Famous Builder (5 page)

The brands you buy are junk.
He holds up his whiskey and jars it; the liquid sloshes over the rim.
You expect me to drink this garbage?

You didn’t even give them the right toys. I had to give them tools to let them know they were boys.

Paul. That Paul was never so smart.

How much did you pay for this place? Who needs two houses? I’ll give you seven thousand for it.

All the while my parents sit there shaking inside, stunned. His tirade goes on through the night. After all, they can’t get up to leave. They live here, don’t they?

***

On one of those thick, humid summer nights when we’re in Cherry Hill instead of the shore, my father tosses his camel-colored briefcase on the kitchen table, buries his head in his hands, and sobs. He sobs so hard that my brothers and I are shy about it, impatient, even resentful—fathers aren’t supposed to cry. I stand at the back of his white starched shirt (it’s too tight in the shoulders), wondering how I should comfort him. Sweat stains dampen his underarms. My mother walks into the kitchen, blinks, says, “Hon?”

“Ettengoff,” he says to her.

We know that name like the backs of our hands. We’ve heard the stories about the layoff list for weeks—my father’s coworkers arriving at the job one day only to pack up their things. Heads are hung in shame, fists shaken in silence, desk legs kicked. Their bosses—Ettengoff, Sorkin, Sass, Degnan, Sellars—aren’t even people anymore. Their names curdle in our mouths like un-refrigerated milk.

He throws his RCA ID badge on the table.

His snapshot glimmers in its plastic sheath: the brush cut, the glasses, the stern, commanding expression above the bow tie.

We decide that we must get to the shore house as fast as we can. We drive through the scorched woods of the Pine Barrens, past the failing and abandoned businesses—Betty and Rags Diner, Finerty’s Quonset Hut, Johnny Boy Farms. The worst is anticipated. There’s talk of renting out the shore house, renting out the Cherry Hill house. There’s talk of selling, scaling down, moving into smaller quarters. Will I go to a different school? And what about our furniture, our piano—will they go, too? A numbness takes over my right side. The pines on either side of the highway are charred. I think of the grittiest South Jersey towns—Deepwater, Penns Grove, Thoroughfare, National Park—oily neighborhoods of aluminum Cape Cods, like houses on a train set, in the swamps along the Delaware, within sight of refineries. Cat crackers flare. I see the five of us sleeping together on yellowed linoleum as my father steps over me in the middle of the night, reaching for a glass of Alka-Seltzer.

We drive to the Ocean City boardwalk the following afternoon. Spin art, Skee-Ball, popcorn in boxes of tinted blue glass—we walk by it all, downcast, as cries of pleasure drift upward from the beach. The sand’s quilted with yellow blankets. Baby oil sizzles on someone’s hot, freckled shoulders. Frisbees sail. It seems almost unthinkable that anyone could be having fun at this moment. Everything glimmers with the possibility of its loss: certainly, this will be the last summer I’ll stroll down this boardwalk. And the sea, the breeze, the open blue sky: I can’t bear the thought of them taken away from me. At Wonderland, the red cylinders of the sky divers swoop and soar, scrambling the stomachs of the kids caged inside.

My father trails behind us, face ashen and tight.

That night we eat creamed chipped beef on toast as if to prepare ourselves for the lean times to come.

It doesn’t take long for our grave news to travel back to the family in Allentown. (How must they react? With surprise? Or is it laced with something else?
This is what happens when you want too much, when you travel so far from home, from your soul.
) Aunt Catherine and Uncle Joe arrive in the boxy red Rambler. Their cheerful, calm demeanors shock us. “Help take these to the kitchen,” says Aunt Catherine, as she nods to the groceries in the car. The bags are filled with all the name brands—Oreos, Fritos, Viva, Hi-C—we’d never think of buying for ourselves.

They take us to the Dairy Queen, they take us to miniature golf. They take us to the beaches along the Delaware Bay, where we collect clear, sea-polished pieces of quartz. I stare at the moss-covered hull of a sunken concrete ship (an old tourist attraction) and want to know everything about it, how it landed there, how they ever got the monstrosity to float. Anything to forget what’s going on at home. We go to the movies. We lower crab traps into a dim, brackish creek. Aunt Catherine and Uncle Joe do everything possible to distract and buoy us, but in spite of their kindness and goodwill, I have the sense that they don’t quite know what we’ve lost, what’s really been at stake here. “It’s all going to be fine,” says Aunt Catherine.

