KooKooLand (41 page)

Finally, Shirley had had enough.

I was almost gone and she wanted out.

One night when they were going at it like cats and dogs she told him to pack his bags.

“You're not kicking me out. I'm leaving,” he said. “I won't live with a goddamn whore anymore.”

Sayonara, baby.

He moved into a flophouse downtown.

Hallelujah! We were in heaven. Shirley cooked less and slept more and even looked happy when she came home from work. I wore minidresses and played the O'Jays on Jimmy's hi-fi.

We watched every Red Sox game.

Jimmy hung out with Hank. They got plastered and vowed never to have another ball and chain yank their chain.

One night Jimmy showed up at Virginia's massage parlor. Virginia's friend spotted him and tipped her off and Virginia hid in one of the rooms, her heart pounding, until the coast was clear.

Virginia quit her job that night. She got another job at a massage parlor in Massachusetts. It was a longer drive but she didn't mind 'cause she was driving a Jaguar now. She'd gotten the Jag—minus its ID numbers—as a birthday present from a guy she'd started dating, a car thief named Armie.

“He's a real gentleman,” she insisted. “He always holds the car door open for me. So what if it's hot?”

Things were really going our way. I really started to believe it.

Then, one night, about a month after Jimmy left, I was home alone. It was after eleven and Shirley had already left for work. I was reading
Slaughterhouse-Five
. It was Jimmy's copy that he'd left behind. It had his comments in the margins, but I tried to ignore them.

I heard someone jiggling the front door, trying to get in.

Before I could make it to the closet where the nearest gun was, Jimmy was charging down the hall. He grabbed me and threw me onto the couch.

He hadn't shaved in days, his hair was even greasier than usual, and he was wearing the same clothes he'd had on his back when he left.

“You think you're pretty goddamn smart, don't you? Pretty goddamn smart.”

I tried to speak, but my throat had closed up.

My eyes darted around, looking for anything I could use as a weapon. A big glass ashtray overflowing with lipstick-stained Luckies was just out of reach.

Jimmy leaned over me, smelling of sour whiskey.

“You got what you always wanted, didn't you, you little rat? You got your goddamn mother to yourself. You put her up to this, didn't you?”

“I didn't,” I managed to choke out. The truth was I'd been as amazed as he was that she'd kicked him out.

“You're a lying little bitch. She did it because of you. And if you don't fix what you broke, I'll come back here and shoot her. Your mother's blood will be on your hands.”

“Daddy, no!”

“Daddy, no!” he mimicked me.

“Leave us alone,” I begged him.

“Leave you alone? This is
my
goddamn house. If you think you can kick me out of my own goddamn house you got another thing coming. You tell your mother to take me back. She always does what you want. You been pulling those strings since you were born. You tell her to take me back, or else. I ain't nothing without her. We been through thick and thin.”

“I can't tell her what to do!”

“Oh yes you can. You do it, you hear me, or you'll end up like no-good Susan without a no-good mother.”

And then he was gone.

I raced to the closet to get the gun.

I held on to the gun all night in case he came back.

I turned everything over and over and over in my mind.

If I begged her to take him back she'd have a miserable life.

If I didn't she'd have no life at all.

But there was a third choice. The one I kept coming back to like a song you don't like but can't get out of your head.

He had to go.

A
ll the next day at work as I played hopscotch and ring-around-the-rosy I tried to find another way out, an angle that didn't involve a gun, a knife, or rat poison.

I thought about calling the cops but not for very long. I'd been trained my whole life to keep cops on a stone wall. And since they went and shot those kids at Kent State, who could trust them? Anyway, I figured they wouldn't be any harder on Jimmy than they'd been on Hank. Even if they did arrest him—which I wasn't convinced of since he'd talked his way out of more tickets than I could count—once they let him go he'd be madder than ever.

I stayed late at work that day, mopping up splotches of Welch's grape juice and sharpening Crayolas, trying to put off going home as long as I could.

