Mark Crane
FOOL FOR A LAWYER
Copyright 2008 Mark Crane
First Edition Published by Mark Crane at Smashwords
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
The trademark Funsub is registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crane, Mark T.
Fool for a Lawyer: a memoir/by Mark Crane.— 1st ed.
ISBN 978-0-6152-4143-2
For my dear parents,who kissed and hugged and praised, and had songs to sing for every season.
Fool for a Lawyer
Everything you read here happened to me. Out of respect for the real people, I’ve changed the names and some insignificant details. I have had to condense lots of legal details, but I am certain any reader will come away with an essentially accurate understanding of those issues and goings-on.
It was a tough job keeping my kids from developing any real character in this book, their wonderful identities being such an important part of my life and story, but I think I succeeded. If they want to tell this story themselves some day, that will be up to them, but their privacy is theirs to offer up.
I fabricated from whole cloth the rule that begins Chapter Ten, just to make the point that such a rule should exist.
The “Transit” mentioned throughout this memoir has nothing whatsoever at all in the slightest to do with my current employer, the Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Okay.
Mark Crane NYC 7/16/08
CHAPTER ONE
This is the second grade at Media Elementary School, Media, Pennsylvania. I am standing. The whole class is watching. I am enjoying this moment.
“The President of the United States,” I say, and wonderful Mrs. Atkinson, an elderly widow who really was born to teach school, is impressed with my choice, the other kids having chosen fireman or bus driver or nurse. She peers at me through her eyeglasses, which are secured around her neck by a drooping chain. She asks then if I will be a lawyer first and, not understanding what a lawyer is, I study her smile. Then, trusting her, I nod that I will.
She sits me down and moves on to Matthew Boone, who sways back and forth when told to stand, who stammers and takes forever to come up with an answer, and my eyes glaze over and I try to see forward in time, into my future, when I will take my place in the world and I will vanquish the wrongs and make everything right.
Here we are. New York City, 2008, just below the surface. A quiet tunnel—cold steel girders ribbing concrete walls, everything coated with a dun-colored grime—steel dust. A drip here, a scurrying there.
And with a roar our train moves, up to two thousand souls packed together at a shot, six hundred electric volts, into twenty great big motors, enough to shove this 400-ton string of hulks, driving and grabbing, then driving on again.
The train is staffed with two: the conductor at the center of the train—the fifth car back—and myself, the motorman. In my cab, it’s just me and the tunnel and the signals. Sometimes I hear the passengers, maybe teenagers shouting back and forth or screaming, playing, soft, distant. But usually it is only the tunnel, the signals, my hand on the brake handle, the other on the controller. And depending on the design of the cab, my back might be involved; my butt, shifting back and forth; my kneecaps jammed up against the control box. Then, to distinguish me from, say, a highly trained chimp, there are always my thoughts, dancing around in the dark, and often, the gnawing hound of sleep.
Ah, but it’s not dreary. When they send me down the “A” line, we push up out of the tunnel just at the culmination of tedium. Up, up, up we go over the housetops, then a cemetery below, with huge old glamorous stones and the sky is all around. I drop the window with a bang and let the stars in my eyes, keeping my head just in (or else, passing signal masts would catch me blind.)
The air is cold and so alive. I let it in; I breath it deeply, clear my eyes. And then we head out over the marsh towards the ocean.
I can be buried under layers of wrong moves, my way confused by anxieties and regrets, so too-much-to-do. But, pulled speedily along inside the wide sky, the sea and the wetland breathing all around, my innocence is apparent and I can let myself off the hook for a while.
Take a trip with me to April the 13th, 2001, C.E.
Beside the school, there is a tall fence topped with jagged wire. They open a gate in this fence every day at ten minutes before three and a small group of parents, nannies, and grandparents file in slowly, careful not to cut each other off, sunlight flashes reflected off passing automobile windshields.
Thanks to my early job, I was able to pick Tali up from day care. She is in my arms now, three o’clock being late in her day. Nicholas will be thrilled to see us. This isn’t my night, but their mother will be relieved she can get a block of unplanned overtime in to help her balance the books my voluntary $1500-a-month child support payments don’t seem to be making a dent in.
Tali and I wander the yard. Nicholas’s class lets out late, his teacher having her own way of doing things. There are clouds in the sky and crows flying around, unsettled by the wind. The children are a sight to Tali, and I feel her curly hair—her grandmamma’s and mine—tickle my ear as a rushing wave of the kids spills around the north side of us.
A boy of about ten is moving in a circle. His arm is holding a book bag up over his head and a girl, a little older and half a foot bigger, is trying to get it from him as he jerks it up, then back down again. He is having the time of his life; she is miserable.
I make some serious eye contact with him as I stride my tall frame his way, which distracts him enough for the girl to succeed in wresting the bag away. Letting my voice drop low, I tell him, “That’s not the way we treat girls.” The girl has the bag on the ground and from it she pulls a box of donuts.
“I’m just having fun,” he protests, not old enough, I guess, to waste any thoughts questioning my authority.
“She didn’t seem to be having any fun to me,” I say as she runs across the schoolyard with the doughnuts.
Who is this person I am? This is my mother’s schoolteacher voice. It’s okay, though. It works with kids.
“That’s my sister—“ he continues with defiance. A very good point.
“Yes, well, even more, then, you should be a gentleman with her. She’s your sister.”
He pulls the zipper back on his bag and throws it up onto his back. “She’s bigger than me,” he adds.