“But Catherine—” says my mother.

“Really now,” she answers with the slightest impatience.

(Does she already sense that my dad will be rehired within the week, with a raise and a bonus, no less?)

But you don’t get it
, I want to
say. My father cannot, cannot ever live in a row house again. It would kill him.

Instead, I rip into a bag of Lay’s Potato Chips, gorging on their salty and greasy taste as if they’re the last meal I’ll eat.

***

Steve and Myra’s living room is newly papered with silver. A green ceramic pine, no taller than two pencils put together, blinks on top of the TV console. I’m down on the silver-blue rug, leaning back on my elbows. Ten A.M.: another game show. The whole lot of us are in this room—aunts, cousins, uncles, parents, siblings—tense, fidgeting, waiting for the phone to ring. Outside a passing truck rumbles the front porch of the house.

When it finally happens, Mary and Catherine almost push each other on the way to the kitchen. Their clothes are crumpled, their curls lank, flattened to their scalps. They’ve been up all night, as have most of Grammy’s children—some surrounding her hospital bed, some walking up and down the waxed halls with cups of cheap coffee. It shocks them that it’s happened so fast, for on Christmas Eve she’d seemed so well; she’d closed her eyes in pleasure as the hot soup was spooned into her mouth, and then the next day.…

The voices are low and hushed from the kitchen.

I tense my limbs tight, tighter.

Outside, a branch cracks beneath the weight of the ice.

My father walks back to the room, finally, looks at my brothers and me for a moment as if he’s never known us, as if any passing resemblance between us is uncanny, a surprise. He sits on the sofa and folds his hands in his lap. “My mother died.”

The plainness of his voice, the unutterable simplicity of it. (Words fall apart: the sky darkens; a clapper strikes a bell.) From across the room my mother catches my face and smiles at me with a fond sadness. Then the weeping starts, a chorus of it from Grammy’s children. It sounds foreign in their throats, almost animal, haunting and deep, as if as adults they’ve forgotten how to cry.

My cousins turn away. Embarrassed, impatient, they punch one another on their arms.

The hours of the next days move slowly, sluggishly. Intermittent snows, freezing drizzle. Uncle Joe takes the kids to a James Bond movie—
Diamonds Are Forever
—to keep us out of the way.

We dress. (Why am I having this trouble? My pants swim above my ankles. The buttons slip through my fingers.) The inside of the funeral home glows with a rosy, burnished light. Tufted French Provincial sofas border the walls. Nothing about it has anything to do with the life that Grammy led: her troubles and compromises, her stubbornness and will. “No,” she’d say, shaking her head. “Not here. Too fancy.” I’m led to her casket where she lies inside a border of banked flowers marked with a single sign: FOR MOM, WITH LOVE. YOUR CHILDREN. Her face shines pinkly, emptied beneath the lights. For a moment she seems so alive that I’m certain she’s going to sit up and say, “Nass boy.” Then my father touches her cheek. His eyes fill; his lower lip quivers.

I mumble a prayer, in silence:
Hail Mary, full of grace
…

Aunt Catherine walks in through the door, stomping her feet, brushing the snow off the shoulders of her long cinnamon-colored coat. She speaks in her usual cheerful, tough voice, preoccupied with who’s bringing what to lunch after tomorrow’s Mass, when she spots the unlikely casket across the room. Her knees weaken, buckle. Her face contorts. “That’s not her!” she cries, as Joe and Francie hold her up by the elbows.

***

A block in Willowdale, the development next to where we live in Cherry Hill, starts to crumble. The houses are too spacious and expensive for anyone to use the word “slum,” but driving down Heartwood Drive with our mother at the wheel, we spot the unweeded flower beds, the crusty gold rags in the dirt behind the bushes. Paint is flaking off the trim boards. Storm windows are ajar. But it’s not the only block in Cherry Hill that looks like this: there’s Strathmore Drive in Point of Woods, Collins Drive in Holiday Estates, Latches Lane in Candlewyck, Chaucer Place in Downs Farm. And while these streets were apple orchards less than ten years ago, the houses on them seem to be tired already.
The mask is falling. Our owners can’t afford us. We’ve had enough of trying to pretend who we aren’t.