I stopped at the Temple Market and bought some Marlboros and smoked a couple.

When I finally made the turn into the projects I saw Jimmy's car parked in front of our building.

I froze. Then I took off running.

I ran like Shirley's life depended on it.

I ran faster than I'd ever run—fast enough, I hoped, to finally beat Jimmy.

When I charged through the door I didn't see or hear anyone. The kitchen was empty.

I ran into the living room.

Shirley was sitting on the couch. Jimmy was kneeling on the floor, his head resting in her lap. She was stroking his greasy hair.

She looked up at me with dead, baby-doll eyes.

“Your father's coming home,” she said.

Jimmy lifted his head from her lap and gave me a triumphant smile.

“I love your old lady and she loves me,” he said.

Later, Shirley told me he had gotten Papou to come over and talk to her. Papou had said she had to take Jimmy back. He said that's what Greek wives
did and even though she wasn't technically speaking Greek she was married to a Greek and that made her a Greek wife.

At first, Shirley had held her ground.

I've had it, she told Papou. You and YaYa don't know how he is. He's nutty as a fruitcake.

Papou put his arm around Shirley, something she couldn't remember him ever doing before. He reeled her in like a half-dead mackerel.

I know he's crazy, Papou said. I know he gets carried away sometimes. But he's crazy about you. How many women can say they have a man who would go to the ends of the earth for them? A man who would kill for them? From now on, I'll keep him in line. I'll do that for you, for the family. Because my son's no good without you. You make him good. Without you, who knows what he could do? You want that on your conscience?”

Dirty fighter, dirty fighter.

Two against one.

TKO.

“Your father needs me. I can't ruin his life,” she explained to me later.

“What about you? What about your life?”

“Oh, I'll make do.”

I could have tried to argue her out of it, but I was afraid to say anything. My words were like bullets. One wrong word and she might be dead.

The following day Shirley was back to cooking up a storm, making all of Jimmy's favorite foods that he had missed in his absence.

As she cooked, she sang a James Taylor song we both loved, one that she said reminded her of Jimmy.

Goodnight you moonlight ladies

Rock-a-bye sweet baby James

Over the next few weeks she baked dozens of Greek pastries dripping with honey for me to take to college.

“So you'll have something sweet to remind you of home,” she said.

I borrowed YaYa's suitcase, the same one I had taken to Old Orchard Beach every summer. I dug it out of a pile of junk Jimmy stored in YaYa's basement—broken lawn mowers he never got around to fixing, duck decoys so eaten away by salt water they'd only fool myopic birds, and half-empty bottles of horse liniment from Jimmy's long-gone days as a racehorse owner.

“You keep the suitcase as a going-away present,” YaYa whispered to me. “Just don't tell Papou. What he doesn't know won't hurt him.”

YaYa also made me a whole bunch of Greek pastries dripping with honey. The honey was soaking through the box already and made my hands sticky.

Shirley repacked the pastries when I got home. She examined them like she inspected sunglasses at work, having just been promoted from piecework to quality control.

“These can't hold a candle to mine,” she announced.

When it came time to leave for college, Jimmy refused to drive me.

“Find your own way there, big shot,” he said.

Virginia would have driven me except she'd broken up with the car thief and he'd stolen her stolen Jaguar back.

Ellen couldn't do it either. She was miserable about not going to college herself and couldn't get out of bed.

So, Ken, another of my North End friends, offered to take me.

I said good-bye to my dusty stuffed animals and the makeshift bunk beds and our cat, Sylvester, who was really old and slept through my good-bye.

Jimmy left early for the spit box so he wouldn't have to see Shirley blubbering over me, but Shirley said it was so he wouldn't start blubbering himself.

She slipped me an envelope with about two hundred dollars. It was in small bills and change, money she had saved up.

“Call when you get there. Ring once and hang up and that way we'll know you're OK but you won't have to pay for the call. If you really need to call, use the change.”

