As You Were Page 10

  Glen sings Dad’s praises the whole time you row the boat back to shore. You don’t open your mouth. You’re wondering if you’ll be able to slip into the bedroom and stuff a coloring book into the back of your pants to soften the blow. But he’s probably too sober to fall for that.

  Glen hops out of the boat and pulls the bow onto shore again, and waits, says nothing, stands statue. He knows his Uncle Dickie is perturbed and knows not to provoke him. Glen doesn’t want to get in the way if Dad decides to beat your ass right there on the shore. Nor does he dare leave until he’s told, but he’s got one foot pointed in the direction of the cabin—he’s ready to run when the moment comes.

  When you stand up with the rod and reel, Dad barks out, “David!” from the back of the boat. You almost wet yourself. When you turn to face him, he hands you a handful of bobbers. For you, it’s two handfuls. Some fall to the bottom of the boat, but you don’t have time to pick them up before he tells Glen to push the boat out and get in.

  They leave you there on the beach and go to the other side of the lake, Lunkerville. Grandma calls you inside for lunch. Grandpa makes like he’s handing you a cup of water in one of those bright blue aluminum Bascal tumblers, but he’s decided you need a Grasshopper too.

  NICE BIKE

  EVERY SO OFTEN, GRANDPA BUB picks you up from school. You get to sit in the front and see where you’re going, which is nice. But it’s not as memorable as the other stuff.

  First, like when you walk through the front door of the house, he says, “What did you learn in school today?”—but in the car alone with Grandpa, it’s not punctuated by Grandma Audrey’s trilled, “Get your ass in the kitchen and do your schoolwork.”

  Instead, he listens while you ramble on about your lessons.

  Second, he’ll yell things out the car window, like, “Little girl, your bike is broken!” and wait for her to hop off the bicycle and give it a once-over before he continues, telling her, “Your back wheel is going forward.” He’ll put on his hazards and wait until his logic works its way into her ear and out the other. When her face lets him know she’s convinced something is wrong, something she can’t fix, he recommends she push her bike home and tell her dad he needs to fix it before she gets hurt. Then he puts it back into drive and does that yuck-yuck- yuck laugh of his and says, “Oh, what a schmuck.”

  He calls everyone a schmuck.

  The dictionary defines schmuck as an annoying person. The Yiddish dictionary says it’s another word for the penis. But a Jewish friend tells you it’s the word for the leftover skin that’s tossed away after a circumcision.

  You don’t ever take your bike to school; it’s only a three-block walk. The first bike you can recall is painted red, white, and blue, with shooting stars running along the frame, like something Evel Knievel would ride as a child. The tires are made of solid rubber. It’s impossible for you to pop a tire. It’s impossible to pop a wheelie, too. The bike is so heavy you can’t get it up off the ground no matter how hard you yank up on the handlebars. And those solid rubber tires aren’t made of soft rubber, either. They’re so hard you can feel every pebble you roll over, every crack in the sidewalk, every bit of gravel in the concrete.

  The vibrations rattle your bones and blur your vision. Because of this, you wobble so bad it looks like you can’t figure out how to handle a two-wheeler until you figure out to ride through everyone’s front lawns, which pisses off some otherwise friendly neighbors.

  The bike after that kind of shows up one day. It’s built by Glen. He has dozens of different bikes piled up alongside Aunt Bobbie’s garage. The cops come and look over the collection every so often, trying to find a bike someone reported missing. But he never stole one. There’s no stars or stickers on the bike he gives you. It’s painted a matte blue primer color. It’s blue, so it must be a boy’s bike—never mind the tassels hanging down from the ape-hanger handlebars, or the white vinyl banana seat with daisies on it, held high into the air with the sissy bar. The tassels come off with one merciless tug, and if your butt stays planted on the seat, no one will see the flowers. The ape-hangers would be cool if it was 1975 or so, but it’s 1985 or so, so you pretend you’re a biker riding around on a chopper and no one really says anything. Though, it is kind of hard to pull off that biker thing while wearing a pair of basketball shorts along with an I Celebrated My Birthday at Chuck E. Cheese’s T-shirt that Grandma got for you at Goodwill. Those shorts, especially, were a bad idea. They are way too slippery to wear when riding on a vinyl seat.

