Tilt (8 page)

It was raining by noon when Ron showed up again, this time not alone. A little boy was holding onto his hand. They looked like drowned rats on the front porch — a huge soaked, sorry gray Papa Rat with a battered brown suitcase almost as wet as his shirt, and the Boy Rat with jug ears and liquidy black eyes so solemn as he gazed up and up even as rain from his plastered black hair dripped down his face.

Stan stood blocking the door, not knowing what to do.

“Dad,” he said.

“Stanley, I'd like you to meet your half-brother. Feldon, this is Stanley.”

Feldon reached up a small hand. Stan took it: limp and cold. He remembered his father insisting he, too, learn how to shake hands.

“What are you doing here?” Stan asked.

Ron stood still for a time, dripping.

“Didn't you tell Mom that Feldon was with Kelly-Ann?”

Silence. Ron looked dignified, somehow, gripping that suitcase.

“She's not going to let you stay here. No way,” Stan said.

In any contest it was essential to know beforehand what the outcome would be. Where had Stan read that? On some martial arts site. It was a matter of imposing your will on the other, of being certain within yourself that no matter how difficult the struggle, you would prevail.

Stan's father seemed to be imposing his will on him right now.

A gust of wind brought a spray of cold under the shelter of the porch. Stan couldn't keep them standing there forever.

“There's no room for you,” Stan heard himself say without conviction. “I mean, Mom has a boyfriend now . . .”

Feldon coughed then. He put his tiny fist up to his mouth and his skinny body curled into a spasm of suffering. Ron did not lower his gaze from Stan, but only put a soothing hand on the younger son's shoulder.

“Who is it, Stanley?” his mother called.

She was in her horrendous sweatsuit with her hair roped back and her knitted yellow sockettes. She was going to —

“Don't let them in!”
she shrieked from the hallway.
“Jesus, Stanley! Don't you —”

Feldon kept coughing. The wind blew colder than ever.

“Kelly-Ann has abandoned us,” Ron said quietly.

He knelt down and hugged Feldon until the coughing subsided. Had he ever held Stan like that?

Stan felt his shoulder being tugged back, and then his mother replaced him on the threshold.

“What the fuck are you doing here? Ron, what the
fuck
— ?”

Feldon turned his black marvels on her.

“Isabelle, this is Feldon,” Ron said. His voice seemed to hold a quiet, triumphant sort of defeat. “Kelly-Ann is gone. Shut us out. We just need a roof for a bit.”

“What? You took the bus home and just found this out, and now you're back already? Or you came yesterday and didn't tell me you'd brought your other son?”

Ron stayed on one knee, pleading with his eyes.

“Why can't you just fucking answer me?”

Suddenly the wind sent a hanging basket spinning off its hook. It crashed close to Ron and Feldon and splashed black, wet earth on their soaked trousers and shoes. But neither of them flinched.

Coughing, coughing. Once more wretched Feldon clutched his father's rain-soaked shirt.

It was Lily who burst from nowhere, squirmed past her mother and tugged at Feldon's skinny arm.

“Are you Feldon? What are you staying out here for? You need a hot bath and a blankie!”

—

It was as if they'd taken two strands of a live wire and pressed them together, hoping for an explosion. Ron — Stan's father! — was in the bathroom running hot water for Feldon, the kid who'd split apart the whole family. It was the same bathroom Stan's mother had just cleaned. And Lily was hanging onto the half-open door, looking in, not looking in, and singing in her loud, off-key little-girl voice, “F-L-D-O-N . . . and Feldon was his name — oh!”

“E! E!” Stan wanted to shout.

His mother hovered in the middle of the living room, that hand bunching her roped-up hair, bunching it and releasing. The other hand was holding a glass of wine — at hardly past noon on a Saturday!

Rain hit the windows like liquid shotgun blasts.

“How can this be happening?” she asked.

Maybe Feldon was truly sick. Maybe he'd have to stay in the hospital. Maybe Ron could stay with him, too . . . 

“I'm going to have to call Kelly-fucking-Ann,” Stan's mother said. “Can you believe it? My husband leaves me. He knocks up a younger woman. And now she's thrown him out . . . and I'm the one who has to hold it together!”

“ . . . and Feldon was his name, oh!” sang Lily.

What about me, Stan thought. What about Gary? You haven't done this all alone.

“ . . . What do I get for all my trouble? The asshole is back in
my
house with
his
kid and
his
problems . . . he's incapable . . . he's
incapable
of . . .”