“Well, you are going to grow up to be a man, right?” He thinks about that. “Well men don’t treat ladies like that, even if they’re bigger.” I tell myself I’ve offered him a valuable lesson. Still, it really isn’t applicable here. The well-mannered boy does not violate the note of finality I’ve ended my sentence with, and he even stands there until I turn away before he jumps into one of the streams of juveniles spurting over the asphalt.
There’s Miles, father of one of my boy’s first-grade classmates. Miles is short and hairy. He wears clothes that say every day is a holiday, but still he never looks very comfortable.
After a little intro chit-chat, he starts letting out his troubles. He needs a new car. He’s got one of those old diesel-fueled Saabs. Gas is getting too expensive for him. I tell him he’s got to take a drive in Connecticut and look for cars on people’s lawns with “For Sale” signs.
“It’s a nice drive,” I tell him. “Spring is here. Connecticut. You look for a house that already has a couple of nice cars in the driveway. That way, you know the guy just has too many cars. There’s less of a chance he’s getting rid of a clunker.” I tell him this because that’s how I got my current wheels. He listens with interest, jerking his chin up, stretching his neck out of his sweatshirt now and then. He wants to know which highway, and I give him some directions, which he doesn’t write down, but makes an effort to show how he’s committing them to memory.
His bushy eyebrows half-heartedly scope the yard for one of his boys. Miles is an insurance salesman—one who I avoided at first, being as I don’t have insurance and don’t want any. But he pleased me in never inquiring, or maybe in assuming I was already set up, like all my responsible peers. Insurance, if you ask me, is like playing the lottery. At 38 years of age, I don’t believe I have enough of a chance of winning—dying.
There is an orange steel door on the other side of the monkey bars that closes the bottom of a narrow stairwell to the second floor, and every school day at precisely five after three that door opens and Nicky’s class marches out in an orderly pair of lines. A few feet out of the doorway, the order lays down, the lines particulating with enough pent-up energy to thrill an atomic scientist.
The time comes, and my boy’s eyes find mine. I rush my parting words to Miles, as I watch Nicholas run, (the way little kids do, without worrying about whether or not they’re going to crash into you,) and before he reaches me his voice is speaking loudly, as though there is no time for a greeting. “Jacob’s got an Anakin Skywalker just like mine.” After I catch him, his hug is only brief, because he’s talking, but his hand is tight in mine. “Dad. I want you to know, Anakin is NOT a bad guy.” I must pull out of his hand’s grip to spell the arm that supports Tali, and then Nicky is at my other side. All the while, his words furiously cascade: “He wins the pod race to escape from being a slave; he’s kind of even an orphan, because his mother is a slave and he doesn’t have a father, and Anakin rescues Jar Jar from Sabula!”
“I know that, buddy. I never said he was a bad guy. All I know is he becomes a bad guy.” He thinks about this possibility, him having never seen the movie, his mother and I feeling he is still too young.
I catch his teacher’s eye. Joanna. She is nice enough, but she’s got quite a phony smile she clicks on as her head turns to face a parent. Over a mass of second graders, I speak to her. “Hiya doing today? Listen, I was wondering, you said you needed a big aquarium, but you just need it for a terrarium, right?” She thinks about it, like it is a very distant subject that we did not discuss two days ago, but, maybe a month and two days ago. I think she nods. “Because, I can get a really big aquarium, but I’m not certain how watertight it will be.”
“Oooh, yes,” she says, letting her eyes go wide like a child’s, but letting her gaze stray immediately. Now she nods enthusiastically.
Nicholas chimes in, “Daddy picked it from the trash,” something he thinks is worth bragging about, but something that makes my own smile a little more toothy than it was meant to be. My eyes are busying themselves tracing the Aztec-like orange-yellow lines that demarcate nothing from nothing at all along the blacktop, speaking to the sky.
“Yeah, well, it’s a big one,” I tell Joanna, holding my hands out, “...just like what you were looking for.”
“Oh, good,” she says. She looks at me again. “Can you bring it Monday?” She is pretty, which is nice. Young kids should have a pretty teacher. Or is it that young kids do have pretty teachers?? I think that may be it—grade school teaching spots go to the cute-looking young women. You never see a grizzled old man teaching Third Grade.
I make a note to get my grade school teaching license when I retire.
We head back across the yard, and Nicky is going on. “Uh, Daddy, I think you’re wrong there, about Anakin. He’s a good guy—Jacob showed me his cards.”
“Yes, well, Jacob’s trading cards don’t show what’s going to happen in the next movie, do they? I happen to know the story.” I explain to him the idea of a trilogy, and then I struggle to explain how the first Star Wars trilogy actually took place later in time than the second trilogy. It is complicated enough that he accepts my explanation and goes on to the next subject.
“I’ve been thinking, Dad. When is the last time we went to McDonald’s?” I tell him Rina, who Tali calls the best daddy’s girlfriend in the world, has prepared a wonderful dinner. He gives me an unexpected smile and says that’s great.
At the very tip-top of Manhattan, this is Inwood, a neighborhood made up almost entirely of the native dwelling of New York City’s rank-and-file: the 6-story apartment building. Because of the parks two blocks west, Broadway strictly separates the lower classes to the east from the gentrifying mixed-race thwenty-somethings.
We cross busy Broadway carefully. People drive like lunatics here.
I get the kids up into the back seat of the Trooper and settle my own self behind the wheel, hoping the fan belt won’t squeal this time I turn the key, but it does—worse than usual—and I quickly pull out to kill the noise. Tali tugs on my hair from her car seat directly behind me. I reach around and squeeze her knee. She grabs my hand and keeps it.
“Are we going to see James this weekend?” Nicky asks about his cousin, who is just a few months younger than he. I mull over the easy drive Saturday down the West Side. My brother, Steve, and sister-in-law, Iris, live a block away from Columbia University.