“Promise you'll call the cops if he gets carried away.”

“Oh, your father treats me good now,” she insisted. “That time on his own taught him a thing or two. He's a changed man.”

I don't know if she really believed that.

I sure as hell didn't.

As I drove away, she watched until I was clear out of sight. So nothing bad would happen to me.

I did the same for her.

I
finally made it over the state line.

I crossed the border from New Hampshire to Vermont.

Five years earlier, Susan had headed off to Vermont, bound for medical school, full of promise. She couldn't make a go of it and now she was back in New Hampshire, back in the nuthouse. Literally. I vowed not to follow in her footsteps.

The first person I saw when I arrived on campus was Paul Newman.

I thought I must be hallucinating since I'd smoked a little pot on the way there, but no, it was really him.

A moment later Rita Hayworth strolled by. What was even weirder was that nobody else seemed to notice either one of them. It was as if everyone had grown up in a world where movie stars were as common as rats at the dump, and only I, the Little Match Girl, thought it was a big deal.

It turned out both movie stars had daughters going to Bennington. Just like me. Sort of.

The dorm I got assigned to was a beautiful old wooden building. I found my room and unpacked. I had only the one suitcase, so it didn't take long. My roommate had gotten there before me and dumped her stuff, but other than that, there was no sign of her. Several large stringed instruments took up most of our room.

Before long, my roommate, her older sister, and their cheerful dad appeared. The sister was a senior and both girls were classical musicians. The cheerful dad had driven them all the way from Delaware, stopping for a picnic on the way.

“I hope her viola da gamba is not in your way.” the dad said.

I didn't know what language he was speaking. Spanish? Armenian?

“We're going to dinner at a French restaurant. Would you like to join us? They make a superb
soupe à l'oignon
.”

I begged off. I said I had plans with the friend who drove me, the friend who was long gone.

After they left I ate a bunch of baklava and smoked a few Marlboros and tried to remember the name of that Armenian instrument.

I missed my mother my sister my cat my stuffed animals my room my rickety bunk beds.

I even missed Jimmy.

I took a bunch of change to the pay phone in the hallway and called home.

“I'm here safe and sound,” I said when Shirley picked up.

I watched a cute boy with glasses carry a bunch of musical equipment into his room—keyboards, amplifiers, and some contraptions I later learned were called Moog synthesizers.

Maybe Bennington was really a music school and I had skipped over that part in the
College Handbook
?

“What's it like there? Is it all fancy like the North End?” Shirley quizzed me.

“The buildings are kind of old, like up in Canada. And one of them is a barn.”

“They charge up the keister to go to school in a goddamn horse barn?” piped up Jimmy, and that's when I realized he was listening in on the extension.

“There's a nice big lawn,” I said.

“Yeah, some poor sap like your old man has to mow that big frickin' lawn,” he groused.

“Well, I better not use up all my change,” I said.

“Next time, ring once and hang up. Don't waste your mother's hard-earned dough.”

“I'm so proud of you,” Shirley blurted out.

“Hang up before you start blubbering,” Jimmy told her.

“I love you, Mom,” I said, trying not to start blubbering myself.

“What about me, dum-dum?”

“I love you too,” I mumbled.

“You better. 'Cause the only reason you're there is you take after me in the brains department. My genes got you there. And don't you forget it.”

“I won't,” I said, and my time ran out.

From then on, most Sunday nights I just rang once and hung up.

It was just as well since I didn't want them to know how miserable I was.

I'd found myself in a nuthouse like Susan. At least that's how it seemed to me.

Everywhere I looked, people were behaving strangely. Girls in nightgowns twirled by themselves on that big lawn, dancing to their own private music. Their mongrel dogs ran free and shat on the lawn and the twirlers twirled on it and didn't mind. Some people walked around stark naked. Others wore giant lobster costumes.

A guy told me he had the mark of the devil on his chest and asked if I wanted to see it.