The Violent Child Read online

  The Violent Child

  Michael Sheridan

  New York

  For Howard and Leota. Carl and Mr. Bair.

  Barbara Carter, RN.

  with love, Mike.

  ONE

  Lorraine is tethered to a small oxygen bottle by a length of green plastic tubing. She pushes the bottle before her in a metal cart, gripping the handle like a cane as she makes the rounds of her darkened apartment: television, refrigerator, thermostat, and toilet.

  I watch as she creeps along the path she has worn in the carpet, nostrils sucking hard upon the green plastic spikes, chest huffing like an engine beneath the rag of her terrycloth robe. Droopy yellow socks. Disposable foam slippers from her last visit to the hospital. As she reaches the kitchen door, she pats at the hair tips bristling through her ancient silk scarf, then picks at the front of her nightgown as though she would finger the tired lace into something delicate and beautiful. She sways and takes one of her great, shuddering breaths.

  Lorraine has mastered the art of holding a cigarette and bourbon in one hand so she may push her oxygen about the apartment with the other. And, now, as she throws out an elbow and steadies herself against the jamb, she looks at me over her shoulder, coughing so hard that her lips turn as blue as her hair. But if she has the look of some bony-legged refugee, I am not deceived by this illusion of frailty. For, glaring out from her rheumy eyes are the fiery lights of a two-fisted young steel worker, measuring me with the same certitude with which I have just measured her.

  “What you looking at?” Lorraine wheezes, her words coarse and raspy, like coal grating along a wooden chute. “Ain’t you never seen a woman with a Toni?”

  “I’ve seen a Toni or two,” I say.

  “Colored girl come down from upstairs. Goes to colored beauty school over on East Washington. She does me okay, but not as good as Trudy used to. Hell, nobody beats Trudy on a Toni.”

  “That scarf’s seen better days.”

  She nods and pats the side of her head.

  “Ted brought me it from the war. Real Jap silk, if you believe anything out of Ted’s mouth. Had it since before you was born.”

  “Yes. I remember you wearing it way back in the South First days.”

  “You don’t remember, Teddie. You was just a kid.”

  “I remember.”

  “Been fifty years, Teddie. You hear people talking, think you remember.”

  “I can see you in that scarf. Standing at the sink doing dishes. That Toni smell.”

  “For cryin’ out loud!” Lorraine rasps, the ropy veins throbbing at the sides of her neck. “You wasn’t no more’n five years old!”

  I close my eyes and wait for Lorraine to catch her breath. I imagine her lungs hanging in her chest like two clots of black, glistening tar. The years of Pall Malls and mill ash have done this to her: she is unable to navigate a world farther than her front door without the help of a wheelchair. Now, when Lorraine visits the market or the liquor store, she must pay the neighborhood children to lift the oxygen bottle into the rack on her wheelchair and to push her there and back; she finds dimes and nickels at the bottom of her purse and drops them like bits of gold into their outstretched palms. These are, of course, ludicrous sums in times of five-dollar crack and hundred-dollar basketball shoes. But, because of her reputation as the local character, because she is the last white person with sufficient spleen to survive the neighborhood, her neighbors send their children whenever she phones. I am allowed, by association, safe passage on my infrequent filial visits. However, I must pay these same children ten dollars an hour to leave my pickup unmolested while I am inside.

  I phone Lorraine once or twice a month, visit three or four times a year. If our phone conversations are necessarily brief and superficial, our visits are tightly choreographed, the first fragile moments almost ritualistic in their detail: we have learned how to provide for the minimum confrontation, to dilute the mutual infliction of our history. We feel safe beginning in this way. As safe as two people can be who believe they see each other so clearly.

  I will knock … listen through the door as Lorraine rises from her recliner and wheels her tank across the floor. She stands on her toes and peers walleyed through the peephole. I put my eye close to the lens and wink.

  “Bogeyman,” I say. “Special delivery. Somebody’s got to sign.”

  “Minute,” Lorraine says. She fumbles with the dead bolts and chains, opens the door a few inches and waves me in. “Kids,” she says. “Got to nail ever’thing down.”

