The Violent Child Read online

  That evening, after the sun had dropped behind the mill and long, smokestack shadows fell across our building, Lorraine stood on the couch and pulled the blankets from the windows. The hinges creaked as she pushed on the rickety frames, and pieces of caulking caught in her hair as she struggled to prop the wood with a stick.

  When Lorraine stepped down, she lifted the faded brown maternity dress over her head and threw it on the couch. Naked except for underpants, she padded barefoot to the end table lamp, licked her fingers, and unscrewed the bulb. She stood in the darkness, arms folded across her belly, swaying to the hum of the street light. I watched her from where I lay on the kitchen floor.

  “I can’t see now,” I said.

  “Turn the stove light on,” she said. “Let’s play with just the stove light on.”

  I opened the oven door, stood on it, and pushed the button above the burners. The light flickered on and the kitchen glowed soft yellow; I slipped into the shadows beneath the open oven door.

  Lorraine came into the kitchen and walked to the icebox. She peeled a rag from where she had spread it on the block of ice.

  “Switcheroonie,” she said.

  I pulled off my hanky bandana and removed the rag from the welts on the back of my head. The cloth had been warm for some time, and I complained when she tied the cold one in place. She rinsed the warm one in cool water and returned it to the ice.

  Lorraine had told Marge that she would call in sick to work and keep me one more night. After we walked Marge to the bus, Lorraine and I spent the rest of the evening in the kitchen, listening to the radio, playing trucks with some mill ends I’d found in the alley, drinking Coke, and eating macaroni.

  Lorraine eased herself onto the floor and lay close to me, on her hip, one hand under her head. She pulled her panties below her belly and rubbed the red ring left by the elastic. Her skin glistened with sweat, and she left wet marks on the linoleum whenever she moved to get more comfortable.

  We played a long while in the shadows in front of the stove, sliding the wood across the floor, making truck noises. The floor was gritty, and the blocks scratched across the linoleum as they swerved around the pop bottles and empty paper plates. Every window in the neighborhood was open, and we could hear people laughing and fighting and drinking. Lorraine told me to turn down the radio so that we could “hear everybody’s business.”

  After awhile, she touched the back of my head and spoke.

  “Mamma didn’t mean to hit so hard.”

  “I know,” I said, keeping my eyes on the wood.

  “You just can’t hit girls. I told you a hundred times.”

  “It’s bad.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like when Ted hits you.”

  I felt her watching, but she said nothing.

  “I won’t be like Ted,” I said.

  Lorraine took me into her arms and held me until the sweat ran between us. She took my face into her hands and crushed it against her own. I pulled her hair over us like a tent as she kissed my ears and eyes and mouth.

  The next day, Lorraine moved me out of Marge and Leo’s and back with her. She said I was old enough to look out for myself. Marge and Leo gave us money when Lorraine was laid off at the mill, and Lorraine promised she would stay home until the baby came. She told me it was time that I pulled my own weight: she put me in charge of sweeping, taking out the garbage, and, especially, watching after Jeanette. I would have to take Jeanette’s part with the other kids, she said, to keep me out of trouble and to atone for what I had done. But, after the fight, Jeanette stopped chasing the boys and stayed more to herself.

  My job was made even easier that fall when the nuns told Trudy that she would have to take Jeanette out of regular school—she had failed second grade for the third time. Jeanette stayed with the nuns at the nursery school when Trudy worked days, with a sitter when Trudy worked swing or graveyard. When they were home, Jeanette rarely came out of the house unless she was with Trudy, and, except for Lorraine and me, the neighborhood was willing to forget her.

  The last time I saw Jeanette was just after I graduated high school, when I was making the rounds of the neighborhood before I went overseas. Lorraine had sent me to Trudy’s to see if I could get her car running. I charged the battery, cleaned the plugs, filed the points. Trudy waved me in for a grilled cheese and coffee after I came back from a test drive. I washed up in the kitchen sink, then waited in the living room for her to call me to the table.

