Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [25]
BECAUSE OUR mother worked in Boston, she had to leave for her job before we got out of bed. Most mornings, only Nicole would be on time and walk herself to school a half mile north. Jeb, Suzanne, and I would sleep till we woke two or three hours later than we should have to catch the bus. Some days we’d stay home. Other days we’d go to school, which meant a four-mile walk through town across Main Street down into the avenues past the Dobermans or German shepherds chained in their dirt yards. In some were babies’ toys scattered among the dog shit, the dogs barking at me behind chain-link fences. I’m sure Suzanne and I walked together many days, but I remember more clearly doing it alone, cutting across Cedar down Sixth Avenue past the auto parts store and junkyard, the battered shells of cars sitting in the weeds, many of the windshields collapsed into the front seats, the rims rusted, the lug bolts like eyes staring out at me.
But I felt watched by no one. Those weekday mornings we slept late and didn’t go to school, our report cards showed as sixty to eighty absences a year, dozens and dozens of marks for tardiness. No adult at school really seemed to notice much. There’d be an occasional letter sent home to our mother, but the counselor or vice principal or whoever it was always wanted to meet during a weekday. How could she do that? She had to work.
I’d make my way through town, past the boarded-up shops on Winter Street, the gas station and used car lot, the pizza shop and Dunkin’ Donuts where on summer nights old men would sit in lawn chairs in the parking lot, smoking and talking and spitting.
At Railroad Square, I’d walk under the black iron trestle covered with hot-paint graffiti: Joey and Nina 4-ever, Tommy loves Denise!, USMC Cpl. Steve L. RIP, U suck! I’d walk over broken glass and cigarette butts in my Dingo boots and leather jacket, my hair tied back. Maybe I’d thought if I looked like the toughest kids at the high school, they’d leave me alone and I wouldn’t have to fight for just glancing at them a second too long. After a while it worked; because I looked like them, they didn’t see me anymore. But the cops did. Especially those late weekday mornings walking through town when I should’ve been in algebra class, world history, gym; I’d pass more barrooms, a lock shop, St. Joe’s Catholic Church, a cruiser pulling up and a cop yelling out at me, “Why ain’t you in school?”
“I had a doctor’s appointment.”
“Where’s your parents?”
“Working.”
“How’d you get to the doctor?”
“Walked.”
“Well, keep walkin’.” And he’d drive off in his police car, his antennas swaying back and forth like a scolding finger.
It seemed that each day I got up just wanting to get through it. I didn’t know if my brother and sisters felt the same way, but my mother seemed to; most weeknights, Bruce quietly drunk, sipping a bourbon and reading in the front room, she’d be stretched out on the floor in front of the TV asleep in her work clothes by eight o’clock, my brother and sisters and me free to do whatever we wanted, do homework or not do homework, fight or ignore each other, ignore the five days of dishes stacked in the kitchen sink and on the counters; ignore the overflowing garbage in the trash bucket or the mountain of bags in the garage because none of us carried any out to the curb on garbage night; ignore the dirty clothes hanging out of the full hampers in both bathrooms; ignore the fact that we each did our own laundry when we needed to, one at a time, going down into the basement