Getting Nowhere Read online

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “Thanks anyway.” I added that to make my father happy. It was his anniversary, wasn’t it?

  “What time is your party?” my father asked me. He and Pat were holding hands.

  “Seven,” I said. I’d checked the time just before I came down. I checked it again. Only six-thirty-five. “I better get going,” I said.

  “We’ll drop you off,” he said cheerfully. “Our reservation is for seven and it’s a bit of a drive.”

  That’s what I really needed. Even in a car like that new one, to be dropped off at a girl’s house. At my age. “It’s only two blocks. I can walk.”

  “How about getting home? You want us to pick you up?”

  “Dad,” I said, “I’m a big boy. I can walk home.” Holy jumping catfish.

  He laughed. “All right. You’ve got your key if you get home before we do. We’d better get going. Have a good time, Mark.”

  “You too,” I said.

  They went out, the three of them, Tony on one side of Pat, my father on the other. I watched from the window. They beeped the horn as they pulled away. For a minute I wished I was with them. Then I remembered where I was going. For once I could look at myself in the mirror without worrying about somebody catching me. Maybe in five years, with a nutritious diet, six more inches, and a course in body building, I’d be a smash. Girls would knock down walls to get at me. Until then I’d have to muddle through on my wit and personality.

  Six-forty. I turned on the Saturday night news. Nothing new. A couple of bombings, an airplane hijack, a report on what was happening to the price of coffee and wheat and a few more jollies. If I walked slowly, I wouldn’t be early. I didn’t want to look too eager.

  I’d been past Lisa’s house lots of times, hoping to catch her in the yard so we could have a spontaneous conversation. I never had. I stood under a streetlight and checked my watch. Still five minutes to go. I walked around the block one more time, dragging my feet, taking my time. There was no moon. Too bad. I understand moonlight makes girls feel passionate. The second time I arrived at Lisa’s house, I figured this was it. I went up the walk, onto the porch, and knocked on the front door. I listened to the sounds coming from inside—the TV and a dog barking. No one answered so I knocked again, harder. The porch light came on and the door opened.

  “Hello,” I said.

  The man looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Yes?” he said.

  “I’m here for the party,” I said. “My name’s Mark Johnson.” Why is it I always feel like such a fool when I say my own name?

  “I don’t know about any party,” he said.

  “Lisa invited me. I’m in her biology class.” I felt like saying, “Didn’t she tell you I saved her life the other day?” but I didn’t. We stood looking at each other. Sweat ran down the insides of my arms. Something rustled in the bushes around the porch. The dog barked in the back of the house.

  “Lisa!” the man hollered. “What’s this about a party?” He didn’t ask me to come inside. I stood there under the light until Lisa came into the hall.

  “This young man says you invited him to a party here tonight,” the man said.

  “Hi, Lisa.”

  “Oh, hi,” she said from her hiding place behind her father.

  “What’s this all about?” he said sternly. “Did you invite him, Lisa?”

  “No, Daddy, I’m not having a party,” Lisa said.

  “Ohho.” Lisa’s father smiled for the first time. “I thought so. You youngsters will try anything these days, won’t you?” I thought he was going to slap me on the back, he seemed so jovial all of a sudden.

  “Ohhohoho.” It was a sound he made deep in his throat, not a laugh, just a sound. “Guess you’ve got the wrong house, eh?”

  I stood there like a statue, looking at Lisa, and her father looking at me.

  “It must’ve been somebody else,” I mumbled. “It must’ve been somebody else named Lisa. I know quite a few girls named Lisa.” I backed off. “Well. Good-bye.”

  I turned and went down the steps, forcing myself not to run. They stood and watched me go. I could hear somebody laughing in the bushes. There was a lot of scuffling. I saw two guys, one tall, one short, running away. A small voice told me they were the same two I’d rescued Lisa from. They were hollering and laughing so hard I heard them for days after. In my sleep even, I heard them. If I’d had a gun and could’ve caught them, I think I would’ve killed them.

