The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter Eleven - This is fiction (I love my sisters)
After four filthy, broiling, twelve-hour days, my work on the third floor had brought me closer to heaven than any of my dealings with Rose had so far. I’d even dragged the kids up there for a few hours to get their noses dirty, one morning having them hold the new windows in place for me (although a three-inch wood screw did most of the work) as I shimmed and positioned each of them and built their casings; another morning, I had them propping up T-braces under the ceiling drywall while I screwed in full-length sheets. Both jobs took more presence than muscle. Mostly, they wandered the floor, planning which wall they’d place the new TV and Xbox against and where the sofa would go in conjunction with said entertainment unit.
For a first stage, the work itself had proceeded well enough — although no matter how many times I put my square to the windows, and no matter how smoothly they opened and closed, they just didn’t look right. Double-checking with the level and the measuring tape only deepened the mystery.
The same could be said of the wall seams. Sure, I’d worked my way up in trowel size when I covered the tape with drywall compound, feathering out, sanding, following all the proper techniques. But…
But fuck it. The loft looked good: bright, spacious, well on its way to being a finished room. Even the outlets were brought up to grade, courtesy of a morning with an electrician while the wall studs still showed.
The view out was much better now, too; no longer peering through a smudged peephole, I could easily observe the lack of activity over at Wendell’s house. Christ! The professional writer ducking the wannabe who’d given him a script to read. Now there’s a novel response. What the hell was I thinking? It seemed like he’d even kept Apricot indoors the past few days, removing any extraneous excuse for me to hover around his front yard.
Of course, someone anxious to discuss the written word still kept an eye out for me. Even as I looked to her porch, Rose raised her head, caught me in her sights, then waved and smiled, displaying a kind of semi-omnipresent awareness in her own right — a trickle-down effect, perhaps. I was her little falling sparrow.
Maddy stood beside me, enjoying her improved view of the neighborhood. She waved back at Rose and said, “Isn’t she cute? She almost looks like a tiny porcelain doll way down there in her chair.”
From the lengthy list of adjectives that had marched through my mind while I’d formed my opinion of her, cute was not one of them. But I had come to admire her in certain ways.
“Yeah, she’s…” I said, pausing and groping for one of them. But Maddy was on to her next thought before I could finish my sentence.
Predisposed to optimism, Maddy seemed to be reverting back to her normal, happy self more and more this past little while. Perhaps just the act of unloading on me had been cathartic enough to start bringing about this change, or maybe she sensed that I’d been shocked straight and had already started noticing real change in me. Admittedly, I hadn’t read much of the Bible (just those two meager pages on the front porch, in fact), but Rose and I would get to that soon enough; and I did almost get into that punch-up at the grocery store (in my defense, with a friggin’ Nazi), but Maddy knew nothing of that. What she had seen was my new willingness to mix, my willingness to sacrifice. I’d spent a lot of hours on my journal, dragging myself into the den, even if only to think, after those long, hot days of renovating. I’d even come to enjoy the process in a weird way (not hair-shirt weird, more finally-working-a-poppy-seed-from-between-back-teeth weird, as if I were relieving unnatural pressure).
But I had to admit . . . I was tired.
Maddy knew this, too, of course, what with the heat, the back-breaking hours I’d spent up here, and the obvious fact that I didn’t have nearly the same stamina I’d had even half a month ago.
“Y’know,” she said. “This would probably be the perfect time to take your trip with the kids. You’ve put in a lot of hard work, school starts again in just two weeks, and getting away from the city for a while might invigorate you, help clear your mind for whatever comes next.”
“I was leaning that way myself,” I said. “But how would we work it?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll need the car.” She paused for a beat, then: “Maybe you guys should rent a minivan, one with a DVD player and a good sound system. Do it up right … like a vacation.”
I liked the idea immediately. No debating the disparate qualities of Britney and 50 Cent and Bowie. They could plug in at the back and I could crank it up in the front for the four-hour cruise each way. We could do all the growing closer stuff out on the town and in the hotel room.
“Sounds perfect,” I said.
“Of course, you’ll have to phone Anita or Jenny and let them know you’re coming.”
That idea I disliked faster than immediately: I held retroactive dislike for it. I hadn’t even thought about seeing either one of them, assuming, instead, that the whole purpose of the trip was as advertised: getting to know my kids, and them me, at this demanding time in our lives.
