Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [57]
I knew in a fight on the street he would’ve beaten the shit out of me. But I’d been able to frustrate him, and standing there beside the coffee and doughnuts I tried to ignore the feeling I’d just achieved something by hurting my best friend.
6
ONE LATE FALL afternoon, I came home from the gym to the smell of cooking. The house was quiet, no day party going on, and in the kitchen Suzanne and Jeb were standing by the stove. There was the lick of blue flames under a black iron skillet, hot oil popping and spattering under the rising smoke. Suzanne glanced over at me. “We chopped these tortillas out of the freezer. They’re the only thing to eat in this whole fucking house.” Jeb sprinkled salt on one and handed it to me and I blew on it and ate it. Suzanne stood back from the stove and wiped her eyes, then pushed a fork into the skillet, the grease crackling, the smoke thicker now.
Jeb and I used to sit in Cleary’s kitchen, his mother passed out in the front room, and eat whatever he put on the table for us: cheese and crackers, Devil Dogs, peanut butter and jelly and bread we made sandwiches with, bags of potato chips and cans of Coke or Pepsi. Most of it was junk, and we knew it but didn’t care. Once he was in our kitchen and opened the fridge and saw its bright empty shelves and said, “What happened to the food?”
What could we say to that? Even when Pop had lived with us, there hadn’t been enough for snacks like Cleary had. And now there wasn’t enough for three meals a day either. It’s something we’d all gotten used to, that hollowness in the veins, the nagging feel there was always just a bit too much air behind your ribs.
But some times in the month were better than others. Right after Mom got paid she’d go to the grocery store, and while there was never food to eat between meals, there seemed to be enough for the meals themselves. These were still the ones she could make from a can or something frozen, something quick so we didn’t eat too late, but sometimes Bruce would have money to give her, too, and there might even be enough for a few days of school lunches. We hadn’t sat around a table and eaten as a family since Pop had lived with us, and I no longer missed it, but our mother did. That fall when I spent so much time at Connolly’s Gym, she suggested we start having breakfasts again, sit-down breakfasts together, and for a few weeks she got up every weekday morning an hour earlier to pull that off.
I’d be in the attic, lying in my bed in the early morning darkness, my breath clouding in front of me. I’d hear the door open at the bottom of the dusty stairwell and my mother’s cheerful voice calling me down. Eventually the five of us would be sitting at the dining room table we rarely used, the blue light of early morning seeping through the windows: Jeb with his wild hair and downy whiskers; Nicole in the brown sweater she wore to hide the brace she endured for her scoliosis; Suzanne in her hip-hugger jeans and a T-shirt, black eyeliner around both eyes like bruises. Mom would be dressed in a blouse and scarf, earrings and makeup, dressed for this job doing good in Boston when it had never paid her enough to do the good she wanted for us. But it seemed she was forever too tired to look for something else. And what else could she do anyway? She was only qualified for social work. She could work two jobs like Rosie’s mother, but then she’d never be home at all. Years later I would think about my father more, think about those three months off every year, his summer mornings writing and running, most every afternoon lying under the sun at the beach. But it seemed he’d chosen that job for those three months. He was as poor as we were, a condition he could endure for those ninety days it gave him back to write longer every morning than he did all year.
For a few weeks that fall, Mom served us steaming bowls of oatmeal or Cream of Wheat with cinnamon