Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [60]
I’d seen him before, too. I’d seen him in church, and I’d seen him standing in the doorway of the framing shop he owned in Bradford Square. Pop had probably met him at Ronnie D’s bar, the place he went to drink after all his work was done. And even this drunk and sick, it was clear how much he respected Pop. He kept glancing over at him with reverence and affection and gratitude. It’s how so many people treated our father, as if he was not like other men, as if there was something about him that made them somehow more themselves when they were around him.
Part of it seemed to be the stories he wrote; people put him in a higher place after having read them. But Pop had always been deeply curious about people too, from the man pumping gas into his car, to a waitress serving us on a Sunday, to the priest standing at the church door in his robes, Pop always lingered and asked people questions about their work, their days and nights, questions nobody else ever seemed to ask.
This drew people to him, people like this dying man Lou, whose hand was now on my knee under the table.
“Yurall sech pretty girlz. So pretty.”
My face was hot iron. Pop was talking loudly over the jazz about the cornbread stuffing, how it was one of the only things he missed about Louisiana. Suzanne was talking, too, her lips moving and her eyes pointed at Pop. Mom was laughing, and Nicole was chewing, Jeb too, and now Lou’s hand moved farther up my leg and I turned to him to tell him I’m no girl, and his lips pressed against mine, his whiskers poking my skin, his tongue pushing into my mouth. It was like getting stabbed. I jerked back, Pop’s voice louder than ever now, “Uh-oh, uh-oh,” he said. And I was up and moving past my mother out the back door to the porch, the air a cold slap I wanted more of. I spit over the railing. I wiped my mouth and spit again.
Pretty girls. How could he think, even shit-faced, that I was a girl? My hair was cut to my shoulders now, still long but not even long enough to tie back, and I had changed. I had a chest and shoulders. I had a flaring upper back. I had learned how to throw punches. How could he even think that? And in front of everyone, too. In front of my father, who was now out on the porch with me, nearly yelling, “Andre, he doesn’t want to suck your cock. Lou doesn’t want your cock, son, he wants your health.” Pop slapped my chest with the back of his hand. “He wants your youth and your muscles and all those years ahead of you. He’s dying, son, he’s fucking dying. He’s got fucking leukemia and his wife kicked him out on Thanksgiving Day. You hear me?”
My father was clearly as drunk as his friend, and he kept slapping my chest, and I was crying for the first time in years, my father’s reddened face, his trimmed beard and thinning brown hair getting all blurry. Did he think I was building muscles for my health? And now he wanted me to go back in and sit down next to his friend.
I wiped my eyes and followed my father back inside. There was candlelight and Brubeck’s piano, there were the smells of hot wax and this holiday feast, but the table wasn’t as loud and raucous as it had been earlier, and Lou was staring at his plate and seemed to be carrying on a conversation with himself. I sat down beside him. I did not look at my family. I lifted my fork, and I would use it if I had to, I would; I’d stick it into his dying face, for it was clear once again