No. I’m thinking I need a plan. I don’t want to waste my quality time with the kids. I don’t want to spend it playing guitars with Steve while the kids run wild through the toy store that is James’s room....
Beachcombing.
My one free arm labors over the turning maneuver uptown. “I dunno,” I say. “The weather’s getting nice. I was thinking we’d head down to Coney Island tomorrow. We’ll have to see if James wants to do that.” James is perhaps a typical child of the Upper West Side, but, whatever it is, to me he’s an exotic breed. You give him a toy for his birthday, and he ignores it until he is sternly reminded to unwrap it by my brother. He then does so, just enough to see what it is, and hopefully he comments on it before returning to whatever Steve had diverted him from. An only child, he has been inundated with every plastic or multicolored or battery-operated enjoyment known to kiddom, and it is all just one big bore. He might want to go beachcombing, but you might just as well flip a coin.
Nicky goes on. “Are we going to have hot dogs?” recalling the last trip to Coney Island from his memory banks and seeking to secure the most positive aspect.
“You’ll each have a bucket and a shovel. As for what else, we’ll see.” Hmm. Now I’m thinking Iris will want to take the kids on all the rides. I myself don’t even take them into the amusement park. There’s an ancient carousel in a garage across the street with a real Wurlitzer that’s more fun than even the Cyclone, and I like to leave it at that.
“How about the merry-go-round. Are we going on the merry-go-round?”
“No, we are going in the Funsub Trooper.” Funsub.com was my brilliant idea just before the dot-com nose dive for a website portal to the internet. It costs me a few bucks a month to keep up, so I keep it as the family website. The kids love it because it features a submarine with a big smile. In Funsub’s heyday, I painted its logo on the spare tire cover to the Trooper, so we all call it the Funsub Trooper.
My eyes catch Nicky through the rear-view, twisting his mouth at my silly sass, then drawing a circle on his window with his fingertip. But Tali has been stirred by the merry-go-round idea and she bounces on her seat. “Nooo. Nicky didn’t ask if we are driving there in the merry-go-round. He wants to know if we are going to ride on the merry-go-round once we get there!” Then she adds, in singsong, “And we are, because we are going to Coney Island and at Coney Island that’s what you do—you ride the merry-go-round.”
My little girl hides behind my legs in public. She whispers in my ears while clinging to me. But when it’s just family, Tali charges in and seizes her moments.
We pass over the small vertical lift bridge that carries Broadway traffic from Manhattan to the Bronx, and head towards the hill that leads up to the ridge our neighborhood is set on. I show them the school bus in front of us and ask them why it has that color.
“Orange paint,” Tali says.
Nicky checks his sister, offering, “It’s orange because it carries kids and kids like orange,” reading a “Captain Underpants” book at the same time.
I offer them two clues, but I make Nicholas look up from his book first. “The color is the same color as highway danger signs, and a school bus carries precious cargo.” Tali is nearly exploding with anticipation, but she’s a little too young to get it figured out.
Nicky drops his eyes down and out of the side of his mouth gives the answer in the most strained tone his voice can perform. “Because the color makes it easier to see so people won’t crash into it.”
“Yeah!” Tali exclaims.
I give the hand that still grips mine a squeeze and assure her, “I could hear you thinking.”
The Trooper makes me proud the way it musters the horsepower to fight its way up the steep incline.
Kingsbridge is this neighborhood’s name, dating all the way back to the time when a real king had such a claim, long before the Seventh Avenue subway came running up through the rural farm and quarry lands and filled the area with strangers from Ireland—longer yet before the Irish were replaced by the Latin Americans who now share claim with just about every other ethnic designation you can find in the city.
I make the turn onto Sedgwick Avenue, which has already become busy with children out of school. It’s a good time to find a parking spot.
There is our neighbor, Maritza, waiting in front of the apartment house for her foster girls to return from junior high.
Maritza is, I guess, a good fifteen years older than I. I have this probably-sexist theory about aging in women (maybe it’s true for men, too—I don’t know) that you have to know a woman when she’s young to always be able to see the youth in her eyes—unless she is one of those rare Maritzas, whose youthful flame never dims, no matter what blunt tribulations she’s been through.
She calls out to my kids, who have broken from me on our way to the building, but they run right past her, unmindful.
“So what are you ladies planning to do with your Friday night?” I ask her, kissing her cheek hello.
“Well, I have to take them to the Center,” Maritza groans, turning her attention back to the avenue. Her girls have regular supervised meetings at the Foster Center with their parents. The abusive parents have taken parenting classes and want the kids returned, but it is unresolved whether the father had molested the younger girl, an issue complicated by the girl’s own lack of recall as she’s significantly developmentally disabled.
“Is the Center a good thing?”
“Well...,” she thinks, gathering her thoughts. “Communication is usually a good thing. I just don’t know if anything can be done here to make things better.” She stretches a wide, tight smile and meets my gaze. “Sometimes, everything just sucks, and you got to wait it out, you know?”
I tell her she’s preaching to the choir before continuing on my way. Maritza throws a kiss to Nicholas and Tali who respond only with blinking eyes, as they have become statues. At the entrance to our building, there is a pedestal on either side of the steps. Each pedestal is topped by a little iron fence that once surrounded, perhaps, a planter. The kids like to climb up and pretend to be statues. I pause there, admiring the not-so-stationary forms. I pull Tali’s nose. “Hmm... This clay is still soft.”
I hook her waist with my arm and swing her up on my shoulder. I get Nicky in my other arm, upside-down, him remaining in the shape of a crouched lion on our way across the shady courtyard, before he collapses into a giggling, kicking twist just after we’ve passed into the dim lobby. Some day they will be too heavy to pick up like this is the thought I always have.