  Remember the massive tree sitting in the center of the block. The roots run under the sidewalk, making a killer jump. One day, the wind is blowing just right at your back, you get going super fast, and launch right into the air, and slide right off the back of the banana seat and bounce onto the back tire.

  That’s when you realize your back wheel is going forward, too, and your tighty-whities aren’t quite tight enough to stop your ball sack from getting dragged by the back tire into the frame.

  No one notices you, or if they do, they don’t come to check on you. No one asks if you’re okay. If they saw what happened, they know you’re not. If anyone heard what happened, they would have heard a sound that made birds take flight. Alone, you lie on someone’s front lawn with a little vomit on your lips and tears in your eyes, along with some presumable snot dripping from your nose. From there, you listen to the wind in the trees, smell the pine needles on the ground beneath you, along with the fresh-cut grass, try to process how the hell it even happened, wonder whether you’re a girl now.

  The bike after that comes from Mom, once she gets brave enough to come around on the regular. It’s a bright red Huffy racing bike with hand brakes and foot pegs on the front forks. A pad Velcroes onto the frame to soften the blow if you fall when doing an endo. There’s another on the handlebars to save your teeth from shattering. But, really, it’s more of a cushion for your friend’s butt cheeks when they’re balancing on the handlebars. The tires are made of white rubber. Nobody else in the neighborhood has white tires. The only other place anyone has ever seen those is on the TV, but it doesn’t have the mag wheels like the BMX racers do. Instead, it has these white plastic aero discs covering the spokes.

  You can see it from a mile away in the summer sun.

  No one ever thought to buy a chain and padlock. You’d pedal around the neighborhood and see bikes in a pile in someone’s front yard. No one knew anyone’s phone number, but everyone knew which bike belonged to what kid. So, when someone says someone else has your bike, you break into a full sprint toward his house, and when he sees you walk into his yard, he comes flying outside to meet you. And you freeze.

  He’s a head taller than you. He’s been held back. This isn’t the first time he’s taken something of yours, so you back off his lawn and head home.

  Grandpa Bub asks, “Where’d you leave your bike?”

  “Someone took it,” you tell him.

  “Who?” he says, his words accompanied by a jingling of car keys. He calls out to Grandma, “Auddie, I’m going out.”

  From behind the steering wheel, he asks again where your bike is, and you answer: “Dan took it.”

  “Where’s Dan live?” he asks and puts the car into drive.

  “Up above Eighth.”

  Up above Eighth, you point to Dan’s avenue and tell Grandpa it’s the last house, but he can see the bike as soon as he turns the corner, and he guns it up the hill to the dead end and says, “Go get your bike.”

  You slink out of the passenger seat and close the door as quietly as possible, but Grandpa’s brakes squeal when the car comes to a stop, so Dan’s already watching from the front window. By the time you grab hold of your bike, he yanks it out of your hands and sneers at you.

  Then his eyes widen in a way you’ve never seen before.

  You’re surrounded in shadow—as if a giant cloud moved overhead—and you concede the bike isn’t yours anymore.

  Grandpa Bub is a six-foot-six Swede who
has worked with steel since the time he came home from WWII, so what he does next is like watching an elderly Larry Bird swat a basketball out of someone’s hands—if those hands were Dan’s shoulders.

  You come up to about the elbow on Grandpa, which makes it easy for him to reach right over the top of your head and slap Dan with an open palm. Dan’s basketball of a head looks like it loses some air when it meets the soft dirt of his front yard. You wonder which hurt worse: the slap itself or kissing the turf. Grandpa Bub’s hands are so leathery from working at the tool factory for forty-plus years, he can cup his hands together and play “Amazing Grace” with the escaping air. It’s a safe bet his hand didn’t tingle the slightest bit.

