Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [29]
One night, when we were still living at the doctor’s house, I heard Mom on the phone trying to convince Pop that he should start taking out each of us one at a time, that he was never going to know us as individual people if he didn’t.
I don’t know if I cared then about that or not, but a cool sweat broke out on my forehead just thinking about being alone with Pop. I’d never been alone with him. What would I say? What would we talk about? What would we do?
When Mom got off the phone, she said, “I can’t believe it. Your father says he’ll be too shy with each of you. He’s scared of his own kids!”
This made me feel better and worse, but every Wednesday night he’d drive up to the house and take one of us back to his apartment across the river. It was on the third floor of an old brick building covered with ivy. Across the street was the Bradford Green, a lawn and trees and a gazebo, and you could see it from his bedroom where his bed was always made and there were shelves of books and his black wooden desk I remembered from when he used to live with us, its surface clean and organized, notebooks stacked neatly beside his typewriter beside his humidor and pipe stand, six or eight of them each with a white pipe cleaner sticking out of the mouthpiece.
In his small kitchen we’d cook something, pasta and a quick tomato sauce and garlic bread we warmed in the oven. Maybe a bacon and cheese omelet. This was something I looked forward to the most; it seemed I was hungry all the time. At home across the river, unless Bruce had given our mother a new check, something he was able to do less and less now, there just wasn’t much food in the house. Breakfast was usually a Coke from Pleasant Spa bought with change we’d found in our mother’s purse or under the cushions of our wicker couch. When other kids filed into the cafeteria, we didn’t have the money so drifted out back where the pot heads stood on the grates, too cool to sit with the others, passing a pipe around, a bag of potato chips, too.
Suzanne was selling dope. One afternoon I stuck my head in her bedroom doorway, and she was sitting on her mattress with Glenn P. rolling dozens of joints from a garbage bag full of Mexican gold. Edgar Winter was playing on her record player. Kids at school walked up to her with a hungry look in their eyes, and my sister had cash and after school she’d sometimes buy us subs, potato chips and Cokes and candy bars, our first real meal of the day. When Mom got home from work at close to eight o’clock, she’d open a can of Spaghettios or stew for us and heat it up on the stove. Sometimes she’d fry us Spam, or make that Frito Pie, too tired to do much else, too broke to buy much else. And Bruce didn’t cook. He’d drink bourbon in the kitchen with her and talk about the new job he had in Boston doing the same thing she was, getting slumlords to rid their buildings of lead paint. She’d nod her head, moving quickly in her work clothes, a far-off look in her eyes, as if she was trying to put back together how her life had taken her here to this: this milltown, this canned food she never would have used when she was first married, these four hungry, depressed teenagers, this hovering man who wasn’t their father.
Those Wednesday nights at Pop’s apartment waiting to eat, he probably asked me questions about my life—school, homework, friends—but what I remember is feeling like a liar and a fake. I’d be in a T-shirt and jeans