They each punch the elevator call button, and, once inside the elevator, they each punch six. I shuffle through my little share of credit card offers and department store circulars from the mailbox.
Nicholas sniffs and makes a face.
“What?” I ask. I review the horrid little elevator’s space, from the point of view of the building’s Tenant Rep, recalling the battle we fought to have things fixed and repainted, a struggle that is ongoing with the building’s slumlord.
“It smells in here.”
There are things Nicholas says that are planted there by his mother. At such a juncture, I must slow the talk down and measure my words.
“No, it doesn’t,” I say. “It needs paint, but....” I inhale deeply through my nose. Tali cheerfully agrees with me and sniffs some herself. “What does it smell like to you?” I ask him.
I can see in his eyes his thoughts changing directions. “Poopy!” he screams, and his mouth hisses with laughter, spit bubbling through his teeth. I shake my hand through his bright blonde dome of hair and help him struggle out in his convulsions.
“Kid attaaaack!” is the scream they give as they run through the apartment doorway to Rina, jumping at her waist, nearly knocking her over. She collapses down to the children and blinks her large eyes up to find mine. The moist hallway air here beside the warm kitchen is infused with the fragrance of herbs I recognize but can’t name.
Rina Rios is a stunning beauty, the kind of woman men find themselves gawking at whether they want to be noticed or not. She is beanstalk-tall, unlike her mother’s Colombian relatives, and bears the Roman nose of her Italian father (“It’s roamin’ all over my face,” she jokes.) Rina’s skin is richly colored a distinctive reddish-olive—that’s the Colombian side. Her long dark curls fall well past her shoulders, and her roller-coaster hips surge dramatically.
But I think it’s really how she carries herself that gets the most attention. She walks with poise, her back straight, her head gracefully erect, floating. She bends to laugh and rolls her engaging eyes.
All the while growing up Rina was the oddball. She was far and away the tallest of all the kids in her class, and she had her own clear idea of who she was, taking little interest in the play and talk of the other girls growing up around her. She did not enjoy physical games and sports, but she tells me she loved to roller skate up and down her Bronx city block—this one. And, of course, everyone in her family loves to dance.
Her dreams of marriage, motherhood, and homemaking were as straightforward as the nightly dreams she describes to me, which are constructed of obvious symbolism and easier to interpret than a Hitchcockian dream sequence. I wouldn’t call her aspirations safe, though, as they maybe still were to a girl early on in my generation. By the time Rina was coming up, they were already preparing girls from kindergarten up to enter the workforce, and, as I know, it is an active, constant struggle to reject normal models of behavior, to go your own way.
Ah, that magic instant when we learn that electrical plugs can be referred to as male-female. Why, yes, of course! we think. It makes perfect sense. The terms alone make it clear which is which. And, careful inspection will reveal that, if two plugs look exactly alike, there ain’t no way they can fit together. And so it is with relationships, as my theory goes: You need to compliment each other. And it’s not just that I’m out making the money while Rina is keeping our home. Her generally calm deliberation often waits out my impatient enervation. And she has a confidence out in the world that my insecurities have always kept beyond my reach.
When we watch a movie, Rina sees one movie and I see another. In hers, the plot is a complicated juxtaposition of facts and spring traps, presented sort of as a puzzle for the viewer to anticipate. In mine, characters always keep their actor’s name, and plot details are only worth storing in my precious short-term banks if they have some allegorical significance. I’m riding a narrative arc through a romantic landscape, while a razor-brandishing Rina is leaned over a project table piled with rhomboid screenplay shards. Between the two of us, we don’t miss a trick.
Nicky, gone in no time to his room and back, carries George, his hamster, in his top shirt pocket. He strolls towards the livingroom where Tali is on the floor with her electronic piano. Intuitively an artist, she picks carefully at the piano, listening for the notes she hears in her head.
I follow Rina to the kitchen, and we share just a little passion. Rina protests that Sissy, the old lady in the apartment across the airshaft, can see us, but Rina’s heavy breathing belies her objections. I clear some space on either side between her blouse and skirt for my hands to rest on the skin right where her wasp-waist curves out. Her back is against the door now, and we drive straight on, right up to the point when one of us must turn back. Now, we slow back down, like an Old West coach detraining its passengers for a prairie picnic.
Like Mary Tyler Moore used to do for Dick Van Dyke in black-and-white, Rina pours me a cup of coffee. Her interior lizard brain drains the day’s events in lively strings of words. Her train has found its way again, and she tells me about what they said and when we are going and what we are going to have to be doing. I keep track of what I can, but I know Rina will, whether I do or don’t.
The apartment’s square-footage is oddly divided, leaving the kitchen as the largest room in the place. We actually have a full set of table and chairs with an island to prepare food on. (Though the square-footage of the rest of the apartment leaves much to be desired.) It’s like when I rented this place my fate was already preparing for Rina and her delicious cooking.
Rina makes her own sofrito, which is a thick, green flavoring sauce, the dominant flavor of which is cilantro. She uses it when she prepares her delicious “sancocho,” a milky chicken soup with a chunk of floating corn on the cob. “Ceviche,” a marinated sea bass, is another common dish we see in our home, though I think it’s more Panamanian than Colombian, as all her family seems to have made their way here through extended stays in Panama. And then, before the holidays, Rina and her mom spend a full day preparing “pasteles,” each of which is a whole meal, essentially, sealed up and cooked in a plantain leaf.