As soon as I'm old enough I'm moving out, Stan thought. When might that be? Maybe sixteen was already old enough? Once he got his license. He could get a job somewhere after school. At the grocery store. He could run items through the scanner and give people their change and help them bag. He could go on welfare. He and Janine could move in together . . . 

“F-L-D-O-N . . . and Feldon was his —”

“ . . . and now I'm the one who's going to have to call her,” his mother concluded.

“Why?” Stan asked.

“Because that's the way the universe is. It doesn't just punish you once. It rubs your face in the dirt and when you try to get up —”

She gestured with her hand, and red wine spilled onto the creamy rug she'd bought from the consignment store for Christmas as a treat for herself.

Stan's eyes bounced once between the stain and his mother, but she didn't notice. That's how bad it was.

“
I
have to call her because Kelly-Ann Wilmer is my punishment for something I did, God knows what. Maybe in another life.”

If he left to live with Janine — if he took the job at the grocery store, if there was a job, and became his own man — then he'd be abandoning Lily to a crazy woman.

A crazy woman who had raised him with some semblance of normality despite living a train wreck.

A crazy woman who loved them both more than made any sense whatsoever.

“You don't have to call Kelly-Ann,” Stan said.

“Well, who else is going to do it?” His mother glanced down irritably.

Then the whole weight of the world seemed to pull her gaze toward the stain. Her eyes fluttered as if she were about to lose consciousness.

“Did I . . . oh,” she sighed, and Stan could almost see the anger seeping from her like water through a child's fingers.

“It's all right, I'll clean it,” he said.

But instead of going to the kitchen to stare in the cupboard at the possible rug-cleaning products, he stood in the middle of the room and held her while she wept a warm flood against his shoulder. Her hair brushed against his cheek and made his nostrils itchy.

“I'll call Kelly-Ann,” he heard himself say.

Anything to help her stop crying. Her shoulders heaved. She had breasts. Skinny as she was, his mother was pressing her breasts against him.

“You're so big and strong now,” she said into his soaked shirt. “I'm so proud of you. If I didn't have you —”

The doorbell then. Who? This was not a good day for answering the door. But at least the interruption allowed Stan to unclinch.

Through the foggy pane he saw a man.

Gary! Stan practically hugged the guy.

“Is everything all right?” Gary said. “I've been phoning and phoning your mom . . .”

When he saw her he crossed the room like a man on a mission, wrapped Stan's mother in his fattish arms and stood there and took it. The sobbing anew, the gibberish that had to come out in gasps and gulps before she could say anything intelligible.

“And . . . and . . . he's right here now. He's brought the boy — Feldon — with him. Can you imagine?”

Maybe
Gary
could talk to Kelly-Ann? Gary could stand at the foul line with his back to the basket and sink the most improbable shot. Maybe Gary was Clark Kent.

But when the two men met — in the middle of the living room, with Stan's mom on her knees scrubbing out the red-wine stain on her favorite rug — it was more like Ice Man vs. Whipped Dog. Ron was wet still from the rain and moved like he'd been kicked in the backside and deserved it. And Gary was trying to hold himself tall, was actually sucking in his stomach.

“I heard your boy's sick,” Gary said finally.

“It's just a cough,” Ron answered. But Feldon's rattle from the bathroom — where did that kid learn his timing? — disquieted the whole house.

“I'm going to need a towel,” Ron said. “We won't be staying long. I just have to catch my breath a bit.”

Stan imagined the two men falling to blows. His father was stronger, but somehow Gary looked like he'd come out on top. Whatever on top would mean in a fight between two aging guys with more belly than wallop.

Why wasn't Ron going to the linen closet to get a towel?

Because it wasn't his house anymore.

“I'll get you a towel,” Stan said, and he was unreasonably happy for the few seconds it took him away from unfolding Catastrophe II.

Lily was guarding Feldon in the tub.

“He's got a little nib,” she said. “Right between his legs!”

Stan could get a job planting trees in the north woods. A helicopter could set him down in the middle of the tundra and he could walk and walk for miles, stooping and planting. He would follow his own compass. At lunch he'd sit on a rock with pine gum on his cheeks and blackflies clouding his face, and the vast and empty tundra would stretch before him, and the sweat would run inside his clothes, and he'd write a card to Janine:

They say this is God's country, and I know what they mean.

And his heart would pound just to think of her, back in civilization, a million miles away.

—

Stan brought the towel and Lily loudly rubbed trembling Feldon's goose-pimply body with it. It was hard to tell just what exactly the adults were saying to each other in the living room.

Stan didn't really want to know.

“Do you want to have a lie-down, buddy?” Stan said to Feldon. “Do you want to curl up in bed?”