  You don’t remember Grandpa putting the bike into the back of the station wagon. There’s only an embedded image of the giant gap between Dan’s two front teeth, along with his swollen lips and his greasy, stringy hair, as he looks up at you from the dirt. And you know you don’t have to be afraid of him again.

  KINDERGARTEN

  KIDS WITH LATE FALL BIRTHDAYS sometimes wait another year to start school, but they let you in—despite the class being full. It’s a safe bet they get a sense of how burned out Grandma Audrey is. She’s taken to grounding you for almost any reason as soon as her patience runs out. Most mornings, that’s right after her coffee cup goes dry. She takes her coffee black, no cream, no sugar, but she likes light roast, so you can never tell when she makes the switch over to brandy. The color is identical, and her slurring sounds a lot like when her false teeth slide out of her head after she warms her cup in the microwave a tad too long.

  The principal lives across the street, giving her a front-row seat to the morning routine. In the summer, you wake, eat a bowl of cereal, after which Grandma sends you outside, latching the door behind you. Later, she’ll scream your name to let you know there’s lunch on the front stoop. If you don’t get there before the squirrels or whatever stray might be running around the neighborhood that day, then it’s just too damn bad, huh?

  Unless it’s raining, really raining, the only way to go inside is if you need to poop. There is a storm drain between Grandma’s and the neighbor’s house for number one.

  When it does really rain, the day consists of cornflakes, $25,000 Pyramid, Family Feud, Hollywood Squares, The Price Is Right, then soaps: The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, Guiding Light, As the World Turns, and General Hospital.

  That’s if you keep quiet.

  Otherwise, she’ll send you upstairs to your bedroom, and if you get too loud up there, you’ll get to clean the basement. The basement is unfinished, meaning its walls are damp from the time when the snow melts until it falls again. When the toilet flushes, the water rushes through the manhole before heading to the city sewer. It’s covered, but it’s not exactly airtight, so there’s a smell.

  The basement houses a washer, dryer, freezer, and the fruit room. The fruit room is where Grandma keeps all her canned goods and jars of tomatoes and jellies in case the Commies come. The basement freezer houses all the Schwan’s ice cream delights you’re denied, along with the corn dogs and taco burgers and fish fillets Grandma makes when she doesn’t feel like cooking from scratch.

  The basement is also where the dogs crap all winter long because Grandma refuses to send them outside into the drifting snow. Instead, she sends you downstairs with an ice chipper to scrape the petrified crap off the floor. Someone laid tiles on the floor down there, most of which are cracked and broken by the time the chore is passed to you, so right when you get the ice chipper sliding along the floor, peeling up a nice long curl of concrete dust and dog crap and whatever comes in when the city sewer backs up into the basement, the ice chipper rams against the edge of a broken piece of tile and the handle punches you in the gut, sending slivers into the palms of your hands and you to the floor. You break your fall by putting both hands out in front of you, and your bloodied hands become slathered with damp dog shit and little granules of concrete and whatever comes in when the city sewer lines back up into the basement.

  Dizzied from the fall, you stand and crack your head on a low- hanging asbestos-wrapped pipe. This sends a cloud of dust into the air, making you sneeze and cough. You can’t stop sneezing, so you blow your nose on your shirt, and Grandma stomps her feet on the dining room floor, hollers about how you sound like a goddamned bull moose, prompting you to tiptoe over to the washtub and rinse your hands off with the scalding hot water which comes from the water heater a few feet away before you head over to the other side of the basement, where you help yourself to some of Schwan’s deliciousness.

  But if it is summer, and it is really raining, and the city sewer lines back up into the basement, and there’s too much noise coming from upstairs, then Grandma gets it in her head you might need to clean your room instead of playing.

  This is bad news.

  Bad, bad news.

  You’re to play with one toy at a time. One crayon at a time. There’s no taking another out of the box until you’ve put the one you’re using away. The only exceptions are action figures and Lincoln Logs. This makes drag racing the Matchbox cars impossible, which is why you never venture out of the bedroom while playing with them. If you can help it. But if she comes into the bedroom, you’re fucked.