  Jeanette was standing at the living room window watching the Mexican kid across the street wax his car. I went to the window and stood next to her. The Mexican was a good-looking kid, small and well put together. Tight jeans and a muscle shirt. Black hair slicked into a duck tail. We could hear the trumpets and guitars from the radio on his front porch. “I like him,” Jeanette said. “We’re married.”

  She smiled. Her teeth were yellow, and her gums were red and swollen, bleeding a little in front. There was a heavy moustache on her upper lip, and pimples along her jaw that wept and looked sore. From the medicine, Trudy said. There was a scar on Jeanette’s thumb. Puckered and silver.

  Lorraine listens as I tell the story. She leans forward in her chair, nodding or shaking her head at various points during the presentation of dialogue and events. She remains quiet, which is unusual, because she loves to recount such stories herself and believes that they must be told from her point of view before she will ascribe to them any shred of truth or relevance.

  We sit for a moment in silence. She looks at me through her thick bifocals as she strikes a match to her cigarette. She takes a drag and swirls the watery bourbon at the bottom of her glass.

  “You tryin’ to tell me somethin’?” she says, crunching a sliver of ice at the back of her dentures.

  I tell her that it has to do with the violence of love. With testosterone and broken marriages and grown children who know me only through rumors of my lack of character.

  “With the revelation of character,” I say.

  “Just like your dad,” she laughs, shaking her head, stubbing out her cigarette. “Bigger words, same old line of happy horseshit.”

  I say that I am not like Ted. I am no womanizer. I have been sober nearly three months running. And the only woman I ever raised my hand against was poor old Jeanette.

  “Well, thanks for nothing, Lord Fauntleroy,” she says. “Bend over and let me kiss it.”

  “I’ve come a long way from Ted,” I say.

  “My own damn fault. Should of pried your nose out of all them books when you was a kid. Same old happy horseshit … college boy words.”

  TWO

  I turn down the television and walk to the kitchen door. I lean against the jamb and watch Lorraine labor over our drinks, listening to the chatter of the glasses as she loads them with ice. The cubes pop and crackle as she splashes them with bourbon, adds a small burst from the faucet. She dips her forefinger into each drink, giving it a swirl, then smacks her lips as she sucks the finger clean.

  Lorraine wobbles toward me, clasping the glasses to her breast with the flat of her hand and wrist. She jerks her head and grunts—her way of saying, “Move it, buster, I’m comin’ through.”

  I return to the couch, and Lorraine drops her drink off at the TV tray beside her chair. She places mine on a coaster on the coffee table in front of me.

  “Coaster!” she breathes, wagging a finger. “Ashtray!” she says and points to the end table next to my leg.

  Lorraine always pours the first few rounds to show me that she is still capable. She leaves the bourbon in the kitchen to underscore the modesty of her consumption, to demonstrate her ability to navigate the apartment even though she is weak and short of breath. It is her way of showing me she is not yet ready for the nursing home.

  After the first half-pints disappear, I bring a few bottles and a bowl of ice to the coffee table to save trips.

  Lorraine rests for a long while in the nest of pillows lining her recliner. Finally,
she lights a cigarette and smiles.

  “Dew’s off the lily,” she wheezes. “But the old broad still gets around, don’t she?”

  “Drink to that,” I say, raising my glass to the toast.

  “Bet your butt,” she says.

  It is difficult to see her here. Like this. But, I have given up asking her to refrain from the things which kill her. When I broach the topic of a nursing home, she will throw things in my direction. Cigarettes. Ice cubes. The TV Guide. When she recovers her breath, she will remind me that she is, as she has ever been, her own woman. That she has savings, full medical, and a good pension from the mill.

  “It’ll be a cold day in hell,” she says, “’fore you pack your mom off to the old folks’ home. That one time they locked me up just before you come home from overseas? Like to never got out of that hell hole. God help you, Teddie Durbin, you ever try’n pack your mom off to the old folks’ home.”