  I carry a case of half-pints and two cartons of cigarettes into the kitchen. Lorraine comes behind, puffing straight to the sink, coughing and pointing: put three half-pints on the counter, stow the rest beneath the sink. Open both cartons of cigarettes and, with a supply of lighters peeled from their plastic wrappers, dump them into the drawer next to the stove.

  When all is completed to her satisfaction, I take a bag of hoary deli ice from the freezer and bang it on the edge of the counter until the cubes are loose.

  “I’ll pour,” Lorraine says. She wrinkles her nose. “You water ‘em down.”

  I ask if she is sure. Say I don’t mind.

  She flicks an open hand in my direction as if she has just slapped my face for questioning her ability to perform this simple task.

  I watch as she takes the nutcracker from the drawer, applies it to the cap on a half-pint and cracks the seal. She prefers the small bottles to pints or fifths—her hands are thin, her fingers knobbed with arthritis. She is also better able to monitor her intake. She allows herself only three half-pints a day: one for morning housework, one for afternoon soaps, the last in order to sleep. She is careful to exceed this limit only for special occasions such as my visits. She is afraid of becoming an alcoholic.

  Finally, we settle in the living room, and, after the usual pleasantries, our conversation turns to the eternal issues. Lorraine will begin by complaining that her inability to fashion my childhood is the sole reason for my failed life. I will tell her it is unfair that she takes all the credit. I attempt to comfort her by saying that failed lives are essentially self-orchestrated. Independent of circumstance or events. But Lorraine will not be comforted, and tells me, in so many words, that I hide behind vocabulary, shield myself with abstractions.

  And so, we pass the hours in her living room over half-pints and packs of cigarettes, debating the requisites of ruined lives and the inevitability of the male hormone.

  But tonight, I think it might be time to stretch us out, to see how much truth we can stand from one another before we exhaust the generosity of bourbon. I remind her that I have been sober in the months since my last visit—no more white-knuckling the toilet seat, no more blood staring back from the bowl. I tell her that tonight is merely a blip on a long curve of sobriety. That I have given myself permission to sit in the middle of her couch, in the middle of my life, and allow the dogs a night to run. I try to explain, as I sign my father’s name to the coffee table dust, that events are the explication of character, not its origin. I use the example of the Big Jeanette fight, maintaining that our collective moment of violence revealed character rather than created it. I tell her that, over the years, I have thought of Jeanette with gratitude, for she authored in me the mercy of an important realization: the nature of violence is no more evil than the nature of love is free from pain.

  Even though Lorraine and I share a common history, we have long since passed the place where we share common language or symbols. I am unable to ease Lorraine’s sense of responsibility. She is unable to deflect me from a life of self-infliction by portraying her own. But we talk. As the night passes, we allow each other a wide place to raise hell and ramble; we make pictures in the air with ou
r hands, invoking the old realities in the space between us, reinforcing the illusions which sustain us: mother and child.

  I recount the particulars of the Big Jeanette fight. Of the time Lorraine was living in a basement apartment across from the switching yard at Inland Steel. Lorraine was working rotating shifts in the ingot plant, wondering what in the hell she was going to do when my sister was born. I had been sent across town to live with Marge and Leo, my father’s parents, until the baby came.

  It was late summer, so hot that the apartment’s block walls were sweating, reeking of mildew and roach spray. Lorraine had thrown blankets over the windows to keep out the afternoon sun. I had stayed with Lorraine on her weekend off, and, now, my grandmother, Marge, had come over on the bus to take me back to her place.

  Marge and Lorraine sat on the couch drinking coffee, and I stood on a chair at the kitchen table licking Twinkie off the cardboard and wrapper. There were no walls. Just one sprawling studio divided into rooms by furniture. If I stayed quiet, pretending not to listen, I could hear the news about Ted. Whenever they lowered their voices and hunched close together, they were speaking about my father.

  “Seen him lately?” Lorraine asked.

