Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See Read online

  “Or … I can compensate you in cash right now and we can skip the paperwork.”

  “Bullshit,” Dale says. “You don’t have that kind of cash on you.”

  “Shut up, Dale,” the woman says. Then she puts her hand on his. “Why don’t you find a phone and call us a tow truck.” Dale slinks off toward a strip mall across the street.

  The woman turns to the gardener and begins speaking in rapid-fire Spanish. He nods. So I open up my trunk, unzip my special bag—false bottom, crisp bills in tidy, bound stacks, as if I just robbed a bank—and pay them off. Considering they have no leverage, I am very generous. Everyone leaves the scene happy.

  No harm, no foul, no fault. Not in LA.

  Back in my car, I pop Nilsson Schmilsson into the tape deck and pull into traffic. “I am driving this car, I am driving this car, I am driving,” I whisper to myself and the beat of my pumping, pounding heart. But instead of heading toward the airport, I continue driving east. Toward the past. Into the past. Not my plan. But I sit back and watch. Suspended. To see what will happen next.

  Yesterday, when I left, it was September, but here, in this now, it is April. I pull up to the curb and see that sticky purple jacaranda blossoms cover nearly every car windshield on the block. They hitch rides on rubber-soled shoes, bicycle wheels, and roller skates.

  Suddenly everything old seems old again. Tinged with the sepia of fading Kodak photos. But I am in them. Where I was. Who I was. Yet I am fully conscious of my full-body flashback. I am was. How would I tell that story? There is no tense to describe it. Telling, though, is not my job. I am the audience—always watching, always suspended, always waiting for what comes next—burdened with both hindsight and self-awareness. Always present in my past.

  Beverly Hills, 1957. I was twelve the first time I heard my father having sex.

  Muffled laughter. Heads bumping against the wall. Oh Oh Yes Oh Yes. Unfamiliar voice. Sharp intake of breath. YesyesyesNoDon’t! And groaning. Like a dying animal.

  If he’d stopped to think about it, my father might have remembered that I was home sick that day; home alone with the chicken pox because my mother couldn’t miss another day of work. She couldn’t risk losing her job—not with four kids. I was the oldest; my sister, Hannah, was ten. We were closest in age so it fell to us to look after my brothers—Ben, six, who had a talent for getting into trouble, and Jake, two, who could get away with anything. Four kids was a lot of mouths to feed. It wasn’t that my father was unemployed. Actually, he’d had more jobs than I could count. He just couldn’t hold on to any of them for long.

  His latest job was as a regional salesman for Tootsie’s, a cheap line of children’s clothing. He drove around to low-end stores in Los Angeles trying to interest buyers, managers, and owners in the newest line of stylish-but-affordable Tootsie attire. The back of our eleven-year-old brown Pontiac was home to a rack of Tootsie samples that completely obscured my father’s view out the back window.

  He hadn’t stayed at one job for more than a year in as long as I could remember. Sometimes he quit, but more often than not he was fired. He’d come home ranting about how he’d been screwed or underappreciated or was overqualified for their shit job and fuck-them-he-could-do-better-anyway. Sometimes he just stopped going in. He had worked for Tootsie’s for nine months. We all knew his days were numbered.

  I found the woman in our kitchen bent over with her head stuck in our refrigerator. She was wearing a pink, fuzzy robe that didn’t belong to her.

  “That’s my mother’s robe,” I said. It was the first thing that popped into my head.

  She started at the sound of my voice, hit her head on the shelf, and finally emerged clutching a jar of pickles, a bottle of milk, and a jar of strawberry jam to her impressive chest. She hadn’t bothered to tie the robe closed and now her hands were too full to do anything about it. She looked at me with panic in her eyes, but when she spoke her voice was as calm and sweet as Miss Lipsky, my second-grade teacher.

  “Hi,” she said, trying to sound like someone who wasn’t using condiments to cover her virtually naked body. “I’m Lucille. I’m a colleague of your father’s.”

  “I’m Greyson. I have the chicken pox. Why are you wearing my mother’s robe?”

  “Oh, the robe, well … Ray?” Lucille glanced over her shoulder trying to gauge the distance between her and the nearest countertop. “The chicken pox, huh? That’s just awful. I had the chicken pox once.”