“Why would I do that?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t you?” Maddy countered. “You can’t just tour your hometown with your children and not visit relatives — especially relatives as close as sisters.”
She meant genetically, of course. But age and gender had always kept us worlds apart, even when under the same roof. To this day, right up to and including the poking of my rat’s nest of memories with a pen, few childhood recollections of them popped into view. And when they did, I sensed no feelings of love or hate; what I felt was ambivalence.
One of the few incidents involving them that I could recall vividly took place when I was ten, and once again weather supplied a vivid backdrop, a marker, as it were, to those unfolding events.
Every day of that particular winter seemed to unfold in the same bizarre manner, with the mornings grey, brooding, and blustery. You could almost sense an existential angst radiating from us kids as, bowed and bundled, we shuffled our way to school with more than the onus of learning throwing up resistance: What was it all about, anyway?
Three inches of ice and slush in their various states always covered the sidewalks, pulling at our galoshes, mysteriously removing all traction in hidden spots. But, in almost schizophrenic fashion (or due to a simple weather system I wasn’t aware of), the second half of these days always transformed into crisp, star-filled nights. By January, under a constant parade of municipal plows, snowbanks piled higher than my head lined the streets, giving the city a Nome-like frontier feel of man against the naked elements.
Back in those days (when tax-funded schools could spend some money), First Avenue Public School would assemble two-foot-high rink boards in the boys’ yard, creating a sheet of ice for gym-class use and after-school house league hockey play. After supper, I’d slip back down there and skitter across it like a winter water bug, honing my basic skills, firing slap shots, backhands, and wrist shots into the Alps-like array of snowbanks surrounding the boards. Of course, I spent as much time digging that elusive black disk out of the snow with the blade of my stick as practicing, but it was all part of the routine.
The year was 1968, I’m sure, because that was the second season of Star Trek, moved from its original time slot to Friday nights at 8:30, and I made sure to rush home at that time every week to see what futuristic mess Kirk and company would get themselves into. And in a traditional touch belying the ethos of that final frontier, my mother would always have a cup of steaming cocoa, complete with Kraft miniature marshmallows, waiting for me.
By mid-January, a -20 degree cold front had joined forces with the snow, laying the city under siege; only the foolhardy and the young ventured outside without constructive purpose, and I spent the better part of my weekends at the rink, playing day-long pickup games with Dougie and the regulars. Guys would come and go and come back again, stepping out for lunch or piano practice (well, okay; only Stuart Jennings took piano), rejoining games that might end with a final score of ninety-three to eighty-six; every half-hour or hour, depending on the severity of the day, we’d pluck hand plows from the phalanx of scrapers sticking from a side snowbank and spend a few minutes clearing the ice.
I almost lived at the rink that winter, but I did have to go home on occasion; and one Saturday, after removing my coat and boots at the foot of our first-floor stairs and enduring the excruciating five-minute ritual of digit-defrost in front of a warm-air vent, I lugged my skates, stick, and hockey gloves to the basement. But I’d heard more than the purr of warm air drifting up through the vent as I thawed out, so I knew a crowd waited below.
And there they sat: Anita, Jenny, and their dreamy high school senior friend, Anne Penny. My, how her braces sparkled, like a string of Christmas lights twinkling beneath her petite, up-turned nose. A band of freckles spanned the bridge of that adorable button (if buttons can have bridges and freckles can span them), and a waifish, no, make that Twiggy-esque, blonde hairdo crowned the whole package. How downright goofy Anne Penny actually looked, or how she’d match up against today’s standard of beauty, I don’t know, but back then she could easily have go-go danced on Saturday Date while Question Mark and the Mysterians belted out “96 Tears” and Dick Maloney spun the platter.”
“Hi, Jimmy,” she said, striking me momentarily dumb. But I shook it off fast.
“Hi, Annie.”
I dropped my hockey gear in its earmarked corner and turned to look at the girls. They sat at the ping-pong table, which, in its various fold-up and -down forms substituted for a card table, racecar track table, and junior chemistry set table. A high-watt bulb screwed into a conical metallic shade attached to the exposed rafters above, casting white light over the play area. The surrounding basement was simple and clean: white paint covered the brick walls and grey paint covered the concrete floor. A two-hundred-gallon oil tank hugged the west wall, back near the cold cellar. Sheer practicality. The seventies, with its wood paneling, indoor/outdoor carpeting, and horseshoe bars, lay a few years in the future.