Tonight we dine like a royal family, after Nicholas and I wrestle with a half hour or so of penmanship drills (with Tali across the room voluntarily doing her best to duplicate his tasks.) Nick and Tali each get to light a candle and the kitchen lights are “shut,” one of the rare cracks in Rina’s remarkable English, considering she was raised with only Spanish for her first five years.
Tali seizes the offered toast, but then can’t think of one. Her eyes are smiling now at the glittering fancy glasses held up over the table, and I can see we’d better not wait.
But none of us is ready either.
“Dad,” Nicky asks, poking a finger up. “I don’t suppose we can toast to imaginary people?” I blink at him and he lets out a snicker. “‘Cause I was thinking of toasting to a Pokémon character—guess which one.”
Before
I can voice my objection to this fork in the toast’s road, Tali
jumps up and exclaims, “Pikachu!”
“N-n-no....”
“Kids?”
Tali screams, “Ash!”
Tali has got it right, and Nicky rewards her with smiling nods. I try to concentrate, hurrying my brain-search for a good toast. Before more Pokémon talk gets out, Rina says, “Let’s toast to—”
“George!” Nicky barks. Then, “Sorry, Rina,” and in a teeny-tiny voice, “I just thought of that toast at the very last minute.”
“That’s okay, Nicholas,” she says, measuring her words. “Please, though, in the future, try to be more polite.”
Calmly, we all toast the hamster.
Rina has made chicken stuffed with some creamy stuff, and on the side a dizzying mound of beet risotto. It is my favorite meal she cooks, after, I guess, an all-out turkey dinner. I chew small bites slowly, taking sips of cold white wine between. The kids, with the more sensitive taste buds they always brag about—especially when they’re trying to get out of eating something—are shoveling the food in, but they’re not at all understanding how scrumptious a treat it is.
Whereupon, the phone rings. Rina and I meet eyes. It is probably either Lori, my ex....—well, technically, my wife—or Rina’s mother. We get about two calls a day from each. Rina’s mom lives two floors below and usually wants to know how many onions Rina has left or if the chicken needs to be moved from the freezer to the fridge.
Lori is usually asking if we can take the kids on one of her days (yes,) or if I have a copy of her car’s registration (no,) or if I’ve been giving the kids the liquid Tylenol she’s been pushing (which is the last thing they need to be taking,) or whether or not I am willing to accept some nonsensical divorce agreement her lawyer is trying to feed me.
Luckily, the phone caller is—I call her “Rina, Sr.” (Nicky, gives it a Latin spin, pronouncing, “Rina, Seen-yoor.”) Naming Rina after her mother was the first and last parental act Rina’s father took before retreating to Colombia. The woman he left, who was from then on a single mother to Rina and her older sister, was appropriately of a single mind in all ways. Rina, Sr.’s critical energy and openness made her my most dependable resource during rent strike meetings. Then, it did not take me much longer to realize the strength of her self-sourced intelligence, or to find I could count on her as a true friend.
She is short and overweight, beset with arthritis. She hobbles a little, finding it difficult to get her limbs up and down steps, in and out of cars. Still somehow, her legs will come alive at family parties on the dance floor, and, like my own mother, she’ll always be among the last to call it a night.
I let Rina know our laundry has finished churning in her mother’s machine.
There is time after dinner for a game of “Godzilla,” where I growl and snarl on the couch as the kids jump on me and attempt to smother me with pillows, and I grab them, tickle them, and then allow them to be saved by one of the diverting attacks of the other.
A popular variant of this sport is “The Blob”—essentially Godzilla with a blanket over him.
Then we read. Nicky’s at a point now where he will want to read while we read, following both Mr. Popper’s Penguins and Captain Underpants at the same time. I make him close Captain Underpants. It is a time for slowing things down.
So, it’s the three of us there in the kids’ room. I’m proud of the walls all around, which are mountains and seas and tall grass I painted in various shades of wall paint, light enough in shade so that nothing is really diverting to the eye. You can see the shapes if you are relaxing in bed, gazing at the walls, but nothing jumps at you. Nicholas’s bed is a platform bed, to make room for the toy storage and puppet theater below. A long bookcase holds the many books I’ve collected for them along the way at yard sales and flea markets. For a chest of drawers, they’ve got the same one I had in my own room coming up. Then there are toy chests and a tall bookcase holding all of Tali’s dolls.
Tali asks, “When do I get my next doll, Daddy?”
Nicholas answers, “On Grandmamma’s birthday.”
“Well,” I tell Tali, “...maybe you’ll get one for Christmas. Grandmamma used to love Christmas.” My mother was always ready for Christmas. She shopped at thrift shops all year, and, bit-by-bit, she stored toys away in her closets. No matter what financial straits my family was in, Christmas morning exceeded its promise.
Mom loved dolls as a girl, and, as she had no girls, she came to amass quite a collection of dolls along the way. When, on her deathbed, she made the only specific bequest of any item I’m aware of, telling me to give Tali the dolls, I was touched, but unwitting to just what it would entail. The long and short of it is that now, my apartment’s closets are filled with dolls. Tali gets one every Grandmamma’s birthday—June 14th—and at that rate, with the help of my brother Will’s fortunately female addition to the Crane family, I should be out of dolls just about the time both of them finish college.
“Did I ever know Grandmamma?” Tali asks, hugging her patchwork rag doll.
“Oh, she loved you so much, darling, when you were a little baby. If only she could be here now to see how wonderful you are.” I hug her tight, too tight, and I tell her it’s just like her grandmother’s hug.
I grab my boy and rub my cheek against his. “Here’s what a pop-pop hug would be like if he was here,” I tell him, scratching his cheek with my half-a-week beard growth.
