Famous Builder (4 page)

I love my Aunt Catherine; unlike some of my other aunts, she’s like a second mother to me. But I wonder if she’s making fun. I know that my father’s side of the family thinks we’re weird. None of us are terribly interested in football or team sports, and I know that it’s part of family legend that we were given dolls to play with as children along with the tool kits and the G.I. Joes.

My mother, two brothers, and I are crouching—or hiding, to be more precise—inside the pink bedroom of Dolores Dasher’s summerhouse, which just happens to be directly behind the weedy lot across from our own summerhouse. Earlier in the day we received a phone call from Uncle Steve’s son, my cousin Stevie, who’s been staying with his wife and his son in Wildwood; he wants to know whether they can drop by at around two this afternoon. My mother knows what this means. They want to extend their vacation for another night or two. They’ll just sit there, we know it, and wait for her to suggest it, and they know she’ll suggest it because my father would be upset with her if she didn’t. How many relatives have been dropping by lately? My mom feels like she’s always on call; more often than not, she finds herself in the role of cook, while the aunts and uncles sit around the umbrella table, where they feed the gulls and watch the boats sailing by on the lagoon.

This time the thought of it is too much for my mother to bear. It gives her a twinge in the neck—and my brothers and I feel it in the backs of our own necks, in sympathy. At the very last minute her friend Dolores Dasher offers to hide us in the hopes they’ll think there’s been some miscommunication.

We look up at Dolores Dasher from the floor. Like our mother, she, too, has taken to wearing striped bell-bottoms, even though she’s a good twenty pounds heavier. She wrings her hands with a vexed look in her eyes and shakes her honey blond curls off her face. Plans are hatching inside her head.

“Do you want me to go over there?” Dolores paces. “I’ll go over there. I’ll tell them something came up. Your car broke down. You had to take it to the mechanic. It was an emergency. How’s that?”

We give her the go-ahead. We sit there in silence. I get down on all fours, butt high in the air, press the corner of my cheek into the carpet, and laugh quietly. Although we’re all on edge, we’re having a strange kind of fun. How many mothers would do such a thing? How I love her sense of adventure.

“Get your face off the floor, dear,” she whispers. “Germs.”

My brother Bobby peers over the window ledge. The top of his moppy head must certainly be visible from Point Drive.

“They’ll see you,” I declare.

After a few minutes, however, I feel bold enough to take a look myself. Dolores Dasher stands at the fence, gesturing, while Stevie and Janice lean against their car, lifting their faces to the sun. Little Stephen tears through the gardens and smashes the portulacas and petunias like a Rotweiler on speed.

“Little Stephen’s destroying the flowers!” I cry.

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” says my mother suddenly.

“Don’t,” I say.

“I mean they’re not going to go away. This isn’t nice. What’s the matter with us? Come on, you kids. Up,
up.
”

And just as we stand up, Dolores walks back into her house, flipping through a sheaf of envelopes in her hand. “Well, that was a flop.”

“What do you mean?” I say.

“Well, I told them about the car, but”—she rolls her eyes—“they were on to me. The car was parked right in front of them.”

“Oh
no!
” we all say.

“They wouldn’t take the hint. I’m sorry, Anne. Those two,” she says, shaking her head. “So damn blasé.”

And so we go back to greet them, cheerily, as Little Stephen starts jumping up and down on the webbed lounge until he breaks through the fabric and shrieks.

***

Aunt Mary’s living room is already cast in darkness, even though it’s not yet three-thirty in the afternoon. Arctic clouds rush and tumble across the sky outside the north-facing window, passing over the gas tank. A gust of wind rattles the panes. The TV imbues the room with a thin, bluish light. I sit in the armchair across from Grammy, who’s lying on the couch with closed eyes, moistening her lips after a shot of insulin. I hold onto the armrests and tell myself not to be frightened.

Murmured voices in the hall. I sit on the edge of my seat and strain to hear above the cries and jeers of the football game.

“It’s getting to be too much, Tony,” whispers Aunt Mary.

I know they’re talking about Grammy. Her care is becoming more and more of an issue; it’s a full-time job, especially since she fell last week. The brothers and sisters argue about who has her when. I feel something in the air when we’re all together, a pulse of frustration, regret.

“We might have to take her to a home.”

“No!” he cries. Don’t they know how she feels about the poor house?

“What do you mean?”