  And you are fucked.

  Two lengths of Matchbox track are clamped onto the nightstand and loop-de-loop toward the foot of the bed before the jump sends cars through the air, over the Incredible Hulk and a succession of monster trucks, landing in the closet where they slide off into the darkness.

  Coloring books and crayons are splayed across the floor. GI Joes lie where they fell during their short but honorable fight against the Rebel Alliance. Spider-Man is stalled midway through his ascent to the top bunk, when his batteries drained and died.

  When the door swivels open, Grandma Audrey lets go a blood-curdling scream. But blood-curdling doesn’t quite capture it. And blood doesn’t curdle unless there’s an elaborate and lengthy cooking process. Blood caramelizes much easier. Her voice sounds the way a blender does when it’s been turned on at too high of a setting and you’ve forgotten the lid—or maybe you’re frozen from fear and can’t quite hear, or she’s so pissed she can’t talk. Luckily, you get your wits about you in time for her to clear the froth from her throat and bark out, “I said clean up your goddamn room!” But you don’t move fast enough—even though you’re snatching up the crayons so quickly you’re snapping and cracking them.

  Grandma grabs a handful of hair and lifts you to your knees and looks you in the eyes and says something to you, but her lips are clamped around the filter of a cigarette so tight you can’t understand her, so you give her a stupid look and she slams you back to the floor, making you drop the crumbled Crayolas. She mutters, “Pick it up,” and you do, and she lifts you again like some sort of yo-yo.

  But she’s not done.

  She doesn’t trust you to finish cleaning up on your own. She marches you over to the toy box so fast you can’t keep your feet under you. She shakes you and shakes you and shakes you until you figure out to drop it into the toy box. She does this until all the toys are picked up, along with a clump of dog crap you didn’t see until she points it out in the back corner of the closet and is convinced it’s some Lincoln Logs you were too lazy to put away.

  But there is one sunny summer day when it isn’t raining, and you do make it to the porch in time to grab lunch before the squirrels or someone’s stray dog gets there. Through the screen door, Grandma notices your black hair is becoming bleached by the summer sun, meaning the strawberry-blond hair you got as a birthday gift from your Mick mom is showing through. That just won’t do.

  Grandma comes back outside, wielding a pair of clippers she got from who-knows-where. She doesn’t even let you finish the sandwich, and wasting food is not something she lets slide. She will tell Debbie how there are starving children in Africa without fail when she slows down at the dinner table.

 
; Grandma makes you take a seat on the top step, and she shaves it all off. But Grandpa Bub has had these clippers put away since before they were married, since before she first made him go to Cliff’s Barber Shop, since before he began to comb it all to the back and have her cut it with a pair of old kitchen scissors she keeps in the junk drawer.

  Regardless of how the clippers are rusted and dulled with age, you have to sit there while she runs the blade through your hair so fast you think she’s trying to get it done before the commercial break ends. It sounds the same as when Grandpa runs the lawnmower over the gravel driveway at the cabin. You duck the same too, except it’s not because you’re afraid of a flying rock, but because some of the hair is coming out by the root.

  When she’s done, your scalp is bloodied, and you watch the afternoon breeze blow clumps of hair out into the yard and down the street. You see those who’ve watched this from their front porches and living room windows turn to go back inside or close their curtains.

  Your friends are called inside too.

  SPLIT CLASS

  THE KID NEXT DOOR is the only one who comes to your birthday party in the first grade. He doesn’t get a choice. His mom cuts your hair for free, and Grandma Audrey watches him free of charge in exchange. His mom’s hair salon is busiest on Saturday mornings—the day of the party—so he is the one guest who isn’t a blood relative.

  Every classmate gets an invitation, though, like on Saint Valentine’s Day.

  It’s not only Grandma who the neighborhood kids are afraid of now. Both classes, the first and the second grade, are afraid. But it’s a split class. The class being split doesn’t mean some are afraid and some aren’t, or some are more afraid than others. A split class means the school is so crowded first- and second-graders share a room and a teacher.