I tuck Tali in. “Did they live here?” she asks, eyes wide, meaning here in the room, I think.
“With you?” Nicholas adds.
“Yes. We all lived together in a house in Pennsylvania. Your Uncle Willy, Uncle Donald, Uncle Steve, Grandmamma and Pop-pop.”
Nicky, climbing into his bunk, tells Tali, “Daddy and Mommy fought all the time, so they couldn’t live together.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, buddy. We didn’t fight so much. It just didn’t work. We loved each other very much, your mommy and I, but sometimes a marriage just doesn’t work and there’s nothing to do to fix it.” I take a deep breath while unpuzzling a child’s understanding of the words that express my thoughts.
“You grow up, and then I’ll explain it all to you.”
Then, as he digs a comic book out from under his pillow, like he’s telling me he has an itch, he says, “Mommy hates you.”
Her voice in my ear, very softly, was murmuring. “You know, Wednesday night when I went to dinner with Amanda and Megan, Megan said Gerald never lifts a finger around the house, and Amanda complained on and on how Philip watches TV all the time and doesn’t like to talk too much, not even to Benjamin.”
“She said that? He doesn’t like to talk to little Benjamin? How did she say that?”
“Well, she said he’s always tired. If Benjamin bothers him too much, he calls her to come get him.” She put the side of her head against my shoulder. “I couldn’t say anything the whole time, Honey, because I have you, and you’re nothing like that.” She sighed deeply. “I am so lucky. What could I say to them?”
Then, even more sweetly, tugging on my arm, she told me, “I’ve got the ideal man.”
I looked over at her and smiled, and then steered the car to the left, which move brought her head up. “Oh, I see now,” she said. “This is her street coming up.”
“Lori, it’s not like this is the first time you’ve come here.” She wasn’t listening, though. She was between the seats, fussing with our baby boy, Nicholas, in the back seat.
“What’s that smell?”
“It’s vapor rub,” she told me. “He’s allergic to the mold spores and dust in your mother’s house. I want to keep his breathing passages open.”
It was a brilliantly sunny Fourth of July. We rarely took the trip to Lansdowne, a suburb of Philadelphia, because Lori couldn’t stand the house Mom lived in.
Yes, the house was dirty with silt from the oil burner. My mother was too sickly to keep things very clean, and she got little help cleaning the place from my two older brothers; Donald, who kept a large, slobbering, smelly (not to mention ill-tempered) dog; and Willy, who was inspired to really any self-sufficient act only by a screeching demand by my mother up the front stairs to his third-floor haven of computer games, sci-fi novels, and television.
Regardless, Lori’s worries over the cleanliness of the place were rather her way of expressing her irritation at being with my family. And possibly that irritation was just an expression of something she felt about me.
Will and I hung our elbows over the backyard fence a while under the overhanging shade trees, watching Nicholas play in the special swimming pool Mom had purchased for her little grandson, overeager for him to grow up, maybe because she was afraid, with her illness, she didn’t have much longer to go. She was thick in places she had never been thick before and just skin and bone in others. Her eyes were as bright as ever, but a weight seemed to hang over her brow, and her movements were stiff. She was scared, too, you could tell, but she was too tough on herself to let it out.
Will was talking. He was telling me a good story—something he relishes.
“So we drove all the way from K-Mart and Don has his hand up out of his window, holding one side of the pool and his other hand on the steering wheel, and mine is up out of my window, holding the other side so it wouldn’t fly off.”
“Why didn’t you tie it down?”
“Mark. Look at that pool.” It was a hard plastic pool, about six feet wide. Round. “How are you going to tie that down?”
My next-oldest brother, Donald, came walking over. I was a little surprised, until I saw the papers in his hand. He wasn’t the type to come and talk with me. He would usually wait until we were sitting around the table with Mom or in a car together before he’d have any direct words with me. Since Mom’s illness advanced, he’d been giving me legal papers to sign, just so we’d be prepared if.
Donald was nothing but a bully to me growing up. Five years older and a high school wrestler, he was able to play off the role casually, as if disinterested. If he didn’t like a look I gave him, he’d just punch me straight in the chest. If I had something he wanted, he’d wrest it away without a word, as if it were merely tangled in some difficult weeds. It was primal—I did not exist because I could not show him significant physical opposition—which one might say was good, because if I could I certainly would have fought back and that probably wouldn’t have been much of an improvement.
As for my parents, when they were around to mediate... well, while his brothers were romping around the house, Donald was studying or reading. He had perfect grades and seemed all grown up already. This was a way of life that spoke directly to our no-good house husband, boozing father, who had left my family for a year to live with another woman when Donald was just starting grammar school.
Donald’s sullenness was respected by my parents. His anger was understandable, whether practiced against Dad or myself.
My father and Donald were ever at odds, Donald, as it seemed to me then, vying for my father’s once-abdicated place as head of the house. Emotionally, Dad cowed to Donald’s scornful, very reasoned strikes, because Donald was right, Dad was a bum. When it came down to it, Dad hated himself, and admired Donald’s academic excellence and cool wit. So, with his incapable father failing miserably to meet a challenge to be capable, responsible—to assert himself more strongly—Donald remained bitter.
He went to prep school, his tuition scrounged or excused on regular pleas to the dean of the Catholic institution by my ever-persevering mother, adept at such sport through practice with the landlord, the milkman, the oil company, the policeman who wanted to arrest Willy for crawling into the sewer after his baseball,.... And if all else failed, Mom would crinkle her brow like her favorite character, Scarlett O’Hara, and breathe, “I’ll say a little prayer.”
