Exley (15 page)

 

 

I
got home after Mother. It was around five o'clock. I walked into the kitchen. Her work clothes were everywhere: her suit jacket was crumpled in a ball on the floor by the stove; her shoes were lying sideways next to the fridge, where she'd kicked them. Her briefcase was on the counter. It was brown leather and had big dents and rips from where Mother had banged it against something.

Let me tell you about Mother's job.

Mother was a lawyer who brought charges against soldiers who hurt their wives. Or husbands, I guess. But as far as I knew, Mother had never brought charges against someone who had hurt her husband. She had an office inside Fort Drum, but she didn't work for the army, exactly. The government made the army set up an office and put someone like Mother in charge of it. It was clear, from what Mother had said, that the army didn't want her or her office there. But they paid her salary anyway. Or the government did, because they paid for the army. It was confusing, at least to me. Maybe even to Mother. Maybe that's why she was so angry all the time after work.

Mother stomped into the kitchen while I was still staring at her work things. She was wearing a gray T-shirt that said
CORNELL
— she'd gone to law school there — and no shoes, but she still had on her black pinstriped work pants. My dad always complained that even when Mother was home, some part of her was still at work. Maybe that explained the pants.

“It's just
unbelievable,
” she said. This meant Mother was on a tear. I was glad. If she was on a tear, then maybe she wouldn't ask why I was getting home after her, and where I'd been all afternoon.

“What is?” I said. But Mother didn't answer. She opened a cabinet door,
pulled out a pot, filled it with water, put it on the stove, and turned on the gas. Then she got out a glass and went to the liquor cabinet. This was just a regular cabinet in the kitchen where she happened to keep her liquor. It didn't have a lock on it or anything. She pulled out her bottle of Early Times and filled half the glass with it. Then she drank half of what she'd poured.

“How am I supposed to run an office with only one person?” she said. She was a little breathless, maybe from the Early Times.

“I don't know,” I said. I knew Mother used to work with another lawyer, but I didn't know anything about him except that he was a him and had been fired or quit or something a little less than a year ago. Anyway, he wasn't there anymore, which meant Mother was the only lawyer in her office.

“It's garbage,” Mother said. “It means for a year I've been working two people's cases instead of one.”

“Like what kind of cases?” I asked. Because I was interested. I'd never told Mother this, but I sometimes wondered if I might want to be a lawyer.

Mother reached back, yanked the rubber band off her hair. The hair fell to her shoulders and she mussed it up with the hand that wasn't holding her drink. “This morning, I met with this woman with her head wrapped up. She had a concussion. This afternoon I met with the little fucker she's married to. He was a big little fucker. His hand was in a cast. He'd broken it on her head.” Mother didn't sound angry when she said this, though. She wasn't like most people, who swore when they were angry. Mother only swore when she was tired. My dad also always said about Mother's job, “Carrie, I don't know how you do it.” I didn't know, either. Which made me think I didn't want to be a lawyer after all. Being a lawyer meant you got tired. I never got tired reading. My eyes sometimes did, but I didn't. “The thing is,” Mother said, “she doesn't
want
to press charges.” Mother paused and nodded, as if she was hearing a voice in her head. “Because women are fucking stupid,” she said, as if the voice had asked her,
Why?

The water in the pot started boiling. Mother finished the rest of her drink, put the glass on the counter, went to the cabinet, pulled out a box
of macaroni, and dumped some of it in the pot. Her back was to me; she seemed to be looking at something in the pot. Suddenly she turned and asked, “Why did you get home so late today?”

“Huh?” I said.

“You got home after I did,” Mother said. Her eyes were narrow; her hands were on her hips. “Where were you this afternoon?”

I tried to think fast. I couldn't say I was at Harold's, studying, because that's what I told Mother I was doing every Tuesday night, when I was teaching my dad's class at the college. I couldn't tell her the whole truth — that I'd been visiting my dad at the VA hospital — because she would say I was making it up, just like I'd made up my dad's letter, just like I'd made up my dad going to Iraq in the first place, just like I was behind the phone call she got from the VA hospital two weeks ago. So I decided to tell a lie that, if I'd said it the day before, would have been the truth. “I was at the doctor's,” I said.

