever asked what a word meant, she would carry our enormous dictionary to the kitchen table with both hands and page through it, peering, peering, getting sidetracked by other interesting words along the way. “Here it is,” she’d finally say. “Look how fascinating it is!” And she would encourage me in the arts as well, enrolling me in music or drawing classes. When I was eight years old, the theater department at Carnegie Mellon cast me in
The Beaver Coat
by Gerhart Hauptmann. Onstage in the blinding lights, I was able to pretend with adults that I was a boy named Philipp, the doctor’s son, who had come to pay Mrs. Wolff a visit. “I’ve been to the zoo and I saw storks!” was my line, which the director told me to shout so that those in the back of the theater could hear.

Now and then on a snow day or in the summertime, my mother would take me with her to her office. At the empty desk beside her, I would play with staplers and paper clips while she typed letters, opened envelopes, answered phones. “Hello, Fine Arts, Dean’s Office,” I would hear her say over and over again, maybe one hundred times, sometimes even saying it in reflexive error when answering the phone at home. It made me ashamed to see my mother having to work like this. I knew that she was bitter and frustrated.

Her boss, the dean, was a large, soft-bellied Syrian man with gigantic eyeglasses, who seemed friendly enough but of whom I was wary. My mother had me fully aware that we were at the mercy of this man and that our tenuous, unhappy economic life could instantly be made worse by him. “I think he’s going to fire me soon,” she would tell me on bad days. It was because of him, though, that the theater department had paid me seventy-five dollars for my performance as Philipp, a sum so immense that I was sure I was destined to be a rich and famous actor. When he entered from his adjacent office, I would become as well behaved as possible, hoping that he would send more good fortune our way.

“Saïd,” he would say in his accented English, “what will your next role be? Hamlet?”

“I hope so.”

And he would laugh, and my mother would laugh, and then he would hand my mother a piece of paper and ask her to type it up.

In the corner of the office sat a grandfather clock with moon and sun faces. The clock chimed every fifteen minutes, with a special chime on the hour, and as I sat at the table and played with the office supplies, I would listen to my mother typing and answering the phone and then the chime as the passage of the day was slowly being marked off. This is the way the years passed. Five years, ten years, fifteen years. My mother would end up keeping the job for thirty years.

When the clock finally struck five, it meant that it was time to go home. And my mother and I would gather our coats and books and whatever uneaten lunch we had stored
in the little refrigerator. The dean would call good-bye to me. Outside, the college students could be seen on their way to class or coming back from class, joking, laughing. My mother would take my hand in hers and lead me to the bus stop, where we would wait. Her face a study in exhaustion. Exhaustion from a day of nothingness.

No, there was no need for my mother to make “the turn.” She had done it years ago.

I
WAS A COLLECTOR OF
teddy bears. “A connoisseur,” my mother said, then she helped me look the word up. At one point I think I had seven of them. Maybe eight. I called them teddy bears, but some were other animals too. “Do you think your stuffed animals are offended that you refer to them all as ‘bears’?” my mother would ask. “Maybe,” I’d say. I had an opossum, for instance, with a beanbag belly, and also an orange elephant called George that my mother had made for me one Sunday afternoon on her sewing machine while I sat beside her. When she was done, she showed me how to push white stuffing through a small opening she had left in its back. Each night I would get into bed with all of my teddy bears next to me. And in the morning I would wake to find them on the floor or wedged against the wall, imagining that they had gone off on exciting adventures while I slept. Before leaving for school I was always sure to retrieve every one of them, line them up in my bed according to their age, and tuck them in.

My bedroom was as neat as my bed, everything organized and straightened. I made sure never to let it get out of hand. The rest of the apartment, though, felt chaotic and cluttered. Clothes draped chairs, shoes clustered in corners, pencils and pens lay scattered on the floor like leaves in a yard. Furniture was generally positioned haphazardly, aimlessly,
without much consideration for the shape of the apartment, as if it had been lugged up two flights to an attic, dropped, and then forgotten. A desk cut off access to the window, a chair sat awkwardly in the middle of the living room. If later my mother was inspired to move my dresser from this side of the bedroom to that side, we were confronted with the additional obstacle of being too weak to do it ourselves and would have to wait patiently until the next time Ed or another male comrade paid us a visit. It was not uncommon for us to eat our meals among the contents of my mother’s knapsack, strewn across the table as if spilled in haste.

Add to all of this disarray the many
Militants
that continued to be amassed week after week, relentless accumulation. My mother saved every single one. To what end I do not know. Never in all my years did I see her referring to them. Their accumulation was quick and significant: forty-eight issues a year. When we moved from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh, when we moved from Ophelia Street to our next apartment, when we moved from that apartment to the next, and the next after that, and after that—half a dozen apartments in two years—they moved with us, each time larger, heavier, more cumbersome, the years all thrown out of order as they were carried to and from the truck by those comrades who had so graciously volunteered to help us move yet again. “One day I should organize all of those,” my mother would say, but she never did.

The day after our arrival in the apartment that I would live in long enough to celebrate my eighth birthday, a friendly neighbor knocked on our door to welcome us to the neighborhood.
Our new home was a gloomy one-bedroom, just slightly less gloomy than the apartments preceding it and whose best attribute was a deteriorating wooden balcony that hovered precariously over the backyard. The neighbor’s arrival gave the unfamiliar surroundings an optimistic air.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” the neighbor said. She was young and pretty and had long dark hair, and she had brought with her, as a housewarming gift, a bottle of grape soda and a half dozen doughnuts. I was instantly charmed.

“Come in,” my mother said.

And the young woman stepped inside and stood among the unpacked bags and boxes, the lamps without their lamp shades, and the stacks and stacks of
Militants
piled dangerously high. I watched from my bedroom doorway as my mother and the neighbor chatted. It was a brief, friendly chat that centered mostly on the nearest supermarket and bus stop. When they were done, my mother thanked her for her time and helpfulness. Just as the young woman was leaving, she casually pointed to the
Militants
and asked curiously, in an offhand manner, “What are those?” It was an honest question, asked without agenda, but it sounded as if it was colored with unease and perhaps even fright, as if the woman had recoiled and exclaimed, “What are those?!”

My mother heard the question in much the same way as I, but she took pleasure in it, seeing affirmation in revulsion. Later at the party headquarters she repeated the question to everyone, stressing the words so the subtext was made apparent:
“What
are
those?” The
comrades were delighted by the story, affirmed as well, and when my mother had finished
relating it, everyone laughed uproariously, including my mother and including me.
“What
are
those?”

“Stop back sometime,” my mother had responded to the young woman, “and we can discuss them.” But the young woman never did stop back. And when I had finished the grape soda and the doughnuts, the treats were gone for good. And within a year we had gone to court with the landlord and we were gone for good as well.

I
HARBOR FANTASTICAL DREAMS OF
becoming a famous actor. Dreams born when I yelled twenty-five years earlier about going to the zoo and seeing storks. This is why I dropped out of college, why I moved back to New York City, why I never try for any sort of promotion at work because I’ve convinced myself that any additional responsibility will interfere with my true aspiration. With the notable exception of having been on the soap opera
Another World
for six episodes, I’ve had almost no success. There’s a certain amount of awareness deep down inside me that I’m not very talented. I do my best to ignore this. Any day now I expect to be discovered by a big film director in much the same way that any day I expect to be discovered by Martha Stewart. And when I do I will use the money to buy a brownstone in the West Village, where I will live for the rest of my life feigning weariness of fame and wealth.

This afternoon I need to take an extra-long lunch to go for an audition. I’m supposed to be working on an urgent set of labels for a collection of patio furniture, but it’ll have to wait until later.

“Hey, Saïd,” Karen calls just as I’m about to walk out the door.

“I have to run,” I say in a panic. “I promise I’ll have them finished by the end of the day.”

“I just wanted to tell you,” she says, “there’s a blueberry pie
in the conference room.” Karen’s hair is brown and curly and her eyes are either blue or green. Around her neck she wears an orange silk scarf that is tied in a pretty bow. An image flashes through my mind where I am eating a slice of blueberry pie and kissing her on the mouth.

“I’ll save you a slice,” she says pleasantly, coquettishly.

It’s warm outside. It’s going to be summer soon. I unlock my bicycle from the lamppost, and the thick chain bangs fiercely against the steel. A coworker walks by holding a potted plant.