Donald adored my mother, who I would say favored him over all her children, had she and I not been so close. And perhaps that may be a reason why he wanted me crushed—a sibling issue. He did not have social problems with people outside the family. And he has always been truly one of the most clever, generous, and conscientious people you might imagine, too. There was just something about me he could not endure.
But let’s not look too carefully at me.
When my dad was alive, Donald fought with him tooth and nail, and once he was gone, Donald moved in with Mom, took over dad’s workbench, and much of Dad’s lifestyle, cooking and puttering around the house, and drinking with Mom.
My brother Will was living there too, but not to be close to Mom. If Will had had it his way, I don’t think he would’ve been home for a full day once reaching the age of sixteen.
Will was the boldest of us all. He clearly yearned to be in charge, too, not for emotional reasons, but as a birthright, him being the oldest and named Will III, after my father’s “Jr.”
Two years older than Donald, Willy was, in comparison, a crazy-ass, having, at the age of six, jumped off the roof of the garage with a wooden airplane that some corner of his brain believed would keep him aloft. He wore a cowboy outfit everywhere he went and liked to shoot hunting arrows with his bow (until he accidentally landed my five-year-old skull a fraction from my left eye and certain blindness.)
Will was hit by a car around the time of his First Holy Communion, and a little while later he developed epilepsy. As a result, he had to take heavy depressants to keep him from grand-mal seizures. Still, even with his brain swimming, he was as smart as half the other kids in grade school and then high school, and he was even able to graduate college. But he could not hold a job very long as an adult, or live alone for that matter. A gap in his thinking would cause him to make some horrible blunder if he wasn’t so unlucky to just have a seizure while climbing a ladder, crossing the street, or driving a motorcycle. He needed to live with someone who cared enough to keep an eye out.
I signed Donald’s papers.
“So you’re a probation officer?” he asked.
“Yep. I have been for two years, now.” It was a funny job for me to have, the youngest and most artistic of the four boys. When they were playing football, I’d be maybe pasting together a collage of world leaders who’d been assassinated: Gandhi, the Kennedys, Lincoln. Or I’d be in the basement with my Action Jackson doll grappling a clothesline. That male-patterning that boys do with sports and exercise, violent movies, rock music—I never related even slightly. My brothers would be watching football, and all I’d see on the TV were ants running back and forth across the screen. (Then again, that is how televised football looked in those days.) When I was in my mid-twenties, almost perversely, the appeal of it all came through to me, and I found myself plowing around in my van with Boston blasting on the stereo, playing basketball every chance I got, and raising an absolute ruckus when someone with an Eagles uniform dropped the ball.
And now, with Steve a contracts manager, Donald a welfare clerk, and Will selling cars, I was the one with the manly job. Donald shifted that around in his head.
“You carry a gun for that job?”
I told him no, yet I couldn’t help but pull out my wallet and flash him a look at my badge. Donald denied me the pleasure, though, and his eyes passed instead to the neighbor’s trash cans beside the yard behind me, and he wandered off, talking to himself, “Are they going to ever empty that pile of crap before we get raccoons?” Will marveled at the shield, though, and made me feel quite important.
“He’s done in the pool?” I heard Donald call out to Lori, and I looked over to find her drying Nicholas and carrying him up the stairs to the deck Donald and Will had built for Mom.
“Yeah, well, the sun is strong today and I don’t want him to get burned,” Lori said, squinting like there was a nuclear fireball in the sky or something.
“You missed it,” I called awkwardly to Donald. “He really had a great time splashing the dog.”
I let Lori go in with Nicky, and I sat with Mom and a cup of coffee. She had an iced tea.
“So, I hear you have a microwave?”
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“I thought you were opposed to microwaves? Didn’t you tell me they caused disease?” Mom was using the most sincere tone for her pointed questions. It was true. I had preached the vices of the irradiating evil of the microwave oven many times to my mother who’d snatched one up at an auction a few years back. Lately, I’d found them to be quite safe and quite reasonably priced. I’m not sure which discovery came first.
We talked about the paintings I had been working on. Lori had written a children’s story, and I was illustrating it. The apartment was draped in these paintings anywhere the cat and Nicholas could not reach.
“I’ve always said that’s what you’re best at,” she reminded me. “Why you never went in for art, I’ll never know.”
“Mom, don’t you remember? I wanted to go to Pratt, but you said I had to go to a regular college?”
That wounded her, which I did not intend. I just wanted it off my chest, I guess. “You mean it was something I said that kept you from going to art school?”
“No, no. You remember how much I wanted to go to NYU. God, that was the best.”
Her mind carefully stepped out of that subject, and she came across something bright. “Are you coming down for the fair?”
Outdoors in the peak of the foliage season, I always enjoyed the church fair.
“Well, that’s not until October,” I told her. “You know I’d love to make it. We’ll just have to see how things go.”
Just then, Lori came out. I could see through the screen door she had Nicky in the stroller. “I’m going to take a walk over to the pharmacy. He needs some teething medicine.”
Teething medicine? I did not show my irritation. I could see my mother was wearied with her own planning—that she had diapers, wipes, ointment...—Everything but the one thing Lori needed. Still.
“Oh, here,” I offered. “Let me go with you.” I figured Lori was putting herself out to be around my family, something that I knew made her crazy, so I might as well support her while she’s here. She might even want to stay for dinner.
Lori concentrated on the navigation of the stroller over the narrow sidewalks that surfed the tree roots with clumsy concrete patches, her white limbs, thinned from a recent enthusiasm with exercise, working a little too hard.
The drug store was one of those huge, new places, always open, offering everything from cigars to snacking groceries. The aisles were empty on this holiday, and some Seventies rock could be heard clearly enough to keep my feet moving comfortably.