  I started walking. I walked a long way. I went past Jeff’s house and saw some lights on in the kitchen. Maybe Mrs. Fields was home and I could talk to her. It was Saturday night. She wouldn’t be home on Saturday night. I walked some more. It started to rain. I put my face up to the rain and it got in my eyes.

  When I got home, it was seven thirty-five. I could hardly believe that was all it was. It felt like four o’clock in the morning. I took the meat loaf out of the oven and ate from the pan. Then I went to my father’s liquor cabinet, got out a bottle of Scotch and poured out two fingers, straight. I drank it down in one shot, the way they do in Westerns. My eyes watered again. I must have fat fingers. One way or the other, either the rain or the booze wound up in my eyes. I went to the bathroom and thew up in the toilet.

  The house felt cold. Empty houses get cold faster than houses with people in them. I put on a sweater. It still felt cold, so I wrapped a blanket around myself. There were mostly reruns on TV so I knew when to laugh. I ate some pretzels, considered having a beer and decided my stomach wasn’t up to it. At the stroke of ten, sort of like Cinderella, I turned off the set and went to bed. Just in time. I heard then come in downstairs, laughing and talking.

  “I guess Mark’s already home,” I heard my father say. Pat said, “I hope the party was a success,” then I heard Tony say something, probably a wisecrack. They sat around and talked for a bit, then the sound of doors opening and closing. Tony came upstairs and looked at me. I lay on my stomach and breathed deeply and regularly. As soon as he hit the pad he started to snore. I think he needs to have his adenoids out.

  I lay there listening to the sounds of silence.

  When they began to deafen me and the pounding in my ears shut out even the silence, I got up and very carefully went downstairs. Through the darkness, which I knew well, I went to the kitchen and out to the garage. She was there, filling every corner; so grand, so sweet smelling, so new. I circled her without touching. With a piece of old sheet, I polished her hood, the trim, the headlights.

  I like to tell myself that nothing was planned.

  Tony’s fencing foil lay in the corner. He’d brought it home over the weekend to practice. The teacher said he could. I picked it up and held it the way I’d seen him do.

  En garde. Thrust. Lunge.

  The tip hit the driver’s side of the silver-gray car. Barely moving, I dragged the foil along the unblemished surface, leaving a delicate, almost invisible line.

  But it was there. I knew it was there. Like a wound, a scar. It would never be perfect again.

  After it was done, I put the foil back in its place, went back upstairs, and lay looking at the ceiling until I heard the birds begin.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “And I had a slice of roast beef this thick!” Tony held his fingers apart to show me. “And Yorkshire pudding, and I went to the salad bar three times and nobody stopped me. And you should’ve seen the dessert tray.” His eyes grew round and he stopped talking for the first time in fifteen minutes while he thought about the dessert tray.

  “There was lemon meringue pie and chocolate eclairs and strawberry shortcake and a bowl of whipped cream to put on everything that was so deep you could’ve drowned in it if you wanted. And the waiter let me have two desserts.”

  “How was your party?” Pat asked from where she stood at the stove frying eggs.

  “O.K.,” I said. “Where’s. Dad?”

  “Bob Evans picked him up to play golf.”

  I opened the door to the garage.
The car was there, breathing. “I’ve got to do a few jobs I didn’t have time for yesterday,” I told them.

  “On Sunday?” Pat raised her eyebrows. “At least have something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry. I’ll be back in a few hours.” Time enough for what was coming. When I woke up I felt as if I’d been running all night long. Running and getting nowhere. I had a headache.

  In this dream I had, the guys hiding in the bushes tied me up and kept kicking me in the groin until Lisa’s father came out on the porch and said, “Stop that racket.” She was hiding behind him, smiling, pointing at me. When I woke up, my pajamas were so wet I thought I was bleeding. I checked. There was no blood.

  I walked on for a while. I kept my head down and was careful not to step on any cracks in the sidewalk. To me stepping on a crack is like walking under a ladder. Bad luck.

