Andrew – Seneca, June 1982
Heading up the dirt road past Old Man Beaman’s, tomato juice up to his elbows, Andrew rounds a bend and takes in the sight of home. Not much to look at. Just an old hardscrabble farmhouse, added onto piecemeal and patchwork since his father inherited it from his Great-Uncle Si and Great-Aunt Adalene not long before Andrew was born. They were the relatives who raised Daddy after his parents and sister died in a car wreck, and the family story goes that the old couple was glad to take him in since they could have no children of their own. Even before the accident, Uncle Si and Aunt Adalene’s door had always been wide open to Andrew’s father, not only to him but to all the nieces and nephews who sometimes filled their extra beds when their mothers and fathers ran into trouble. But Daddy was not only the oldest of all his many cousins, he was the one who had stayed with them the longest. So he was the one Aunt Adalene left the place to when she followed her husband to the grave less than a year after Andrew’s parents got married. Andrew has lived in this house since he was born, and he sometimes wonders. if his great-uncle would spin in his grave if he could see it now, its steps loose and its columns leaning, its porch roof buckled and about ready to fall. Daddy tries. New pea-green aluminum siding stretches halfway around the house, stuff left over from a job Daddy helped his buddy Lew with. But the project’s been put on hold until Daddy gets the money to buy more that matches.
Andrew loves and hates this place. He walks up their drive, past the cinderblock garage Daddy built for his truck but only keeps boxes and tools in now. He passes the fancy satellite dish his father won off a friend in a poker game last Christmas. In the yard, Buck rests in a circle of dirt worn beneath the maple tree there, and when he spots Andrew he rises dutifully, dragging his chain through the messes he’s made. Momma hates having a yard full of filth, so it’s Andrew’s job to scoop up Buck’s messes in old cereal boxes torn in half, then bury them in the old orchard or fling them into the creek along the road if the water is high enough to float the evidence away.
He passes close, and Buck jumps up to greet him, nearly strangling himself. Andrew scratches the dog’s ears, amazed at how easy it is to make Buck happy. The dog looks up into his face like he senses Andrew’s sadness, licking his lower lip in that nervous way he’s had ever since his tooth got broken. Back when he tried to steal a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Momma hit him with a rock.
Andrew feels sorry for the dog and releases the chain from his collar. Buck sniffs Andrew’s fingers, pokes his nose into the bag in the boy’s hand. Andrew shoos Buck away from the ruined shirt. When Buck tries to lick the thorn cuts along Andrew’s calves, Andrew throws a stick into the high grass along the edge of the woods. Buck runs after it, picks it up, shakes it in his mouth, then lets it fall. He
never quite got the hang of Go Fetch. Andrew’s pretty sure Ricky Pierce has a dog better than this, so when Buck decides to head up the mountain, Andrew’s not all that sorry to see him go.
Andrew makes his way up the porch instead. The old boards moan beneath his weight, and he wonders if what Momma says is true, that someone’s going to lose a leg out here real soon. He considers doing his chores, but thinks better of it. This is time alone and Andrew wants nothing to steal it from him. Inside, the house feels different with no one around. Andrew moves quietly through the downstairs rooms. He pretends he’s a thief as he steals a bag of potato chips from a kitchen cupboard. He takes them to the living room, where he stops to enjoy the uncommon quiet, nothing but the sound of his own blood pulsing in his ears. Standing amid the mismatched furniture and family clutter, he suddenly screams as loudly as he can. He falls down laughing in his father’s chair, glad to be alone, glad to be free.
Andrew flips on the TV, wheels it on its stand close to the recliner. A satellite station out of Pittsburgh is broadcasting Psycho—jittery Anthony Perkins in grainy black and white. Andrew stayed up late to see it once, watching with Allison while Momma was at Grandma’s and Daddy was passed out on the couch. Norman Bates is Andrew’s favorite crazy man. He draws Andrew in with the sadness of his life. Andrew watches him try to impress a blond lady with his taxidermy skills, leading her into a parlor full of birds he’s stuffed with sawdust. Norman’s uneven voice fills the weird little room inside the TV, fills the room Andrew sits in as well.
The blond lady nibbles at a sandwich crazy Norman has made for her. “And do you go out with friends?” she asks.
Norman sits with folded hands. “Well,” he stutters, “a, a boy’s best friend is his mother.”
Andrew starts to chuckle, but is stopped cold by the gravelly rumble of a car coming fast up the dirt road. He races the potato chips back to the kitchen and flings himself in his father’s chair again just as the car pulls into the drive.
“You know what I think?” says old Norman, his voice all aquiver. His words come slow. Outside, a car door slams. Hurry, Norman. “I think that...we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and, and claw, but only at the air, only at each other. And for all of it, we never budge an inch.”