Lori joked about shoplifting from time-to-time, but I always left the little bit of her joking that sounded serious untouched. She was not a thief. When I went shopping with her, though, she would bother me by keeping her items in the baby’s stroller as a shopping basket.
She knew it bothered me.
This time, I looked away as she began casually slipping her shampoo bottles and Q-Tip packages around our sleeping baby. I did what I could to distract the corner of my eye from keeping track of the items as I followed her down the cool, antiseptic aisle.
It wasn’t a game. It was Passive Aggression 101, the way Lori knew best to deliver it. I would put up with about 20 seconds of such nonsense before calling it what it was, so Lori knew to save this type of activity for times when it was most inconvenient for me to raise an objection. A hundred miles from home out on a trip to my family, I was most disinclined to start an argument with her.
At the register, she stacked up her small $20 pile of toiletries, but I couldn’t help myself. As she was preparing to pay, I reached down and, hoping to find nothing there, I felt under the blanket, just below the baby’s neck and found an expensive bottle of vitamins. I placed them up before the cashier. Lori blinked her small, dark eyes at me, her mouth in a little oval, then turned to the cashier who added the item and took Lori’s money.
There have been so many junctures in my life when I can see trouble brewing very clearly, way ahead of time. I know just what misunderstanding is going to happen, and it has not even begun to happen, and still, no matter what I do, there is nothing that can as much as even slow the development of the problem.
My eyes waited, watching the back of her henna-infused flop of red hair.
It’s like I can see the person is moving in the wrong direction, but I still think of the future as being under my control. I fail to estimate the other person’s capacity to drive our fate.
She looped her bags around the handle of the stroller and rolled on towards the automatic doors.
“How did you remember that vitamin bottle?!” she asked, turning to face me once we were full into the outside heat. “Were you watching me?”
My reply played casual. Still, at the end I couldn’t help but stick in something along the lines that she should use a shopping basket so that misunderstandings don’t happen. “Misunderstandings?!” and in just a few beats more she was trying to say I was accusing her of shoplifting, which, in fact, I was trying very hard not to do.
Then she was talking about my family and this awful day, and we were coming up my mother’s walk and her voice was too loud and the baby was crying, so I picked him up and bounced him in my arms as I climbed the steps, and she walked in front of me, but I stopped responding to her, finding nothing to say that did anything but make her angrier, so, hoping nothing would spawn nothing, I said nothing, and she just glared at me, then pow! punched me hard in the cheek, swinging just over Nicky’s head.
I was thinking nothing, or rather how did she have the control over an act that people do in movies, boys do in high school, trying to pattern after men in boxing rings? Then, as Nicky and I watched for some sense to show itself, she found herself dissatisfied with my response and she punched the other side of my face with her other fist. Squarely.
I did nothing. There was nothing to do. Nicholas’s face was right in front of mine, watching me, his eyes trying to put it together. I could not let him be traumatized, so I was still, letting him study the odd swatch of time. She started talking again, just as angry as before. I walked back down off the porch, Nicholas still in my arms. I walked swiftly down the street. The harpy followed, still yapping and yapping. She was telling me I should apologize. I checked Nicky, who was playing with the buttons on my shirt. My lack of response, I guess, had fooled him into letting the disturbing image pass.
I made the full circuit of the block. I went in and said goodbye to Mom. I suppose I made some excuse. She was gracious, as always. I guess I was too miserable to care too much about Mom’s feelings there, but she was so sick, even she didn’t care too much about her feelings. We hugged goodbye, a long, lingering hug always, Mom rubbing her hand quickly up and down my back.
My first memory is standing in one of the two laundry tubs in the Media house, on the back porch, Mom rubbing my back with a soapy towel, my brother, Steven, standing in the tub beside mine, the two of us making faces and the sun shining in hot on the cement wall in front of me. There was a dog sitting on the floor, right in the way of everything, and piles of laundry all around. A wet pile of balled-up shirts waited on the ironing board.
The thin porch door smacked, and Willy, hunched over, strode through, passing only a glance our way.
We lived in Media, Pennsylvania, the county seat of Delaware County, just twenty miles outside Philadelphia. A county seat is a great place for kids to run around; there always is a distinct center of town, with a courthouse, often set behind a little park with a Civil War statue; there are always piles of old buildings, too, more than a few of which are especially impressive to see—built for the wealthy judges and lawyers of a hundred years ago. A county seat usually comes with cultural extras, too—a library, a museum, all sorts of social and political clubs, maybe even a playhouse.
My entire childhood was spent in a house just three blocks from State Street, Media’s central thoroughfare. We four boys ran wild around that town using as our base what will always be a mansion in my memory—a twin, actually, but old--19th century—and three stories with a whitewashed, cave-like basement big enough to play a game of run-the-bases in. Like the echoes from the big bang, the sounds that reverberated through the house of our shoes clopping on the wood floors are still in my head today.
Unlike my brothers, as a small child I was raised mostly by my father, because, by the time I was born, my parents had begun to understand Dad was not going to keep a job. He’d been fired from a slew of jobs—the boss would overhear him talking down the company or he’d be caught slacking off. He was fired from the A&P after it was noticed he was passing poor people’s groceries through without ringing everything up.
And he was as much an alcoholic at heart as any Bowery bum.
When he was a handsome young buck with slicked black hair, Bill Crane showed eyes that glinted mischievously over an unwieldy intellect. He was gifted the early wisdom that comes from having never truly believed in an authority higher than his own resource. His father was a salesman of cardboard packaging—to whom any client capable of signing a purchase order was worthy of his deliberate esteem. As such, his father was an intimate to the bogus fabrication of authority.