  I tipped back in my chair and put my face in the crack of light streaming in under the blanketed window. With my head at that angle, I could hear the women above the noise from the alley.

  “Ted don’t have time for his poor old mom no more,” Marge said.

  They sipped and looked into their coffee.

  “Better’n a month,” Marge said.

  “Horseshit,” Lorraine said.

  “Don’t, now, honey. Your condition.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Well … maybe he come over with Miriam last week.”

  “That whore.”

  “You dig a scab, it won’t heal, Lorraine. A woman needs time to heal over a …”

  “I’m over the son of a bitch. Way over.”

  Marge looked down at Lorraine’s belly.

  “I was dumb enough to let him wiggle back—once,” Lorraine said.

  “Well, sweetheart, looks to me like Ted wasn’t the only one doing the wiggling.”

  Lorraine brought her knees together and looked away.

  Marge laughed and covered her teeth. “God, kid,” she said. “It’s a little late to be putting them legs together, don’t you think?” She pinched Lorraine on the arm.

  Lorraine pulled away.

  “Ma’s just teasing you,” Marge said. “You know I love you like my own. More’n that damn Ted of mine.”

  “Now there’s a crock! Christ, Ma, half the time you act like the man’s Jesus come to breakfast. Where’s he run to when he’s booze-sick or hidin’ out on his wife? Who bails him out of County ever’ time he gets his butt slammed in a crack? Ain’t nothin’ wrong with Ted except a case of over-mothered.”

  I slid from my chair and pushed it to the sink. I climbed up and turned on the water, letting it race until the brown cleared. Turning it to a trickle, I held my mouth to the faucet.

  “Teddie,” Lorraine said, “get your mouth off there and get a glass like a normal human being. Then go on outside ‘til bus time. You got your good pants on so no rough-house.”

  “I want to stay in,” I said.

  “Go on. Me and Grandma want to talk.”

  “I won’t listen about Ted.”

  Marge laughed.

  Lorraine pointed to the door. “Move your butt, mister.”

  I ran to the table for the rest of the Twinkie.

  “Leave it,” Lorraine said.

  “How’s come?”

  “Because I said so, and because it ain’t polite in front of the other kids. You can take it on the bus with Grandma.”

  Lorraine snapped her fingers toward the door.

  I looked at Marge.

  “Git!” Lorraine said.

  “Jeeze!” I said and ran for the screen door. I opened it wide, banging it behind me as I ran up the steps. I swung under the pipe railing when I reached the top of the stair, dropped into the window well near the door, and looked into the apartment through the crack beneath the blanket.

  Lorraine had the flyswatter in her hand and was struggling to push herself up from the couch. Marge put a hand on Lorraine’s knee and whispered something in her ear. Lorraine threw the swatter across the room, and the springs groaned as she sat back into the cushions.

  “Dammit,” Lorraine said. “Sometimes I could skin that little shit alive.”

  “He was just mad over his Twinkie,” Marge said.

  “He don’t pull that crap on me. You see him look at you when I told him no? You better not let him pull that crap at your place, neither. He starts pullin’ that crap, I’ll find somewhere else for him.”

  “Come on, now, Lorraine. You don’t have to mean-talk. Just don’t crowd all the spunk out of the kid is all I was …”

  “Ma, you and Leo done wonderful for me and Teddie. Beyond the call of duty, and I’m thankful. But don’t mess with me on raising. That kid’s got Ted wrote all over him. He needs a knot jerked in his tail, and I’m just the one to do it. You better back me to the hilt if you want to keep keepin’ him. I ain’t endin’ up with another Ted on my hands.”

  Marge put down her coffee and folded her hands on her lap.

  “I ain’t endin’ up with another Ted,” Lorraine said.

  “Alright, honey. You’re the boss when it comes to raising. We’ll do it just the way you want. I love that little boy with all my heart. It’d cut me and Leo to the quick you let somebody else do for him.”

  “He is the spittin’ image of his dad, ain’t he.”