The sound of Momma’s feet pounds up the back porch steps. The kitchen door swings open. “Andrew!” Momma hollers.
Andrew takes a few steps forward, stopping at the sight of Momma standing in the kitchen archway ahead. Her eyes burn bright as she draws on her cigarette. Andrew thinks of the new baby burning inside her.
“What is it, Momma?” Andrew’s voice is sturdy, trying to drown the TV voices that buzz behind him.
“You know what,” Momma says, setting a grocery bag on the counter. “How dare you sneak away from your grandmother’s house without telling anyone!”
“I told Allison.”
“She’s ten years old, for Chrissake!”
“Almost eleven,” says Allison, coming in the door behind Momma, arms full of more groceries. “Don’t you make me sew your mouth shut,” Momma warns her.
Allison slinks back outside.
Momma moves in close, her face all twitchy. Her eyes scour Andrew like a wad of steel wool; he knows she wants to spank him, but he is too big. And her own stomach is in the way now, too; there’s no room left to turn him across her knee. “You’d just love for some pervert to come along and snatch you up, wouldn’t you? Do you want me to get my picture in the paper for worst mother of the year? I don’t want you running off again. Ever. Understand?”
Andrew shrugs. “Whatever.”
Momma slaps him so hard Andrew’s teeth rattle. “Don’t you ‘whatever’ me. I was worried.”
Andrew’s face stings as Norman Bates’ voice floats up behind him. “It was just too great of a loss for her,” Norman confesses. “She had nothing left.”
“Except you.”
“A son is a poor substitute for a lover.”
“Good God,” says Momma, moving past Andrew to the living room.
“Why don’t you go away?” the blond woman continues.
With a quick jerk of her arm, she wheels the TV stand toward her. “What the hell are you watching now?”
“I couldn’t do that,” says Norman, looking up at Momma through the screen. “Who’d look after her? She’d be alone up there.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” says Momma.
“It’d be cold and damp like a grave. If you love someone, you don’t do that to them, even if you hate them.”
Momma flips off the TV off and rolls it in its stand back against the wall. She turns toward
Andrew. “Don’t rot your mind with such trash. Now go outside and clean up the dog shit in the yard. And I want that animal back on his chain before supper. But first take your pissy T-shirt to the basement and put it in the washer. By itself. Can you handle that?”
Andrew nods yes and unclenches his fists, heading off without getting to see the best part of Norman’s story, the part where the blond lady gets stabbed in the shower.
In the basement, the smell of dust and old mice droppings mixes with the dampness rising from the washer. Andrew covers his nose against the urine stink and shakes the Wonder Woman shirt out of its plastic bag into the hot water. He adds soap, a white blur of too much. Andrew stares at the water filling the tub and knows he will never wear the shirt again. He considers burying it in the old orchard alongside Buck’s messes, ridding himself of its memory forever. But Momma might search his dresser for it. He pours bleach into the washer, not caring if he ruins Lynda Carter.
Upstairs Andrew closes the basement door and steps into the small pantry by the kitchen. The water heater there chugs as the washer below kicks into cycle. On the wall above a shelf stocked with canned goods lies an air vent, and through it Andrew can hear the sound of Momma moving in her
bedroom, the squeak of bedsprings as she and the baby-to-be lie down to rest. Sometimes late at night when he sneaks downstairs to forage for snacks, he stops here and listens to the sounds that eddy in this spot. The flow of faucets, the rasp of the furnace, the hum of people upstairs breathing. The occasional sound of his mother crying. Sometimes the air’s push and pull through the vent plays tricks on his ears. Those rare nights Daddy comes home, Andrew has paused here wondering, not sure if the muffled grunts from above come from fighting or fucking.
June’s nearly over, but the bank calendar tacked to the kitchen wall still reads April, the page yellowed from where the sun strikes it each day. Andrew pulls the calendar down to change the date. In the margin all the months are laid out in miniature. Momma says the new baby will likely arrive just after school starts, that money will be tight--she won’t be able to do secretarial work for the School Board or get on the substitute teacher list like she wanted. Andrew wonders what the new baby’s birthday will be. Allison hopes for August, the same month as hers.
Andrew’s finger traces July 21st, his own birth date. He’ll be thirteen then, a teenager like Ricky. Andrew moves through the months and holidays in reverse, past the Fourth of July and Easter, past April Fool’s and St. Patrick’s, past Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve. In December he stops at his parents’ anniversary, two days before Christmas. Only seven months before his birth. That shouldn’t be.
Nine months’ incubation, Ricky’s voice taunts again.
Though Grandma Rose has told him that he and Momma had to stay in the hospital a few days after she delivered him through C-section, there’s never been any talk of Andrew being premature.