  Lorraine makes no apologies for her situation and accepts her lot without complaint. Since we are alike in this way, I must respect her choices. Still, it is difficult to see her like this. For I cannot help but see the young woman beneath the wagging neck skin and bloated belly. Independent and strong, both fists swinging. Never a fight ring for Lorraine. No elaboration of rules, no touching of gloves before hostilities. Lorraine was an alley fighter. A body puncher. Her way was to bully life into a corner—then apply fists, feet, and teeth.

  It is difficult to watch as some of her finest qualities turn against her, as their now-poisonous residues contaminate the end of her life. For it seems the words of people long dead fester within Lorraine’s mind; she dwells in places long razed for the coming of condos and espresso shops—as though the ferocity of her love blossoms with tumors, metastasizing to mind and spirit.

  Lorraine stubs out her cigarette and takes a long pull at her bourbon. She dabs her lips on the back of her sleeve, then carefully centers the glass on its coaster.

  “You had your say on Jeanette,” she says, “and I didn’t say diddley. I’ll have my say now.” She thrusts an arm out before her as though she sweeps a table full of dishes to the floor. “No head-up-his-butt college boy sticking his nose in ’til I’m done. I set here and listened quiet to all your fancy-ass horseshit, you can damn well set there and listen to your mom tell how it really was.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Mr. Hot Shot Pro-fesser.”

  I fold my arms across my chest and sigh. “I’m all ears.”

  “Trouble is, people don’t do for each other no more. Back then, people did for each other. What’d of come of us without old Trudy? Or Marge and Leo? We’d of gone to hell in a handbasket, that’s what.”

  “We’d have been …”

  “… between a rock and a hard spot. You shut up, now! Hell, even the iceman put us on the cuff ‘til we got back on our feet. The god damn iceman! And he didn’t know us from Adlai Stevenson. You imagine that nowadays? Nowadays damn ten-year-old kid’d knock you over the head for a quarter.”

  We smoke and drink while Lorraine tallies on her fingers the count of those who helped us, those who didn’t, and how she ultimately repaid each according to his measure. I have heard these stories many times, but I pretend to follow closely, interjecting questions or comments at appropriate intervals. To occupy my mind, I wander back to a morning not long after the fight with Jeanette.

  It must have been just before Lorraine went to the hospital with my sister. She was swollen and uncomfortable and, on the advice of the doctor, spent most mornings in bed with her legs propped on cushions pulled from the couch. I woke early and went to the alley to wait for my friends to wake and come outside. The sun was still behind the rooftops, the concrete cool, the streets quiet. A pack of strays prowled the garbage cans, pacing and sniffing, yelping the moment I reached down for a rock.

  I squatted in the window well above the kitchen, breathing the warm air as it rose from the apartment: fried potatoes and coffee, the sour smell of Lorraine’s trip to the sink when her breakfast came back up, the lingering fumes of the previous night’s Toni.

  I curled against the corrugated steel, fingering spit onto the window screen, watching as Lorraine rolled herself out of bed and waddled to the stack of dishes in the sink. Her head was wrapped in her Toni scarf, the sleeves of her duster rolled up past her elbows. I pressed my ear to the screen as she began whispering to herself, but the words flew so fast and low that I could not make out what was said.

  When the ice truck swung into other end of the alley, two men jumped out of the cab and began to make a great racket as they wrestled the silvery blocks onto their shoulders and hauled them into the buildings. I watched as they worked their way slowly toward me, stopping and starting the truck, finally pulling up to the back of the bar behind our apartment with a loud screech of the brakes. I crouched low, peeking over the metal rim of the well as the iceman and his helper heaved a huge block onto each shoulder and, backs bent beneath the weight, kicked open the barroom door. When they returned and took the stairs to the apartments above, I ran from my hiding place and sneaked into the truck cab for a pretend-drive. They came back sooner than I expected, so I hid on the floor next to the gear box, waiting for them to pick up another load and head back upstairs. I listened as they sat on the front fender, rolling cigarettes, talking. If I raised up slightly, I could see the backs of their heads through the windshield: their hair stuck out along the bottoms of their rumpled caps, the dirt lines above their collars were smeared by the melting ice.

  “I heard Ted Durbin’s old lady got laid off over at the mill,” the iceman said.