  “He is. Just like his dad at that age. But he walks and holds himself more like you. Leo says he’s got his mom’s fight-back and want to do right. But you sit on the kid too hard, you’ll likely get the very thing you’re trying to keep from.”

  “I know what I’m doin’.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Teddie’ll turn out.”

  “Sure he will. All I’m saying, just give the kid room to turn out—maybe in a way you ain’t got in mind. The raising is only half the deal, Lorraine. The other half is his own inside self.”

  Marge reached out and stroked Lorraine’s hair.

  “Let me brush it out, honey,” she said. “Let me pull it back and pin it away from your face.”

  I ran to the vacant lot next door. I stood in the sun, sweating, disappointed Lorraine had not come waddling after me, full speed, shouting and waving the swatter in the air.

  I kicked up some dust and watched as it puffed from the hard pan and swirled on the heavy air, as it hung and moved slowly, boiling in a cloud over my head. The sun beat down in the stillness, and heat shimmered from the packed earth and the brick walls that bordered three sides of the lot. When the dust began to settle and cling, I beat it from my pant legs and stooped to wipe it from my shoes.

  I had not seen the girl sitting in the shade at the edge of the lot. Bent over my shoes, I didn’t hear her as she crept behind me. She pounced on my back and wrapped me in her arms.

  “Big Jeanette, you fat hog!” I said.

  “Oochy, oochy, oochy,” Jeanette laughed. She pressed down, and I fell into the dirt.

  “My good pants! My good pants!” I yelled.

  Jeanette was a few years older, the daughter of Lorraine’s closest friend, Trudy. The girl terrorized all the boys my age in the neighborhood, but she never meant to hurt us. Jeanette just wanted to play. Dress up and house and married, she said. She wanted to hold us, to feel our smooth skins, to rub her face in our hair. We threw rocks and called her Fat Hog and Retardo. Jeanette would chew the heels of her hands as we laughed and danced out of reach, but, whenever she caught one of us, she would hold us down and smother us with kisses.

  Lorraine had laid down the law: “I ever catch you deviling that poor little retarded girl, I’ll blister you ‘til you can’t sit for a week.”

  Je
anette used her bulk to roll me over and pin my arms with her knees. She sat on my stomach, bending low over my face. She coughed up some phlegm. I squirmed and kicked. “No!”

  She let a long trail of mucus drip from her mouth.

  “No!” I said and twisted my head.

  “Right’n the ear!” she crowed. “Right’n the ear!”

  I thrashed and twisted and bucked.

  “The boy gots great big tears,” she sang, massaging dirt and tears into my cheeks.

  “Get off, you fat hog!”

  Jeanette sat down harder. She tried to kiss me, but, each time she bent down, I managed to turn my head.

  “Gimme a smooch,” she said.

  I kept my face turned to the side.

  “Okay, then,” she said. She gripped my ears with both hands, digging in her nails for a better hold, and leaned close.

  “Not on the mouth!” I shrieked.

  Jeanette laughed and brushed my lips with her own. I shook my head with all my strength, and her thumb slid into the corner of my mouth. I bit down.

  Jeanette howled.

  She slapped my face and bounced on my stomach, but I bit harder. Finally, when she raised herself to her knees, I bucked, and she fell onto her side. There was a tearing sound as her thumb was wrenched from my teeth, and she cradled her hand in the crook of her arm, rocking it as though it were a baby. She wept without a sound, mouth open wide.

  I leaped up and spat her blood from my mouth. When I saw what she had done to my clothes, I attacked, screaming and crying, grunting with rage each time the toe of my shoe met her solid, fleshy back. Jeanette rolled on the ground and sobbed, swatting in my direction with her good hand, but I was out of control. My foot thudded into her again and again as she wallowed in the dirt, so that by the time Lorraine arrived, Jeanette had curled into a whimpering ball.

  I heard the swish of Lorraine’s dress as she rushed up behind me, but I was too weak to run.

  Lorraine grabbed me by the hair, yanking me to my feet. She slapped the back of my head with the flat of her hand, punctuating each syllable: “What-in-the-hell-did-I-tell you …”