Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [137]
“No jobs coming up, mate. I’ll try to keep your brother working, but you don’t have a kid so good luck to you.” He shook my hand, his larger and more callused. I thanked him for all I’d begun to learn and drove away, the sun still high above the telephone lines and rooftops and trees. I’d started another story, this one set in New Hampshire and told from the point of view of a teenage girl whose family was moving when she didn’t want to. She smoked a lot, often late at night among packed boxes in the dark living room, her family asleep upstairs. In the last writing session, she was drawing deeply on her Kool, its tip a bright ember she was thinking of putting to dry cardboard.
Rent was due and there was only a month left before I was to drive west for studies I was no longer pulled toward, so I left my apartment in Lynn and moved in with Pop, Peggy, Cadence, and Nicole. He gave me the spare room on the first floor, the same one he and I had broken into when he lived here with his second wife, Lorraine leaning against the doorframe in her nightgown, smoking, waiting for us. Except for those two weeks between women when he’d stayed with us on Columbia Park and slept in my room, I hadn’t lived in the same space with him since I was a boy in the woods of New Hampshire. It was strange to share a house with him; I felt like some hovering ghost of the boy I had been.
Soon enough I owned a black vest and bow tie, a white shirt and black nylon pants and black shoes, all of which I’d bought in pieces in strip malls. I’d gotten a bartending job working for a small catering company who did private parties for people wealthy enough to cater parties. They were in Boston in neighborhoods where surgeons and bankers and corporate executives lived. Except for some of the bigger houses in Bradford, I had never even seen homes this big and comfortable. They were on wide quiet streets, the unbroken sidewalks shaded by maples and oaks, and many of the houses were behind tall walls of stone and thick green hedges ten feet high. Some had security gates, and my boss—a funny and warm man going bald at thirty-five who referred to himself as a bisexual Jew—would get out of the van and announce us into an intercom. A metal gate would slide open and we’d be directed to a service area, the place where I learned the cleaning people parked, the cook or nanny, the pool men, the gardener, and any tradesmen who’d come to work on the house.
It was a dry August and many of the parties were outside under cream-colored tents. We’d carry our bins of food and bags of ice and kegs of beer and cases of wine and liquor out to lawns that usually held a clay tennis court, a pool and pool house, a lush rose garden alongside hedges like those hiding the walls from the street. There would be tables set up under white linens, votive candles floating in glass bowls of water. I’d set up my bar in a corner of the tent or up on a veranda, and while I cut limes into wedges, as I emptied jars of olives and pearl onions and maraschino cherries into their respective dishes, as I cored lemons and sliced the skins into twists, I took in how the owners were usually polite enough but spoke to us all in the clipped and patronizing tones reserved for children or the mentally impaired. It was the same tone I would hear from owners on construction sites, the surprise the widow had shown when Jeb first saw her piano and mentioned he was a classical guitarist. She smiled and looked him up and down, his carpenter’s apron and framing hammer hanging against paint-splattered jeans with the hole in one knee, his scuffed work boots, the two days of whiskers on his cheeks and chin. She clearly did not believe him, something which