  All along I think I knew I was going to see Mrs. Baumgartner. She was the only person in the world I could bear talking to right now.

  She came to the door in her bathrobe, frowning. “Now now, Mark,” she said in a cross voice. “Henry had a bad night. I didn’t get much sleep and, to make it worse, my son’s coming today.”

  “Oh,” I said. I turned away and the tears came to my eyes. I felt as if she’d kicked me too. As if my last friend in the world had said, “Get lost.”

  “Why don’t you come back in a couple of hours,” she said in a softer tone. “That way I’ll get a chance for a rest and maybe Joe won’t stay long. It depends on whether he has a golf game or not.”

  “O.K.,” I said. If I’d had enough money, I would’ve gone to the movies to kill time. As it was, I walked around town, up and down streets I’d never seen before, looked in a few store windows, then sat down on a. bench in the park and watched a couple of little kids fight over a bicycle.

  “How come you kids are fighting?” I said, to get a conversation going.

  They stopped hitting each other. “We just like to,” one said.

  She’d said to come back in a couple of hours. I made myself wait two hours and forty minutes. Try that some time. When I finally allowed myself to turn into the Baumgartners’ street, I walked very slowly, passed the house once, then turned around and came back. Talk about self-control.

  “Did your son come?” I said when she invited me in.

  “He called and said he couldn’t make it,” Mrs. Baumgartner said. “He said he’d come next week. Joe doesn’t come often because he doesn’t like to see his father the way he is now.” She sounded bitter. “It embarrasses him. He doesn’t understand that Henry is the same gentle, good man he was before. Henry has a loving heart. If you know someone with a loving heart, Mark, consider yourself lucky.”

  “I don’t have one,” I said. “I hate a lot of people.”

  “Listen”—Mrs. Baumgartner pointed her finger at me—“don’t tell me about hating. I know all about hating. It’s loving I had to learn about. I’m still learning. You look surprised.” She turned her back to me. “I’m a very impatient person. Before Henry’s illness I lacked patience. But, as I said, I’m learning.”

  “I did something terrible last night,” I said and told her what I’d done to the car.

  She turned to face me. “There’s one thing I’m sure of, Mark. And that’s that you and only you are responsible for the kind of man you become. I found that out a long time ago. It may be the only thing I’m sure of. Don’t make excuses for yourself.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to become a man,” I said. “Suppose I decide to be a kid for the rest of my life. Do what I want and never mind anyone else. Suppose that’s what I decide.”

  “You look as if you’re ready for a fight,” she said. I realized my fists were clenched. “I suppose you had what you thought was a good reason for doing what you did to the car. But about staying a child all your life. If that’s your decision, I feel sorry for you.” Mrs. Baumgartner went to the window and looked out. “But I’m even sorrier for whoever moves through your life. Your wife, your parents, your children.”

  So I told her about the phony party and how I went to Lisa’s and how Lisa’s father cut me up into little pieces and fed me to the guys in the bushes. I didn’t tell her about the fight and what they did to me because I didn’t want to have to say “groin” to her. I thought maybe she was too old to hear that word.

  “Poor Mark,” she said. “Now you’ll have to face your father and he’ll be furious.”

  “Maybe he won’t know I did it,” I said. “Maybe he’ll think it was scratched in a parking lot. That happens lots of times. A guy parks too close and opens his door and nails you.”

  She shook her head. “Remember one thing. It takes a lot of energy just to stay alive, to go on living. It doesn’t matter whether you’re your age or mine. Energy is what you need. And hope. In the long run it’s worth the effort.”

  I said good-bye and walked around for a while longer. Then I headed for home.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The minute I walked in, I knew that my father knew.

  “Hello,” I said. I opened the refrigerator and pulled out an apple to give my hands something to do. He sat at the table looking at me. Pat got up and started to peel some potatoes. I could hear Tony’s radio upstairs.

  “Mark,” my father said, “I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. I want to think you’re not responsible for the gash on Pat’s new car. That it happened last night at the restaurant and whoever did it didn’t have the guts to let me know himself. Tell me that’s the way it was.”