“Feldon can't talk!” Lily whispered.

“Sure he can,” Stan said. Then, to Feldon, “You're just a bit shy getting to know us.”

He had the eyes of a hundred-year-old. Not a hint of a smile from his gray, calm face.

“Do you have a change of clothes, Feldon?” Downstairs was ominously quiet.

“He has no clothes, and he can't talk,” Lily said. “And he's got the brain of a squirrel!”

Stan tapped Lily's head. “Don't talk about anybody that way,” he whispered. “Especially not your half-brother.”

Feldon didn't seem to mind.

“Maybe he's half squirrel,” Lily said.

Stan found an undershirt for Feldon, whose skin was still cold. Then Stan put him in his own bed, which felt like the brotherly thing to do.

Maybe Stan wouldn't be living there all that much longer anyway, so what would he need his bed for?

“You have a good sleep, Little Man,” Stan said. Feldon looked at him like he was never going to close his eyes but it didn't matter. Stan drew the drapes.

He wondered if his father had ever called him Little Man.

—

Stan had said that he'd call Kelly-Ann, but what was he supposed to say? That her husband Ron had brought Feldon to his ex-wife's house and was on his knees now explaining how to get red-wine stains out of a creamy carpet while his ex-wife's boyfriend paced back and forth looking like he might burst a blood vessel?

Anyway, Stan didn't have the woman's number, and he'd never met her, and for some reason he was having trouble breathing. It felt like a balloon was slowly inflating, crushing him from within.

Ron and Gary looked like they were about to start launching lamps at one another. Probably Stan should stay on hand to protect his mother and the children.

But the inner balloon kept inflating like some maniacal toy.

“It's not coming out!” his mother said.

“Trust me. Trust me, it is!” Ron replied.

What was he rubbing into the carpet? Why was he hunched so badly over the spot so no one else could see?

Why couldn't Stan breathe?

He needed to tell them all that Feldon was in bed upstairs shivering even after the hot bath. And did the boy have a change of clothes?

And he needed to tell his mother, separately, that he wasn't going to call Kelly-Ann. And he needed to tell her that no matter what disaster might be unfolding here, he was going to a dance tonight with Janine Igwash.

And he needed to tell Ron, separately, to get the hell out of their lives. He wanted to have a broom handle in his hand when he did that.

Except he could hardly move right now.

And that's why when Ron, his miserable dad, said, “Son, could you get a little vinegar — not the apple, but the white?” Stan turned and left. The white vinegar was in the closet off the kitchen landing right beside the brooms. If he'd gotten the white vinegar he would have unscrewed the broom handle, too, and murdered his father.

Instead he plunged out the back door into the driving rain and the whole sweet wide world of fresh air.

Free lungs! He ran and ran. His body was so hot he didn't feel the wet until he was nearly a mile away from the house.

The cold came even later.

“I'm Stanley. Stan Dart.” Stan tried to keep the trembling from his voice. “You must be Mr. Igwash.”

The man at the door stood in a pair of slippers, worn on the outside edges. He didn't have a balanced step. But he towered over Stan. And it looked like his shoulders rubbed both sides of the doorframe at once. His hair was shaved nearly down to his skull. Stan's hand got lost in the big man's grip.

“Do we know you?”

Stan explained that he was Janine's date for the dance. Rainwater washed down his neck even though the worst of the storm was over. The late afternoon had settled into a steady drizzle.

What time was it? What time was he supposed to show up?

Janine's father turned his head slightly. He didn't let his eyes leave Stan's.

“Janine!” he called. He had the holler of a basketball coach. He looked like he could dunk without getting too far off his toes.

Janine appeared in the slight space behind her father's bulk. Her hair was wet and it looked darker. Had she colored it again? Had she been out in the rain herself?

“There's a half-drowned gent here says he's going to the dance with you tonight.” Her father's slate gray eyes glimmered with amusement.

“
Daddy
, this is Stan.” What was that in her voice? Some little-girl tone Stan hadn't heard from her before.

“Why is Stan all wet? And why is he two and a half hours early?” Janine's dad turned back to Stan. “Are you staying for dinner?”

Stan shifted his weight from one squishy shoe to the other.

“Do you have a change of clothes, son?”

Stan hadn't thought it through. He felt himself shivering like Feldon had on his doorstep just a few hours before.

He didn't want to go back home. Home felt impossibly complicated at the moment.

“Dinner would be delirious,” Stan said. Then he laughed. Was this what it was like to be drunk?