The table that afternoon was set up for cards, and, fittingly enough, the girls were in the middle of a game of hearts.
For a ten-year-old, I played well enough to hold my own, but, obviously, more than my competitive urge drew me to the game. I watched for a moment, working up my nerve. Finally, I asked, “Can I play, too?”
“Sorry, Jimmy. We’re right in the middle of a game,” Anita said.
She turned back to the girls, but we all knew you just had to add their scores and divide by three. I could enter the game with that sum as my score.
On they played, slapping down their cards; in that spacious brick and concrete room, each strike of the table echoed like a slap in the face. I remember only one other sound; the song “Happy Together” by the Turtles, leaked from the rickety transistor radio sitting on the far corner of the table.
Finally, I turned and left, my mind blotting out all sounds but the rhythmic fall of cards as I took the stairs and passed through the doorway to the first floor.
Then, the explosion of laughter.
Had they been waiting, wrinkling their smooth teenaged brows and making cutesy-sour faces (the kind that eventually leave their mark) at each other until they could contain themselves no longer? Were they laughing at something else entirely? I don’t know, but I felt as if a knife had been rammed between my shoulder blades.
Now, thirty-five years later, stating how long I lay sobbing in my bed would be pure speculation; what seemed like an hour may have been minutes. But I do recall this: in the midst of my end-of-the-world, face-in-pillow weeping, as the girls’ muffled and indiscernible voices drifted out of the warm-air vent in my third-floor bedroom, I heard the doorbell ring; the house-wide resonance of basement stairs being ascended two at a time followed. A moment later, with the sounds easier to distinguish from the front hall air vent than from the basement ductwork, I heard the door open and Jennifer’s woman/girl squeal.
“Oooh, Tim! Hi.”
“Hey, Jenny. Whatcha doin?”
In our vestibule stood Tim Wilson, one of the Wilson boys from down the street, undoubtedly decked out in his brown desert boots, beige stovepipe slacks, madras shirt, and Lisgar Collegiate windbreaker — cool, despite the fact that he had to be freezing his nuts off. Like Anne Penny, within the myth of the middle- to upper-middle-class wasp nation, he was considered a genetically superior model, sort of Kennedy-esque (although his equally close and equally touted Chiclet-toothed resemblance to Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits fame undoubtedly told the real story).
“We’re playing cards,” Jenny said. “C’mon downstairs and we’ll cut you in.”
C’mon downstairs and we’ll cut you in.
Of course, I’d tasted my sisters’ exclusion before that moment, and in this part of my journey, in my search to locate the seeds of my cynicism, you’d think I’d consider those events a contributing factor in my current dilemma.
But I don’t. If I’d found myself in the same situations they were in, with age difference and gender difference and raging hormones as determining factors, I’d have behaved identically. It’s how people work. It’s also why I had no urge to visit them. As I’d said, we truly lived worlds apart.
“So,” Maddy said, touching my shoulder now. “Are you going to phone them, or am I?”
“Jesus, Maddy. Why do we have to bother? Neither one of them has called here yet, but you can bet they know what’s happened to me. Everyone seems to know.”
“I’m sure they’re worried about you. They’re probably waiting for you to contact them.”
Not wanting to inflame an already tenuous situation, I didn’t respond with, Yeah, right. So they can have a good laugh at my expense. That would have been my ten-year-old response. Instead I sighed and said, “Fine, I’ll phone. Just to get together for one dinner, though. This trip’s supposed to be about the kids and me.”
“Atta boy,” she said, turning, snuggling against me, and planting a big, yielding kiss on my lips. She pulled her face away from mine and looked into my eyes. “It’s obvious that you’re growing even as we speak.”
“Well, there’s only one way to take care of that,” I said. Reaching around, I squeezed her bum and snuggled back.
But glancing over her shoulder, I could see Rose down below, leaning out from her chair, clutching her Bible, and peering up at me through our big new window even as I squeezed.
All right, then. There were two ways to take care of that.
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