“She’s my
mother
,” he says. “We can’t just throw her away.”

A pause, a pull, a catch in the throat. “She’s my mother, too,” murmurs Aunt Mary. “Don’t you think we love her?”

Aunt Mary has stepped into the doorway, where a bar of light from the kitchen illuminates the top half of her face. It’s full of suffering, a drawn-ness in the cheeks, the same suffering I’ve seen in Grammy’s face for years. “Then you take her, Tony,” she says finally.

A wave rises then falls inside my stomach. Leaves rasp against the frosty grass outside.

My brothers and I are buttoned up in our coats, our hoods tied beneath our chins. I hold the paper bag of ham sandwiches and M&M cookies she’s made for the long drive home. When my father leans over to hug her, he presses a check into the pocket of her dress.

“No, no,” says Aunt Mary with exasperation.

“Now listen,” says my father firmly.

“It’s too much, too much,” she says, fingers fluttering against the front of her dress. After a minute she tosses the check at my father. “Too much.”

“Now Mary,” he says.

We stand in the foyer, heads lowered. I fumble inside my bag for a Hershey’s Kiss and pinch a flag of foil between my fingers. The check is tossed back and forth until it’s creased. Finally, Aunt Mary plunges it into her pocket. Her face is sweaty. She’s breathing hard, but she’s already relieved that this part of the ritual is over.

At some point in the next couple of hours, my father must bring up the possibility of taking care of Grammy to my mother (does it happen when I’m curled up in the backseat of the car, sleeping, lying beneath my coat?). She stares at the windshield; the words are dumb in her throat. Of course they took in her own mother during the last months of her life, but this feels harder, more challenging. Hasn’t she given up enough of herself these last few years, poured every last ounce of her attention into us? There’s hardly anything left of her. She looks at the dried maple leaves blowing along the sidewalk, and for an instant she’s a maple leaf herself, scraping against the pavement, lit by the headlights of the passing cars.

Our house is electric the next several days. Every time I touch something—a doorknob, a light switch—I get a shock. I jump every time I hear something. Doors and cabinets are slammed emphatically. Even my mashed potatoes don’t have much taste; I leave them on my plate until they’re cold. My dad finishes them off, spoons them into his mouth, blank-eyed, with abandon.

I stand in the backyard one day when the house finally explodes. Voices thunder. “Not true.” “Responsibility!” “Your mother?
My
mother.” I curl up against the trunk of the crab apple, the wet ground seeping through the seat of my pants. I cannot stand fighting.
Any
thing would be better than fighting. (Where do I begin or end? I
know
they’re talking about Grammy, but I can’t help feeling that I’m at the center of things. I bear it all like a buoy in a squall.) I keep looking over at the windows, worrying a long blade of grass in my hands.

Then peace. The house settles into an unlikely peace for the next several days. My parents are kinder, calmer; what has transpired between them? They start talking about where Grammy should sleep, how to keep her comfortable on the long car ride back to Cherry Hill. There’s talk of moving her into one of our bedrooms, Bobby and I doubling up. I picture her lying on my single bed in the dark, the back of her dress pulled up to expose the crack of her naked rear end as she waits for another shot of insulin. I picture her in this land of shopping malls and racetracks and nightclubs, frightened, far from what’s familiar. My stomach hurts; my meals go unfinished for days. I must stop behaving like this. Selfish, selfish, I will myself to be a better boy. Then, just as my father decides to phone the aunts and uncles, to tell them, yes, we’ll take her for a while, he learns that Grammy has taken a mysterious turn for the better. No need to move her now. One day she actually carries on an extended conversation about the summer when she was sixteen, when she rolled cigars in a factory outside Bratislava. On another day she actually gets up off the couch. She walks across the room herself, stands at Aunt Catherine’s picture window, and watches with amazement all the cars and buses threading down the street.

***

The weeds are tangled around the base of the shore-house fence. They’re amazingly thick, like dried reeds. I pull them through the wire links and cut them off with the shears. A rusty smell rises from my fingers. Steve, Myra, Francie, and Goldie are due to arrive at any minute, and sure enough the mint green Valiant moves up the street at an excessively slow pace, jerking to a stop every few feet—someone’s pointing inside—before starting up again. I draw my elbows closer to my rib cage and pretend to be absorbed in my task. My head’s overheated like the blades of a lawn mower. A greenhead lands on the damp flesh of my neck, and I reach back to slap it,
but—pinch
—it’
s
too late.