They let him in out of the rain. Their house was one half of a duplex — boring brown brick on the outside, spacious and neat on the inside. A hallway immediately offered three choices: left to the living room, straight ahead to the kitchen, where something was cooking, or upstairs to the bedrooms.

Upstairs looked dark.

That's where her dying mother was, Stan thought.

He kicked off his muddy running shoes and stood shivering in the foyer in socks squishy with rainwater. He pulled off those socks, hesitated, then leaned out the door and squeezed them until gray water drenched his wrists and ran onto the porch.

“I can get you something dry,” Janine said. “Don't worry. I have lots of boys' clothes.”

“Boys' clothes?”

“That's all she would wear for the longest time,” her dad said. “Till she started growing in certain directions.” His right eye lowered a little when he might be teasing. He had a bony hooked nose that somehow had the same outline as hers, but hers was a lot prettier.

Janine headed up the stairs into the shadows, and her dad stood grinning like he was going to remember this moment for a long, long time.

“Are you coming?” Janine said.

—

The bathroom was large and orderly and didn't smell of spilled perfume. Stan looked at himself in the mirror.

Drowned rat. Grinning fool.

She had given him a plaid shirt that fit perfectly and smelled a little like someone adorable had worn it not so long ago. It looked fine on him. It looked better than most of his own shirts.

The jeans were a little long but he could roll up the cuffs, and large at the waist. Janine wasn't a big girl, not in the middle. But he was a skinny guy.

Stan went up for a pretend jump shot in the bathroom. The tips of his fingers brushed the ceiling on his follow-through. Monday morning, six-thirty — rendezvous with destiny. For just a moment he saw himself dribbling the ball through Karl Brolin's legs, then pulling up, fading slightly on the shot. Nothing but net.

Sweetness.

Why did Janine Igwash wear boys' clothes?

Because she could wear anything and still steal the eyes of most men with a pulse.

Or maybe . . . she was tilted.

Stan stepped slightly back and launched a high side kick at his own reflection in the full-length mirror on the wall by the brown towels. It was a perfectly executed blow that left a footprint at face level but shattered nothing. Mark of a master. He wiped the footprint off with toilet paper, and when that still left a murky smudge he wet the toilet paper and wiped again, and when that left greasy streaks he used his hand, then the tail of Janine's shirt.

The dull, blotchy spot that remained on the mirror was about the size of his own face.

—

Down the darkened hallway. Janine's room was at the end with the door closed. Two other bedroom doors loomed. One was to a study, which had a desk and a computer and a nice view of the front lawn. The other room, darkened, had its door only slightly ajar. Stan had the feeling that someone was in there dying.

Stan slid past it, didn't want to look.

He knocked quietly on Janine's door.

“Everything fits,” he whispered.

“Great.” Her voice sounded cool. Did she want him to push open the door and come in? “I'll be down in a minute.”

Instructions clear.

Stan descended the thickly carpeted steps. In the kitchen Janine's dad whirled amidst controlled confusion. Saucepans bubbled, pots steamed, hot oils spat and hissed while the big man poked, adjusted, fiddled with lids.

“How are you in the kitchen, Stan?” her father asked.

“Do you need any help?” Stan took his hands out of his pockets — out of Janine's pockets — in preparation.

“This is perfectly under control. All I'm saying is a man ought to have at least one dish under his command. One never-fail. Are you a basketball player?”

Stan smiled. “I am, actually.”

“Then you know. When the heat's on, you're down to the last shot, the defense is tightening like a vise.” Barehanded, Janine's dad picked up a scalding hot iron-handled frying pan. “You need something you can rely on.” He waved it like it was a badminton racket. “In the kitchen, for me, it's chicken-leg spaghetti. I wooed Janine's mom on it exclusively. It's dead simple. Buy some spaghetti sauce, pour it in a pan like this, dump in the chicken legs and cook it all slowly. The secret's in the spices. This is true for all of life, practically. Onion, of course. But garlic first. The older you get, the more you put in. Basil. I'm starting to really appreciate basil. And rosemary. Rosemary and chicken are practically a perfect marriage. Peppers — green and red, maybe a little bit of —”

The front door opened and Stan felt the draft pull him around. A woman appeared in a brilliant purple and silver headscarf and a raincoat so yellow it nearly vibrated. She had shopping bags in her hands.

“Not spaghetti chicken again!” she said. She peeled off her coat. “I told you I was handling dinner!” She squinted at Stan. “Janine, honey, what are you wearing? The dance is tonight!”

Janine's dad walked past Stan into the hallway and wrapped the woman in his big arms.