  “Yeah. My old lady was telling me,” the helper answered.

  “Dirty deal. Like to get my hands on that Polack foreman out there.”

  “Yeah?” the helper laughed. “Then what you going to do, Chuck? That’s a big handful of Polack.”

  “Be two hits in that fight.” The iceman ground his knuckles into his palm. “Me hitting him and him hitting the ground.”

  “What you got against the Polack? Ain’t any dumber—or uglier—than the rest of them skees.”

  “Me and him’s butted heads a couple of times over at the Horizon. Acts like his shit don’t stink, ‘cause he’s some kind of honcho over at the ingot plant.” He cleared his throat and spit. “His daddy-in-law’s got pull over at the union, got him his job. That union bullshit grinds my ass, anyhow, so don’t rub my nose in it. Top of that, the deal with Durbin’s old lady—laying her off ‘til after she pops the kid. Bastard’s got some kind of balls, don’t he? Tells the little thing to get home and do right by the one she already hatched.”

  “Some more of his business, but a foreman’s got the right. Prob’ly for her own good, anyhow, Chuck. Can’t have her calving right there on the slag room floor in front of God and everybody, can he?”

  “So she says how’s she going to take care of the one she’s got when there ain’t no money coming in if she ain’t working. She asks him if he’s going to kick in.”

  The helper scuffed a rock and sent it rattling down a grate. He laughed. “Ballsy broad, ain’t she. And there ain’t nothing to her. All knees and elbows and skinny little butt. But I heard she don’t take no shit. What the hell you expect she’s doing with all her money? Her and some of them other broads been workin’ over at Inland since the war. They ought to be making near as good as a man by now.” He nodded his head toward our building. “But she ain’t exactly hole up at the Ritz, is she?”

  “So you know what the Polack says? ‘Hell, honey,’ he says, ‘if it’s a matter of money, I seen your old man down at the Horizon the other night, and he had plenty on him to get Miriam Klazusky good and shit-faced. Maybe you ought to run your ass over there and ask him for it.’”

  “Hey! That ain’t right. Talking to her like that. Her knocked up higher’n a kite, and all. But I heard she can take care of herself. I bet she jumped right in the middle of his shit!”

  “Not a word.”

 
; “Naw. That don’t sound like what I heard about the Durbin broad.”

  “She don’t say a word, just hands him the clipboard sweet as titties in sugar, like she’s going off shift. When the Polack turns around, she reaches herself a shovel and goes to crack him up alongside his head.”

  “You shitting me? She nail the peckerwood?”

  “Naw. Missed killin’ the son of bitch by half a inch.”

  “Man! That broad’s got balls big as grapefruits. And there ain’t never been no love lost on that Polack over there.”

  “Broad’s hung like a stud, Rudy.”

  “I’d of give a week’s pay to seen that.”

  “You and me both. Company bulls had a hell of a time dragging her out of there. Cussing at the top of her lungs every step of the way. Said she ever catch that Polack on the street, she was going to split his head open down to his asshole.”

  “I was him,” the helper said, “I wouldn’t be going down no dark alleys.”

  The men laughed.

  “They say them kind’s real tigers in bed,” said the helper. “What the hell you s’pose is a matter with Ted Durbin? Got a good thing going like that at home, and he’s all over town diddling some punchboard like Miriam Klazusky?”

  “Hell, who knows? But he ain’t tapping that at home no more. They split the sheets a long time ago.”

  “Can’t of been that long,” the helper said, holding his arms out in front of his belly.

  “My old lady says she used to let him sneak back for a piece now and then. Must’ve tagged her on one of them sneak backs. But the old lady says she don’t put up with that crap no more.”

  The iceman slid off the fender and stepped on his cigarette. “You seen my gloves?” he said, opening the door to the cab. It flew open with a loud, grinding creak, and, the moment it swung wide, I was up off the floor and scrambling over the seat.

  I tried to squeeze out between the iceman’s legs, but he brought his knees together and caught me around the shoulders. I squeaked as he grabbed my arm and hoisted me into the air. I threw punches and made animal sounds.