03 -His mom hates me
Dave’s mom scares me nearly as much as my uncles do, red
hair, green eyes, nearly as tall as Dave, wearing paints and blouses to work
each day, and an old house coat at home when she watches TV, her thick glasses
bloating her eyes, so she looks like a fish.
She likes and hates me alternately, depending on her mood,
and how much trouble me and Dave get into on a particular day, she blaming me
for steering Dave the wrong way, when I think she’s scare I might get him to
stand up for himself, even when it comes to dealing with her.
She lords over her kids as if they were born slaves, making
them do everything a parent is supposed to do, but she won’t, always
preoccupied with other more important things, though just what these things
are, I haven’t a clue, and neither does Dave, but he listens to her, telling me
to shut up when I beg him not to.
She always talks about her friends, people she works with,
even distant relations (though these she often blames for her condition,
especially those on Dave’s father’s side, who she says are complete bums), but
is quick to pack the family into her station wagon every holiday on rumor of a
free meal or gifts.
Dave says she loves to work, by which he really means, she
hates coming home to find a house full of kids she regrets having, and would
have done things differently, married that other boy she knew in high school,
if she had it to do all over again, coming home to fall into her stuff armed
chair, accepting the meal Dave or Dennis or Debby cooks as an offering before
drifting off into the litany of TV shows she has marked off on the TV guide
each week.
Her bedroom dresser overflows with bottles and jars,
perfumes and creams, to make her smell acceptable and to smooth over the
wrinkles having four children and a disabled husband brought her. She
constantly smears tanning lotions on, desperate for a tan her fair skin won’t
let her get; she only burns, face and shoulders blistering after each visit to
the beach.
Dave’s dad spends more time in the hospital than out; a
grumpy, dark man, who grumbles and snorts, drinking beer when he can’t get
whiskey, and smoking filterless cigarettes that make his teeth and fingers
brown, shouting for someone to get him something generally another six pack or
pack of cigarettes from the liquor store next door, who gives him credit his
wife doesn’t know anything about until after she’s dragged him back to the
hospital and has to pay.
He reminds me a lot of my uncles, and yet, he doesn’t,
wearing a blue work shirt and pants, and black work boots when he’s out, and
wife-beater t-shirt with shorts around the house. He always looks a little
dirty, a tinge that won’t wash off even when she showers.
Three of the four kids take after Dave’s mother, all but one
have reddish hair and fair skin, blue or green eyes, tending to be taller than
they ought to be with Dave, tallest of all, six feet by age 10, giving her hope
he might exceed at basketball, which he hasn’t, topping out at a disappointing
six foot six by age 16 after which he grew sideways, giving her hope he might
become a football star, by which time, he quit school entire, leaving her to
hope Dave’s younger brother Dennis, might succeed where Dave failed, a thin and
eventually a taller boy, too, Dennis excels in running, briefly joining the
cross-country track team in junior high, only to truly exceed in his ability to
out run the police.
Even Debby, the next in line, seems a disappointment, dark
haired like her father, small boned, extremely pretty, knowing it, too at an
very early age, so that she often plays with older boys, losing her virginity
by age ten, reportedly with her own brother, Dennis, a claim Dennis nor Debby
deny.
If Dave’s mom has hope for her youngest, Danny, this quickly
faded, thin and frail like Debby, but with light hair like his mother, fragile
as a bird, perhaps more like the last born in a batch of cats, bits of him not
fully developed at birth, showing a distinct preference for boys over girls
very early in life, and for which he would later get beat up downtown by the
white bullies from Wayne, bored or frustrated after a heavy drunk at one of the
Market Street strip clubs, though Danny is fond enough of his sister to Debby,
to let her play with his penis.
Maybe Dave’s mother hates me because she wants Dave to be
like me and not be like me, fierce, but not too fierce, independent, but not
from her, tough, but not tough enough to come home covered in blood the way I
sometimes do after dealing with the bullies at school.
Maybe she just hates me because I am who I am, maybe too
much like her husband used to be before he let the whiskey drive him crazy, too
much like my crazy uncle, Ritchie, sneaking out of married women’s backdoors as
their husbands come in the front. Maybe she even hates me because I hand Dave the
key, dragging him into situations he would never get into on his own, then
dragging him out again, regular pranksters well-known in the neighborhood, the
reports of which get back to her somehow, some way.
When I ask Dave what he wants to be, he tells me he doesn’t
know, his mother hasn’t told him that yet, and I want to kill him.
“What do you want to be, if you’re so smart?” he asks back
an angry at me as I am at him.
“I want to be Huck Finn,” I tell him.
He doesn’t get it; he never will. But I think his mother
does, and that scares her, too.