Mother was still squinting at me. I didn't say I'd been at Dr. Pahnee's because she didn't know about Dr. Pahnee; as far as Mother knew, I was still seeing the first doctor. They were in the same practice, and so Mother wrote the checks out to the same place. After I made the first doctor refer me to Dr. Pahnee, I'd asked Dr. Pahnee if I should tell Mother I'd switched doctors. “Better not tell her,” Dr. Pahnee had said. So I hadn't. “But you see him on Wednesdays,” she said.

“He said I could see him other times, too,” I said. “Whenever I needed to.”

Mother walked over to me and squatted. She used to do this when I was younger, and smaller, so she could be at eye level with me. Except I was bigger now, so her eyes looked right into my chin. This seemed to surprise her, and she stood up straight, which was probably more comfortable for both of us.

“Why did you need to see him today?” she asked. Her voice was full of concern, and in it I heard an opportunity. I didn't think I could ask Mother what I wanted to, which was:
You know my dad went to Iraq. Why won't you say so? You got a call from the VA hospital. Why won't you tell me you got that call? Why don't you believe that he's there? Why don't you go visit him?
Because if I asked these direct questions, Mother would be
able to say that she didn't know any of that, and that neither did I, and I should stop making things up. So I decided to try something else.

“I just had a question,” I said. “And I needed the doctor to answer it.”

“Did he?”

“He told me he wasn't the one who should answer the question,” I said. “He said you should.”

“Answer what question?”

I drew a breath and said, “Why couldn't my dad have gone to Iraq?”

I thought Mother was standing straight before. But she somehow straightened up even more. She put her hands back on her hips. She became more like a mother, in other words. I didn't like the change, and I don't think Mother liked it, either: she had a pained look on her face, like she was preparing to swallow something gross. I sometimes wondered if Mother actually wasn't a “Mother,” not really, except for the times my dad and I made her into one. “Miller,” she said, “we've talked about this.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “I know he
didn't
go to Iraq. I'm just wondering why he
couldn't have
.”

Mother smiled at me. It wasn't a comforting smile. It was a triumphant one. I knew the soldiers who hurt their wives didn't deserve any pity. But I could see Mother smiling at them like that, and I pitied them, just a little.

“Because,” she said, “your dad never cared about the war at all, let alone cared enough to go fight in it.” I knew why Mother said this. I remember the day the planes ran into the towers in New York City. I was home with my dad. I wasn't old enough to be in school. I was playing with something on the living room floor, and my dad was lying on the couch reading a book. The phone rang. My dad got up and answered it, then listened for a little while. “Jesus H. Keeriiist,” my dad said. Then he listened for a while longer. “OK, I'll tell him,” he said. He listened for another second. “Me, too,” he said, and hung up the phone. He came back into the room and lay back down on the couch. “Your mom says to tell you that she loves you,” my dad said. Then he went back to reading his book, which I know now had to be
A Fan's Notes
. He didn't turn on the TV, or radio, or anything. I didn't hear about what had happened until Mother got home that night, and then only because I overheard my parents talking in their bedroom.

“You didn't turn on the TV, or radio, or anything?” Mother asked. “Weren't you even a little bit interested?”

“For Christ's sake, of course I was interested,” my dad said. “But I was in the middle of something.”