He finally knows the truth; it was his fault Momma and Daddy were forced together. How could he have not have realized this before?
On the bank calendar, his finger skims back two more months, to the likely date of his conception. Late October. Seneca’s annual Pumpkin Festival. That’s when Daddy’s seed must have taken root inside Momma. That’s how Andrew wormed his way into this world--at Halloween time, not the backseat treat his parents wanted but an unexpected trick that would last their lifetimes.
Andrew’s heart is still sick with this secret at suppertime when Momma cracks eggs in a skillet with the flick of her wrist. She’s decided that Daddy will have pancakes and fried eggs for dinner since he failed to come home last night so he could be here for breakfast. Andrew stayed up late last night but never did hear his truck, just heard Momma talking low into the phone as she called bar after bar in town. Now Momma wants to make a point, wants to rub Daddy’s nose in his mistakes the way she did to Buck back when he was a puppy in need of training. Wasted effort, thinks Andrew. As useless as his father’s excuse when he finally called back a while ago, saying he stayed at Lew’s house to rise early and spend the day helping pour a concrete patio for one of Lew’s clients. “More likely sleeping off a hangover,” Momma had muttered as she hung up the phone. Now it’s half an hour past the time Daddy had promised to arrive.
“You two hurry and finish eating,” Momma tells Andrew and Allison; she wants Daddy all to herself when he gets home. They need to talk.
They need to fight, thinks Andrew as he works hard on his pork and beans, on his hamburger patty, avoiding the Brussels sprouts not even Buck will eat.
Momma sets to cracking more eggs. Andrew watches her hold the white shell in the curve between her thumb and forefinger, the slight twist of her hand just before the yolk and clear liquid flop gently into her big black skillet, egg after egg. How many does she expect Daddy to eat?
Andrew moves his Brussels sprouts around with his fork, hoping they’ll disappear. When he tries to eat one, it reminds him of the way his Wonder Woman shirt smelled, and he spits it out with a gag. Across from him, Allison curls her lip in disgust.
Andrew watches Momma crack the last of her eggs against the rim of the skillet. “Shit,” she says softly as a punctured yolk oozes down the side of the pan. “Shit, shit, shit.” She takes a fork from a drawer by the sink. On tiptoes, she reaches for the highest cabinet. Her fingertips nudge a glass bowl toward her. It tips the ledge and starts to fall, but Momma catches it.
“Your father will just have to eat his eggs scrambled,” she says as she dumps the contents of her skillet into the bowl. It’s only one egg, Andrew wants to tell her. The rest still float intact like oversized eyes. But Momma plunges her fork in anyway, whisking the eggs into a blur of light yellow. She glances at the clock above the stove: a quarter till seven. “If he doesn’t get here soon, he’ll not only be eating them scrambled, he’ll be eating them burned.”
Andrew can’t help himself. “Why don’t you just wait and fry them when he gets here? They’re just eggs.”
“Okay, Julia Childs,” Momma says. “You can fix dinner tomorrow night. You can see what it’s like not to have him show up.” She reaches into the middle of the table to get the salt and pepper.
Momma shakes the salt over her bowl, but nothing comes out. “Damn,” she says. She takes the spare saltshaker from atop the refrigerator, but it’s empty, too. “Why can’t you kids ever refill anything?” She searches through her spice cabinet for the shakers there. When she holds the glass shakers up to the
light, she twists her lips, not satisfied with the amounts in those either. She finds a couple more pairs in a drawer by the sink, then lines them all on the counter in a row. No two pairs are alike. Some are glass, some plastic, the others ceramic figurines--a pair of pigs wearing silly clothes, a bride and groom. Momma scoots the peppers to one side, the salts to another, like the separate boys and girls lines they used to divide Andrew’s class in at school. She hunts through the cabinet for her box of salt, her can of pepper. She finds the pepper tin and fills five shakers to the top, then begins working on the salt. Allison clicks her heels under the table, watching Momma, watching the salt fill the bride’s clear glass gown with pure white. Andrew can tell Allison wants to play with them. But just then Momma snaps her head around like she can read Allison’s intentions too, and the two kids jump at the sight of her wild eyes.
“What?” she wants to know. “What?”
“Nothing,” says Allison. She stares down at her plate, pops a Brussels sprout in her mouth as penance for looking.
“Hurry up and finish so I can clear the table,” Momma growls. She screws the head on the bride and groom, then slides them out of line. They’re special--wedding presents from Great-Aunt Inez. Maybe tonight she’ll use them with Daddy.
Andrew watches Allison sneak sidelong glances at the miniature couple. She pushes her new glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Can I have the salt please?” she asks politely.