My parents have prepared for the visit all week. My father has made sure he’s around; he’s even gone so far as to do the grocery shopping himself, a task which seems about as comfortable to him as painting his nails in public. (Why does he look so dour pushing the cart through Starn’s Shop Rite? Is it the outlandish numbers on all the price tags?) For Steve, he’s bought Dietz & Watson, Entenmann’s, Vlasic—all the brands his brother expects whenever he comes to visit. One by one he loads the items onto the conveyor belt, trying his best to seem cheerful. “Don’t take this so seriously,” I’m tempted to say. Fortunately, I know when to keep my mouth shut. It doesn’t take much to trigger an explosion these days.

Not in the house for five minutes, Steve sprawls in one of the blue-gold armchairs, yawns, and asks to be brought a beer. The dynamics in the house have shifted. My father doesn’t sound as sure of himself; my mother lifts the lid off a pot, trying to make more macaroni salad—the first batch hasn’t met with Steve’s satisfaction. “Are you okay, Steve?” “Would you like another beer, Steve?” “How about a nice ham sandwich, Steve?” Steve sips from his beer, asks for another before he’s finished, watching our every last move—how we walk, talk. Every gesture seems to be recorded and assigned a barely passing grade. Occasionally, his eyes actually widen as if he’s appalled by something. A nerve pinches the base of my neck. How are we to live through this? He’s grinding us down like a pestle.

Finally, I decide, no, enough; I’m not giving in.

I pull out the poster board of New World (a name I’ve shamelessly stolen from the Rossmoor Corporation), the prototypical city I’ve been designing since the beginning of the summer. I’ve situated my project in southwest Florida on an immense tract of flooded sawgrass outside of Naples, where we’ve recently been on a family trip. I’m so proud of New World, of my skills as a city planner, that I’ve lost any traces of self-consciousness. Am I showing off a bit? Steve leans forward in his chair, squints slightly. I start drawing the tiny cul-de-sacs in pencil. I reach for my art markers, ink in the parks, waterways, shopping-center sites with their respective color codes. Then once I’ve finished, I start the naming process:
Daily Lane, Danube Lane, Dasher Drive, Davenport Drive
…

“What are you doing on the floor?” says Steve.

I drag the map closer to his chair, then hand it to him. In a voice more deferential than I’d intended (how does he have this effect on people?), I describe my city. His breath is scented warmly with beer; the rims of his nails are stained yellow with nicotine. Nevertheless, there’s the lure of authority in his eyes, in the steely white hair combed back off his forehead. For the first time in my life I can see that he must have been handsome and full of life once. And that it couldn’t possibly be easy to be in charge all the time.

“This isn’t going to work,” he says finally. He points to a section of the map, a little cluster of homes I’ve called Jupiter Shores.

“What do you mean?”

“These canals,” he says, shaking his head. “Water flows
down
hill.”

I don’t have it in me to remind him that my city is just west of the Everglades, where there is no downhill, where the water level is only a few inches beneath the surface even during droughts. I’m merely shocked that he’d find fault with my project, that he wouldn’t find a single thing to praise in it.

My mother, hearing the nature of this exchange, walks into the living room, wiping her hands on a dish towel patterned with bronze coffeepots. “Paul’s been designing cities for years. The
Philadelphia Bulletin
’s even done a story on him.”

“Paul should listen,” says Myra, who walks into the room from the porch. “Steve
knows.
”

How can people be so sure of themselves? He goes on to talk about the nature of physics and water, about sewers, seepage, drainage. For all I know, he’s made it up. He hands back my map to me, an aloof, satisfied look in his eyes. His face slackens, bluing the skin of his cheeks. I think again: how can people be so sure of themselves?

Is it even possible to reconstruct what happens next?

I can only piece it together from the bits and pieces I’ve heard through the wall. (“Why didn’t you defend us?” cries my mom later, before taking off in the car.) Drinking, drinking through the night, Steve lays into my mother and father, in a sustained explosion of sorts. Smoke banks against the windows, stalling in the room like soot from a power plant. For some reason he’s made sure Goldie and Francie sit by his side; they pull in the edges of their lips between their teeth. Their eyes dart from Steve to my parents—whom should they side with? As Myra sits on Steve’s right side, blank and imperial.