Maybe the families who live inside these houses are changing and their children don’t feel the pressures that their parents once did. (“Yes, it’s good to be Jewish, Italian, Polish, Greek! Watch us now. We’re just as good as the rest of you!”) Although there are different kinds of pressures—odder, more complicated pressures. Someone I once saw in the lunch line of my school cafeteria stabs his mother over and over in the family living room, a story that seizes the attention of the Philadelphia/South Jersey news media for weeks. Someone else flings a vial of sulfuric acid on a special-education student’s back as she wanders across the front lawn of Cherry Hill High School East. Richard Dubrow, a boy in Bobby’s homeroom, stands in his closet one October morning, steps off a milk crate, and hangs himself with one of his father’s blue neckties. In house after house, the kids simply fall silent, holing up in their bedrooms with their doors closed, or hanging out in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven. Anything to stave off the oppressive, persistent boredom. Until they get out.
But it’s all been for you
, think their parents.
You’ve tread on the names of your ancestors.

Weren’t you the reason we were born?

One day after school, I’m lying on my stomach, trying to work out a proof for geometry class (in which I got a D on my last test, to the horror of my mathematician father), when the sirens outside wail and fall, wail and fall. Why is it so dark inside my room? I walk through the front door, and then one by one, people run out onto their wide green lawns with their heads raised. A sooty bank of smoke covers the entire sky, blocks out the late afternoon sun. “What’s burning?” I call out to a neighbor.

“The racetrack,” says Mr. Coticone. “It’s going up.”

***

A parade of funerals. Every few months there’s another sudden, unexpected death in Allentown. Someone goes to work and feels pins and needles in the chest, a numbness in the jaw. A crack, flash of fire, and … Anna. Steve. Catherine’s husband, Joe. We go to so many funerals in a such a short span of time that we’re getting to be in practice now. We’re careful of what we say to one another. We clench our shoulders every time the phone rings.

We mill outside the St. Catherine of Sienna Cathedral as Joe’s silver casket is carried down the front steps by eight of my older cousins. A flock of doves scatters about us with harsh, beating wings.

Aunt Mary turns to my father. “You’re next, Tony,” she says.

***

Our car idles on the eastbound shoulder of Route 70. My brother Michael aims his camera at the lighted billboard against the winter blue sky: TOTIE FIELDS.
LAST NIGHT TONIGHT: THANK YOU FOR TEN YEARS OF PATRONAGE.

***

The meat at the Bonanza Restaurant is tough, chewy, a little hard to swallow. I’d like to eat at the new restaurant on the old Hawaiian Cottage site (another arson), but this place has become so familiar, so much a part of our family ritual on Sundays that it would seem wrong to go anywhere else. And besides, it’s inexpensive, so we won’t have to feel anxious later about my father’s cracks about the extra side salad one of us asked for and didn’t finish. All five of us sit at those long, dreary wooden tables, beneath the red wagon wheels suspended overhead, when another family of five sits down beside us. I close my eyes. Don’t I just know what my father’s going to do? Isn’t he going to talk too loudly? Isn’t he going to ask the waitress for her first name, flirt with her within sight of my mother, before he asks for a refill? Isn’t he going to make some observation about the length and style of my hair? All the ingredients are here: the audience of strangers to his left and his faltering son before him.

“What’s the matter, Paul?” he says casually.

I shake my head back and forth.

“Paul?”

I lift my head. “Nothing.”

“Can we have some of that A.1?” says the other father, leaning in over my plate.

I pass the bottle to the man. We’ve been talking about my lousy scores in the math segment of the PSAT, what we can do to raise them before I take the SAT in the fall. I wonder if I should just come out and say that I’m not interested in college, that I’m not obsessed with money like he is, that I don’t want to build cities in South Florida anymore. All developers do is pollute and destroy. All developers do is rip people off. I’m going to be a musician and a composer. I’m going to live a life that isn’t measured and determined by how much money I have in my bank account. And if I’m poor, so what. At least I won’t be worried and miserable all the time.

Still, I keep all these thoughts to myself.

He’s going on and on about the possibility of hiring a tutor or sending me to some remedial class that meets at 8:00 A.M. at the high school every Saturday morning.

Just as we’re ready to leave, he produces the sheer, plastic doggy bag patterned with blue and red asterisks he’s picked up from the dispenser next to the cash register. “Come up, kids,” he says. “Fill ‘er up. Make Taffy happy.”