  Lucille’s hands must have started sweating. She seemed to be having more and more trouble hanging onto her snack. Each time she lifted a knee to slide the milk bottle back into place or jiggled the pickles back into position, I saw more of Lucille—the outer curve of a breast, a flash of pink nipple, black hair between her thighs.

  Now it was my hands that were sweating. I stood there gawking at her, both of us at a loss for words. Little by little, she was losing her battle with the pickle jar. She’d had it wedged between her forearm and the exposed part of her stomach. Now everything but the lid had slipped below her arm. She slid her right leg forward, trying to rest the jar on her bare upper thigh.

  “How exactly do you know my father?”

  “I told you, we—I—Ray and I are just—”

  In midsentence her eyes dropped from my face to the tent in my pajama pants. She gasped. My eyes followed hers. The blood that rushed to my face did nothing to reduce the size of my erection. Seconds later, broken glass, pickle juice, kosher dills, globs of jam, and our milk for the week covered the floor and the front of my mother’s robe. She turned away and started to cry.

  “Raaaayyyy?… Raymond goddammit … Ray-hay-hay …”

  “Coming, Doll,” my father called from my parents’ bedroom.

  He dashed into the kitchen, looking lithe and graceful like one of those dancers on The Lawrence Welk Show and then turned two shades paler when he saw me, the mess, and Lucille crying.

  “Greyson, what are you doing home from—”

  “He has the chicken pox, you idiot. What kind of a father are you?”

  Lucille was still hanging onto the counter facing away from us.

  “Of course I knew he had the chicken pox,” my father said defensively.

  “You knew?” Lucille hissed at him.

  Pop tried to whisper so I wouldn’t hear.

  “I knew he’d had the chicken pox. I was up and out before anyone else this morning. As far as I knew, Grey’d gone back to school today.”

  That was a lie. Today had been no different from any other. Pop slept in while everyone else cooked breakfast and packed lunches.

  “Don’t move,” Pop told Lucille. “I’ll get you some slippers. I don’t want you cutting your feet.”

  My father left the kitchen. I didn’t know whether to stay or go.

  “Greyson?” Lucille said, still facing away from me. “I’m sorry about … your mother’s robe.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said, backing into the hall and my father.

  We stood there staring at each other, not saying anything. He cleared his throat.

  “We were on a sales call,” he said, beginning to lie again.

  I looked at the wallpaper, trying to count how many brownish-gold fuzzy bouquets were in each row and then on the whole wall in front of me.

  “… so the manager of Sid’s Kids trips …”

  Two, four, six, ten, fourteen, twenty, twenty-eight, floor to ceiling.

  “… and spills his chow mein all over Lucille,” he said.

  … five, ten, fifteen, twenty … times forty-two left to right equals …

  “Well, naturally she had to get herself cleaned up. So …”

  … one thousand one hundred seventy-six.

  I looked down. He was holding my mother’s pink fuzzy slippers in his hand.

  The ones that matched her robe.

  I ran back to bed and crawled all the way under the covers. I thought about my mother and let myself wish she were home sitting on the edge of my bed, laying
her small, cool hand on my forehead.

  After lying to my mother, spending her money, or cheating on her, my father liked to play the good husband. He’d fix leaky faucets, give my little brother a bath, take a stab at the laundry. That night he cooked dinner.

  I woke to the nauseating odor of frying onions and organ meats. I could hear Jake playing house with Sunshine, a ratty old doll Hannah had outgrown. I stuck my head out the bedroom door. My grandfather was snoring in his La-Z-Boy—his spindly arms protruding from his white T-shirt, his hand resting on his tiny bulge of a belly. He’d been almost as tall as my father before he started to shrink. Hard to imagine. Now he was barely as tall as Mom.

  The door to the balcony was open and I could hear Ben and his friend Wallace playing cowboys and Indians in the cactus bed downstairs. In an effort to avoid gardening costs and unnecessary labor, my grandfather had planted thick, dull cacti out in front. Now their dry, dead tips had curled and turned yellowy-brown. “Ben, you and Wallace better not be breaking off cactus leaves,” I yelled over the balcony.

  “But they’re dead anyway,” he called back.

  “You think that matters to grandpa?”

  “Oh, fine,” he said, and then screamed like a banshee and aimed one of his toy pistols at me. I made sure my father was nowhere to be seen and wandered into the living room. Hannah looked up at me. She stood up and put her hand on my head the way she’d seen Mom do a thousand times. “You look better,” she said, “but you still have a fever.”

  I put my hand on my own head. “How can you tell?”

  “I just can. Only girls can do it. It’s Darwinian.”

  “Oh.”

  “Tyler McClaine got suspended for smoking in the alley behind the gym,” she said, going back to her homework. She had perfect handwriting.

  “Can they suspend someone for that? I mean isn’t the alley off school grounds?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought of that,” she said.

  “Mom’s late, isn’t she?”

  “No, she came home and then went out to the store,” Hannah said. My stomach lurched.

  “How’d she seem?” I asked.

  “Huh?” Hannah looked at me blankly.

  I turned and walked numbly into the kitchen. My mother was always fine.

  I opened the silverware drawer and pulled out enough mismatched spoons, knives, and forks for the seven of us. My grandfather always sat at the head of the table. His place setting had to match. I looked at what was cooking on the stove, put the cover back on, and got a can of Campbell’s Chicken & Stars out of the cabinet. I was sick. I could get away with eating soup. My brothers and sister would have to choke down the liver and onions.

  My father came into the kitchen. I could hear the ice cubes in his scotch rattling around in the glass. I didn’t turn around. He was nervous. I could tell without looking at him. I could practically feel him vibrating.

  I turned around with a fistful of flatware and caught my father staring at the yellowing linoleum and pinching the bridge of his nose. He’d taken off his tie and jacket, but was still wearing his suit pants and short-sleeved sport shirt. I looked down at his feet: beige socks and cracked, brown leatherette slippers. He took the top off the pan, picked up a spatula and poked at the slimy purple globs swimming in onions. He saw me staring and forced a big, fat smile. I don’t know why I smiled back, but I did. He seemed relieved.

  He shouldn’t have been.

  He looked at the kitchen floor again and then at me.

  “Hey, Grey?”

  “Yeah, Pop?”

  “You know I love you, son,” he said.

  As I folded the paper napkins, my stomach turned over and my mouth filled with saliva. Maybe I did have a fever. Maybe it was the smell of cooking innards.

  My mother walked in the front door holding a gallon of milk. She looked exhausted and kicked off the navy-blue Sears Comfort Zone heels she’d worn for the last twelve hours. She had red marks on her toes from where they rubbed and pinched. My mom left the house every morning by six twenty to drive an hour and a half to her job at the Tarzana Public Library.

  She smiled when she saw me. “Oh, don’t worry about it, sweetheart. It’s not as if you dropped it on purpose. It was an accident. Don’t give it another thought.”

  It took me a second to register what she meant. And another to feel the sting of it.

  She pulled me to her and put her lips on my forehead. I leaned in and put my arms around her waist. “Cool as a cucumber,” she said. “I think you can go to school tomorrow.”

  I watched her from the hallway as she walked into her bedroom. The bed had been haphazardly remade. She stopped for a moment, looked at it, and straightened the bedspread. She walked to the closet to get her slippers, but stopped again when she stepped on something sharp. “Ow, sugar!” she said quietly. My mother never cursed. Staying close to the wall and with the ache in my stomach growing, I moved closer so I could get a better look.

  She leaned on the bureau, lifted her foot, and pulled something round and sparkly off her heel. She turned it over in her hand examining it. Still holding the object, she limped to the bed, picked up a pillow, and, bringing it close to her face, inhaled deeply. Her shoulders sagged and she sat down on the bed and sighed heavily. After a few moments, she got up and tossed the sparkly thing into the trash basket. Then she put on her pink fuzzy slippers and walked past me into the kitchen to finish making dinner.

  I found it under a bunch of used tissues, an empty bottle of Phillips Milk of Magnesia and an old issue of Life magazine. Lucille’s brooch was shaped like a butterfly. It was covered in multicolored gems, three of which were missing. The gold paint was flaking off. I put it inside an athletic cup and shoved it in the back of my sock drawer.

  I sat down to dirty looks from Ben and Hannah, whose plates of liver and onions sat untouched in front of them. My mother had a tight smile on her face. She tried to make pleasant small talk about the day. My father tried not to look at me. I was a ticking time bomb. In truth, I was a coward, but he didn’t know that. I looked into my bowl of soup and watched the universe of chicken and stars swirl in front of me.

  I hated him enough to tell, but I loved her more—enough not to. Besides, I thought, I could hold this over his head for years. It was my first lesson in strategic negotiation.

  I was the last one to go to sleep that night. Since it was his house, my grandfather had the master bedroom. My parents had the smaller of the other two bedrooms. A bunk bed and a twin were crammed into the third bedroom that my brothers and sister shared. Normally I slept on the living-room couch, but since I’d gotten sick, I’d been sleeping in Ben’s bed. Tonight it was back to the couch. I didn’t mind though. It meant I had a TV in my room.

  Once in a while, headlights from passing cars would shine into the windows of our living room—my bedroom. Sometimes they’d honk their horns because there was a three-way intersection on our corner and no one ever knew whose turn it was to go. I’d gotten used to the lights and the noise though. I pretended I was in the sleeper car of a train. Every night I’d go someplace different.

  I lifted up the middle sofa cushion and pulled out my pajamas. I went into the bathroom to get undressed. I had a steady stream of pee going when I saw the little bunched-up ball of blue behind the toilet bowl. I tried to lean forward to see what it was, but I started to overshoot my mark and had to back off. When I finally finished, I got down on all fours, buck-naked ass in the air, and grabbed it. Them. Panties. They were lacy, sky-blue silk panties. My mother didn’t have panties like these. And Hannah certainly didn’t.

  For a long time I just stood still, looking at them in my hand, feeling my heart pounding hard against the inside of my chest. Panic, desire, guilt, revulsion, lust—it was all coming at me too fast and too hard. I got dizzy and sat down on the toilet. I ran Lucille’s panties over my legs and chest, and then somehow they found their way to my nose and I was breathing them in and imagining what Lucille would look li
ke in them peeking out from underneath that pink—No! That was my mother’s robe. That was disgusting. I was sick. I had a sick mind. But not even the intrusion of my mother’s bathrobe into thoughts of Lucille’s musky-smelling blue silk panties could chase away my prodigious hard-on.

  When I finished in the bathroom, I climbed into my bed-sofa and felt around under it for my flashlight and book. The Catcher in the Rye by the light of a Coleman See Bright. It was the best part of my day. I wasn’t allowed to bring it to school—“not appropriate,” our dumb-shit principal, Dr. Bowen, said.

  I got the book from my mom. She had checked it out from the Tarzana Library, where she was associate librarian. She said most people didn’t appreciate Salinger yet, but someday they would and I could say I read him way back when. I tried to concentrate but felt guilty. By jerking off with Lucille’s panties, I was cheating on my mother too. She was sleeping in that bed now. Which side had my father screwed Lucille on?

  My mother was already gone when I woke up the next morning. We went to school just like it was a regular day. But I wasn’t really there. By the time the bell rang at three ten, I’d almost convinced myself I’d made it all up. But my father didn’t come home for dinner that night. He left a note saying he had to drive all the way out to Bakersfield to make a presentation to some new wholesale outfit. We all knew Bakersfield wasn’t part of his territory.

  This déjà me speeds by in a breath and is gone. Because the speed of light is fast, but has anyone ever attempted to clock the speed of racing thoughts? Out of the gate there might be just two or three jockeying for position. But within seconds, dozens, scores, hundreds crowd the field, hurtling past each other, traveling back and forth in time, ricocheting off one another like pinballs, sending sparks flying; creating new tangents and fragments; sending reason running for cover.

  And now I am brushing sticky thoughts off my windshield, trying to clear my head. So that I can think, can drive—out toward the airport. I will stop at a used car dealership on the way. I will sell my luxury automobile for next to nothing and take a cab out to LAX. I have no plan, no idea what will come next. I just know I can’t do what I’ve been doing. It has become too hard. Too exhausting.