Anyway, that's why Mother said my dad didn't care about the war. But then again, I didn't really care about the war, either, until my dad was in it. I bet that's how it was with my dad, too; I bet that's how it is with most people. I was going to tell Mother that, but she put out her hand to stop me and listed all the other reasons my dad couldn't have gone to Iraq: Because he was forty, which was too old. Because he was in only so-so shape, even for a forty-year-old, and definitely for a forty-year-old who wanted to join the army. Because he was lazy, and they didn't like lazy people in the army. Because it took a long time to train a lazy, out-of-shape forty-year-old man to go to war, and according to the letter I got, he must have trained for only a few months before he shipped out. And that was not a long enough time. Because, because, because. By the time Mother was done, I was starting to wonder if I really had made the whole thing up. I started to wonder if I had seen my dad in the VA hospital just an hour earlier. I felt terrible. Mother must have seen that. She smiled, as books like to say,
not unkindly
, and said, “OK. Who's ready for some mac and cheese?”

“I'm not hungry,” I said. I started walking out of the room. Most kids would do this, expecting, hoping, that their mother would tell them that she was sorry, to come back and please eat something. I might have been that kind of kid, but Mother was definitely not that kind of mother. If I wanted to go to bed without my supper, then she was going to let me. But then I thought of something that had bugged me when I was with my dad at the VA hospital. I turned. Mother was standing over the garbage can with the pot. It was the kind of metallic garbage can with a lid on hinges. The lid was open. I could see the steam coming from the can, and I knew she'd just dumped the macaroni in it. I said: “Would my dad ever have hurt you like the guy with the broken hand hurt his wife?”

“Your father couldn't hurt anyone in that way,” Mother said. “That's another reason.” Then she slammed the garbage can lid, went upstairs to her room, and closed the door. I walked over to my dad's study, lifted
the window seat, pulled out the notebook, and wrote down all the stuff that had happened to me that day, and then, on a separate piece of paper, I wrote down another thing my dad had taught me. When I was done, I put the notebook back in the window seat, then went upstairs. When I did, I heard Mother talking. Although I couldn't hear words, just sounds. “Mumble,” she said, then stopped. “Mumble,” she said again. I took a step closer to her room, then another. When I did, a floorboard creaked. I stood there for a long time, listening, but I didn't hear anything. Not even a mumble. The door to Mother's room was closed; I could see from the space underneath that her light was off. I felt like I was hearing things. And if I wasn't hearing things, then I felt like I wasn't close to understanding what I
was
hearing. I felt like I was going crazy, basically. So I walked back downstairs, opened the window seat, and wrote about hearing Mother mumble and feeling like I was going crazy, and I felt better. Maybe that was why Dr. Pahnee wanted me to write down what happened every day: what you didn't know could drive you crazy, in your head, but once you put it down on paper, what you didn't know seemed more like part of a story you'd figure out later on. Maybe that's why Exley wrote
A Fan's Notes
, too. Maybe that's why anybody writes anything. Anyway, I went back upstairs. Mother was mumbling again, but it didn't bother me now. I just walked into my room, closed the door, and went to bed.

 

 

A
fter my visit to the Public Square, I decide it is time I tackle (figuratively)
A Fan's Notes
. I have read twenty or so pages when the telephone rings. I pick up the receiver, but before I can even utter the conventional greeting, M.'s mother says in a low, angry-sounding whisper, “So I hear M. paid you a surprise visit.”

“Hello!” I say. My heart leaps at the sound of her voice and then sinks at the tone of it. “I can't tell you what we talked about,” I say, because I know, from the tone of her voice, that that's what M.'s mother will ask me next.

“Right,
” she whispers — growls, rather. “Doctor-patient . . .” And then she stops, as though she's looking for the right word. “Confidentiality,” I say.

“Bullshit,
” she whispers. It's a whisper that wounds. As my own mental health professional knows, when I am wounded, either I curl into a ball and cry, or I try to wound back, in my own fashion.

“You're a lawyer,” I say. I remember this from M.'s file. “You couldn't tell me what you said to your clients any more than I could tell you what I said to mine.”

“Bullshit,
” she whispers again. M.'s mother has quite a mouth — a mouth and, indeed, a
vocabulary
. “Just tonight I told M. about one of my clients. Right before he told me what you told him to ask me.”

“What?” I say, and she repeats what she's just said. “No, no,” I say. “I heard what you said. But what did M. tell you I'd told him to ask you?”