  It took all my strength to look him in the eye. The trouble was I didn’t have enough energy left to open my mouth and tell him how it’d been, about last night, about what was going on inside me. Not that that was an excuse for what I’d done. I knew it wasn’t. It just might help him to understand.

  He started to pace back and forth. I saw Pat give him an agonized look. That’s the right word, the word I want. She looked at him and her eyes were full of agony. Not for me. For him. Sometimes it seemed as if everything was for him. If I ever do grow up to be a man and have kids of my own, I’ll spread it around. People are supposed to remember what it’s like to be a kid.

  “Will you say something in your own defense or will you let me assume that you deliberately, with malice aforethought, marred that car simply out of bad feeling toward Pat and me?” my father asked me. He waited. I opened my mouth.

  “Yeah, I did it,” I said. Even to my own ears I sounded smart ass. I didn’t mean to; that’s the way it came out. “I won’t lie to you. It was me.”

  It was the only way I could get to you. I didn’t say that, I thought it. I wasn’t going to defend myself.

  “But it wasn’t malice aforethought. I didn’t plan it, it just happened.”

  Pat wiped her hands carefully on her apron and left the room. It was just as well. This was none of her business anyway.

  “It’s not so much the car, although, God knows, that’s bad enough. It’s the feeling behind it. What’s happened to you to make you have so much hate in you?” My father put his hands behind his back, probably so he wouldn’t put them around my throat.

  “I’ll pay to have it fixed,” I told him.

  “And that’ll make everything all right—is that what you’re trying to tell me?” My father’s voice got louder.

  “Maybe I ought to run away, go live some place else, come and visit on Sunday once in a while.” My voice trembled.

  “That’s not such a bad idea,” he told me. “Don’t go wallowing in a sea of self-pity, either. The way you’ve been acting around here for the past few months indicates there’s a lot wrong.”

  My father put his hands in his pockets. He was getting closer. “A lot wrong. I realize you dislike your stepmother, for what reason God only knows. She’s done everything she could to be pleasant. She’s a good person and she’s willing to try. But we can’t go battering our heads against a stone wall forever. That’s what it’s like with you, battering aga
inst a wall.”

  Something rose from the pit of my stomach and hit the back of my throat. It tasted yellow and vile. It crawled up to behind my teeth. If I kept them tightly closed, whatever it was might stay there and not come gushing onto the floor, maybe even hit my father in the face.

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” I started to shout. “I’m your son. All you care about is her, hopping into the sack with her. Pat this, Pat that. There’s not enough to go around, Dad. You don’t know squat about me, what I think, who I am. I’ll tell you who I am. I’m your son!”

  The kitchen was very quiet. The house was listening. From a long distance away I saw my father’s face, the contempt on it, the anger, the rage. Almost with relief, I saw him raise his hand. It had been a long time coming.

  He hit me against the side of my head. Hard, very hard. It rocked me back.

  “Yes,” he said slowly, doling out the words as if they were hot and bitter, “that’s true. You are my son. And, believe it or not, that’s something of which I was once proud.”

  He left me then, alone. The sound of breathing filled the room. It was me. I drank a glass of water. I wasn’t going to get sick. I wasn’t even going to cry.

  The telephone rang and I answered.

  “Hey, turkey, how was the orgy last night?” Jeff asked.

  “As orgies go it was all right,” I said.

  “Is that all you have to say?” He was indignant. “You been running?”

  “What?” I said.

  “You sound like you been running the mile in nothing flat.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s been kind of rough around here, that’s all.” I felt the side of my face where my father had belted me. “I’ll see you around.”

  “The only guy I know who goes to an orgy and doesn’t get all the facts,” Jeff said. “If it’d been me, I would’ve taken a camera.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Breakfast was grim. My father pretended I wasn’t there. Tony sat looking at all of us as if we were insane. Pat put four spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee, then didn’t drink it.