![]() He made fun of my mother, called her the mouse mother because she worked in a library. Brody’s mother stayed home, so there was no sneaking off to his place. His father drove a truck for the New York Post that was all I knew. “Cutting school,” she said, “is the gateway to a lot of things I hate to have to think about.” In fact, she was right about that.īrody hardly ever talked about his family. ![]() From the get-go, my mother had said Brody was too old for me, and, when she found out I was cutting school (I did it too many times), she banned him from our apartment and tried to get me to promise never to see him, which wasn’t even the sort of thing she did. I had slept with two other boys, a few times each, so I knew something but not that much the male anatomy was still an unfolding mystery to me. Then he decided we should start cutting school, and I sneaked him back to the apartment while my mother was at work. What delights we hid in that back room! I thought of them whenever I wasn’t with him. We kept our clothes on, though we did a lot of reaching around and under them. For weeks after, the shop was our love shack. I was so thrilled when I went to get more boxes from the back and he found me behind the storage shelves. Like it’s news each time.” “Totally,” I said. Brody said, “People keep discovering that over and over. How pleased we were to be indifferent together. Was I bragging about how heartless I was? Probably, and it drew Brody’s interest. This was a leading question-I didn’t care all that much myself. ![]() “Do you care about the hostages in Iran?” I asked him. We had the long weekend shifts, busy in the morning and dull in the late afternoon. Ronald, the owner, was never there and told me to do whatever Brody said. We both worked at a doughnut shop on West Eighth Street. I was much too abstract in the way that I viewed him. I should have paid more attention to Brody, the boy in question. But what I held on to was the lasting certainty that I was going to have to look out for myself. My mother said the man probably had reasons we couldn’t know. But what I took from that night most of all was the shock at the man walking out on his unconscious friend, the silent story of it. I had broken and splintered my tibia in a fairly major way. I left there with a huge plaster cast on my leg, and I looked forward to having all my friends sign it. The nurse got an orderly to move him onto a gurney, and she was wheeling him away from us before we knew what was happening. He was alive, but he was a dying monster. The man made a choking, burbling sound, desperate and liquid. “Hey, Edward,” I said, and I shook his shoulder, in a rough way, as if I were just a kid making fun of him. But if he died because of us, what then? I was sure we’d never forget, though I think now that people do forget such things. Had I ever seen my mother cheat like this? I understood that she was cheating for my sake. Where was he going? He was gone! When I told my mother, she said, “Oh, he’ll come back.” And then he edged out of the row and along an aisle and headed through a hallway. He smoothed his friend’s hair down, he patted his head. Meanwhile, the guy next to us had got to his feet and was settling his limp (maybe drugged-out) friend into the molded plastic chair, getting him positioned so he didn’t fall to the floor. I told my mother this, and she went up to the desk one more time. My leg was on fire now, even when I didn’t move it. I had more nerve than she did and was better at persuading people. And if she’d been the one to fall I would’ve dragged her outside and talked a taxi into taking us. If no one else had been around, she would’ve phoned someone to help. My own friend Nini had yelled to high heaven to save me. They could’ve been brothers, but I thought they were friends. Would you bring someone dead to a hospital? Did people do that? The leaning man was wearing his sweater inside out, and he was sleeping. Ahead of us in the line of chairs was a man with a mustache, with his arm around a man who was slumped against his chest.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |