Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [8]
My father, thirty-two years old then, was earning seven thousand dollars a year teaching. He had a brown beard he kept trimmed, and he ran five miles a day, a ritual he had begun in the Marine Corps a few years earlier. My mother and father rarely had money to go out to a restaurant, but they still hosted a lot of parties at our house, usually on Friday or Saturday nights, sometimes both; my mother would set out saltine crackers and dip, sliced cheese and cucumbers and carrots; they’d open a jug of wine and a bucket of ice and wait for their friends to bring the rest: more wine, beer, bottles of gin and bourbon. Most of their friends came from the college where Pop taught: there was an art professor, a big man who wore black and had a clean-shaven handsome face and laughed loudly and looked to me like a movie actor; there were bearded poets and bald painters and women who taught pottery or literature or dance. There were students, too, mainly women, all of them beautiful, as I recall, with long shiny hair and straight white teeth, and they dressed in sleeveless sweaters or turtlenecks and didn’t wear bras, their bell-bottoms hugging their thighs and flaring out widely over their suede boots.
The house would be filled with talk and laughter, jazz playing on the record player—a lot of Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and Buddy Rich. From my bed upstairs I could smell pot and cigarette smoke. I could hear music and the animated voices of my mother and father and their loud, intriguing friends. Sometimes there’d be yelling, and there’d be words like Saigon, Viet Cong, and motherfucking Nixon.
One weeknight on the news, there was a story about Marines killed in battle. I was lying on the floor under the coffee table as the camera panned over the bodies of soldiers lying on the ground, most of them on their stomachs, their arms splayed out beside them. Pop sat straight on the couch. His hands were on his knees, and his eyes were shining. “Pat, those are boys. Oh, goddamnit, those are eighteen-year-old boys.”
Later, sleeping in the bed beside my brother’s, there was a weight on my chest and I woke to my father holding me, crying into the pillow beside my ear. “My son, my son, oh, my son.” He smelled like bourbon and sweat. It was hard to breathe. I couldn’t pull my arms free of the blankets to hug Pop back. Then he was off me, crying over Jeb on his bed, and there was my mother’s whisper from the doorway, her shadowed silhouette. Her arm reached for our father, and he stood and looked down at us both a long while, then he was gone. The house was quiet, my room dark and still. I lay awake and thought of all the good men on TV who’d been shot in the head. I saw again the dead soldiers lying on the ground, and until Pop had cried over us, I hadn’t thought much about Jeb and me having to go and fight, too. But in only nine years I’d be as old as the dead, and it’d be my turn, wouldn’t it?
BUT SOLDIERS have to be brave, and I was not; I was a new kid in school again, something I would be over and over for many years, trying to find a solitary desk away from the others, dreading recess because everybody knew everyone else and threw balls back and forth and chased after each other grabbing and laughing, and I just didn’t have the courage to jump in. Then some kid would see me looking and yell, “What’re you lookin’ at? You got a problem?”
Sometimes I’d get shoved and kicked and pushed to the ground. I was still trying to figure out what I’d done to make them mad, I had not yet learned that cruelty was cruelty and you don’t ask why, just hit first and hit hard.
There was more fighting at home. My parents must’ve tried to keep it from us because it seemed to happen only late at night, both of them screaming at each other, swearing, sometimes throwing things—pots or pans, a plate or glass or ashtray, anything close by. When they fought, their Southern accents were easier to hear, especially my mother’s, “Goddamn you, you sonofabitch.” Pop’s voice would get chest-deep and he