“I've got dinner covered,” he said. “And this is Stan —”

She squinted again. “
You're
Stan?”

Stan failed to reply, as if indeed he might be an imposter. The moment grew so awkward that Janine's mother seemed almost forced to say, “I'm sorry. I took my contacts out in the store, they were hurting so much. I'm blind as a bat like this.”

She pushed her husband aside and hugged Stan fiercely. She was a tiny woman, mostly bone.

“Janine has a shirt exactly like yours,” she said. “Thank God she isn't —”

Suddenly Janine was at the base of the stairs in a killer black dress with a slit up to her waist, practically, and black leggings and a big silver buckle and white cowboy boots.

She was so beautiful, Stan felt his jaw soften, his hinges melt.

Her hair really was black now, and her eyes seemed dark, dark. She didn't look like the same girl at all.

What was she doing going out with Stan?

“I see you've met my mom,” Janine said.

Janine's mother was still clenching him.

“I didn't know he was coming for dinner,” she said. “But he's got a good feel to him.”

—

“The main thing I tell my clients is, prepare for life. You don't know all the twists and turns. You can't predict every bounce of the ball. But you can prepare your reserve force. That's the key. The single most important investment in almost anyone's life . . .”

Janine's father paused. The four of them were sitting at a round table in a back alcove — candlelight, linen napkins that seemed to have been starched. Darkness pressing from the outside.

“. . . is the home, of course. Cover your mortgage. But that's only the start. What if you lose your job? Or you fall ill? What if —”

“Stan isn't married, dear,” Janine's mother — Gillian — said. “He doesn't have children and he doesn't want to think about it for years and years.”

“The smart investor,” Janine's father went on, “looks at those risks. What about retirement? Okay, you tell me you're sixteen years old. You think retirement is a hundred years away. Do you think the government is going to look after you when you're sixty-five? Consider the deficit. Consider the ominous shifts in global trade —”

“Joe.” Gillian placed her thin hand on his long forearm. “Maybe we can talk about other things.”

Janine was studying her plate across the table from Stan. Her tiny lizard shoulder tattoo peeked out at him. If this wasn't dinner, if they were alone, he could reach over — if he brushed aside some of her black, black hair . . . 

“Tell us about your family, Stan,” Gillian said. “What does your father do?”

A slurp of sauce caught in the back of Stan's throat and he sneezed some of it, without thinking, onto the white linen napkin.

“He's a carpenter,” Stan spat out.

“A carpenter!” Gillian exclaimed. “You know, I'd really like to expand the family room. But it's so hard to find someone . . .”

Joe glared at his wife. Janine shook her head slowly, staring a rut into her plate.

“Contractors rip you off,” Joe said. “No offense to your father, Stan. But if it's at all possible to do the work yourself . . .”

Gillian snorted. “Two words, dear.
The bathroom
. And three more.
Lest we forget
.”

Joe picked up his chicken leg dripping with sauce and tore a chunk from it with his teeth like Henry VIII in some movie.

“The bathroom was years ago. I've learned a lot since the bathroom.”

“You have learned to hire a contractor. Somebody who will do it right the first time.” Gillian turned to Stan. “How long has your father been a carpenter?”

Stan had to concentrate to pick up his own chicken leg cleanly.

“I'm not really sure. I think only a couple of months. He was in real estate before that, and a lawyer before that.”

Silence. Finally Joe said, “A lot of lawyers decide they want to do an honest day's work in midlife.”

“You just said most contractors are shysters,” Gillian said to her husband.

“For God's sake!” Joe said. “I'm getting to know Janine's boyfriend.”

Stan felt all eyes on him again now. Was he supposed to say something? Silence stretched like ice taking over the room. Then the words just popped out of him.

“My father left us five years ago and never sent a dollar to help my mom with my sister and me. I never talk to him, he never writes, he's missed every birthday since I was eleven. Then yesterday he just showed up again, and today he brought Feldon, my half-brother.”

Stan sucked the chicken bone. He was breathing like a marathon runner.

“They're all back there right now in the living room. My mom, her boyfriend, Gary, Ron — that's my dad. I wouldn't be surprised if World War III has broken out. That's why I showed up early.” He wiped his fingers properly on the napkin. “This is really delicious,” he said.

Gillian was trembling.

“You poor boy,” she said. “You're getting the full wallop.”

“The what?”

“Life's all hitting at once. The way it does sometimes. That's why we all need to go out dancing.”

Stan glanced at Janine, then back at her mom.

“The universe kicks you in the teeth and the only thing to do is dance like crazy. You'll see. Tonight is going to be a huge release!”