Chapter Twenty-One
Was it dawn, or was it dusk? Just as things were starting to look shiny (for some), the clouds moved, changing the light. Or were they the ones changing, while dawn and dusk played a slow game of paddleball with the sun?
They hardly knew where to let their eyes land when they read the newspaper.
They’d been told the atomic bomb had changed warfare forever, and the need for foot soldiers in the future had been greatly reduced. They’d also been advised to create fallout shelters in their homes where they could hide for weeks, in case of a nuclear attack.
They’d been told that Washington, D.C., Hollywood, and the entire U.S.
military had been infiltrated by Communists, Communist sympathizers, and homosexuals.
They’d been told that Communists were sprinkled throughout the United States like paprika.
Now they were told the Communists were up to no good in Vietnam, a country wracked by civil war.
But the U.S. military was there, keeping an eye on things, and would do whatever it took to make sure Communism didn’t domino its way here, where everything was nice, fair, and democratic. Stay tuned, they were told.
Meanwhile, all through 1956 they’d read in the paper, heard on the radio, and seen on the television reports about the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, until the Supreme Court finally said it was unconstitutional to prevent Black people from riding buses in that state.
In September of 1957, they’d learned that it had taken both the 101st Airborne Division and the National Guard to fend off a white mob, just so nine Black children could walk into a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The South was simmering with racism, it seemed to everyone who wasn’t in the South—though to Becky it seemed that the whole country was simmering; the South was just more obvious about it, and had signage.
In February of 1960, when Cal read of the four men who refused to leave the Woolworth counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and all of the other sit-ins that followed, he remembered how Roman had spoken and even moved differently whenever a Black customer walked into the store (which wasn’t very often).
How curt he’d become, how guarded. Cal had always found it embarrassing, but hadn’t he stiffened, too, at times? Didn’t he still? A little?
If you believed in God but didn’t go to church, and only prayed on an as-needed basis, you lived with your fingers crossed that your life was stacking up to make some sort of sense, and that it was preparing you for what was to come.
But that meant you were depending on a map you were drawing as you went along.
When he read, heard, and watched the news, he wondered how many people were out there doing the same thing he was—scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how to prioritize their worries and confront their prejudices; drawing their own maps with their fingers crossed.
Becky, he thought, was a person whose life was stacking into something that made complete sense.
Right before his eyes, she’d transitioned into middle age with grace, poise, and a desire not to waste any more of her efforts on other people’s foolishness.
She’d gotten very good at weeding out potentially frivolous clients.
By instinct, she’d told him. He hadn’t asked her to explain that, knowing the particulars might lead them into the kind of prickly conversation they didn’t have anymore.
She had no complaints about her practice, and he was glad.
She complained about her gray hair, but he suspected she secretly liked it; she looked at it in the mirror enough.
She complained about the few pounds she’d put on and blamed her weakness for ice cream.
And chocolate. She had a sweet tooth. He had a salty one.
There was, often, a plate of chocolates and pretzels on a plate between them while they read or watched or listened to the news.
She was, he told her, more radiant than ever; her body was exactly the way it should be.
The lines coming into her face were only in service to the lines that were already there—which he’d honestly meant as a compliment, but it didn’t sound like one once it was out of his mouth, so much so that she smiled.
Everett’s arthritic hand would sometimes reach over and tap a headline Cal was looking at. “That one’s bullshit,” he’d say.
“Can I read it first, please?”
“Just trying to save you the time.” Everett was something of an authority on time, having clocked, by 1962, eighty-two years of it—far more than anyone, including him, would have predicted he’d get.
He’d lost a few molars, further pitting his cheeks, and he fell asleep whenever the urge struck him—sometimes right in the middle of a meal.
But he’d looked like an old man since Cal was a teenager, and—to Cal, anyway—he didn’t look that much older now.
Cal, on the other hand, had a high widow’s peak in his yellow hair, and little pastries under his eyes that turned ashen when he was tired.
He winced sometimes when he stood, and he looked with envy at the men who walked with canes they hardly seemed to need, like they were accessories, while his bore more weight with each passing year and became crucial to his balance.
Then he would hear Becky saying, You’re not your leg!
and other people’s canes would stop bothering him.
He would allow himself to be the guy who took over his father-in-law’s hardware store and doubled its size and its business in less than five years.
The guy who got the Chamber of Commerce Heart of Downtown Award. Twice.
—
They sometimes caught themselves watching Tom’s face like it was an egg about to hatch.
The almost perfectly replicated pattern of hair growth on the back of his and Cal’s heads was hardly discernible—the sort of thing that would only draw the attention of a mother, or a lover.
They saw other similarities, but those usually didn’t stick around for long.
It seemed to the three grown-ups still in the picture that, on the whole, Cal wasn’t going to end up commandeering Tom’s looks after all, which was a relief, though Cal privately felt an ache in the back of his chest. Not because he wanted to lay claim to Tom, but because part of him, deep down, wanted Tom to know.
Even if the two of them never spoke of it or even acknowledged it to each other, he secretly longed for the information to be shared, though he would never be the one to share it.
What was discernible to the naked eye, but only after they were sure Tom was finished growing, was that, while Margaret was responsible for his hair, his eyes, and most of his face, Tom’s frame was Cal’s (only evener in leg and straighter in spine).
What was not so easily discernible:
His nose was a composite—hers at the bridge, Cal’s at the end.
His ears were Cal’s, but there was nothing remarkable about Cal’s ears.
His pinkies, like Cal’s, could be bent backward at the top knuckle, but even Tom hadn’t noticed that about himself.
His mouth was Margaret’s, right down to the full, carved lips, but the way he held it was Cal’s.
Add to that the fact that familiarity tends to breed blindness. By the time Tom turned sixteen, in the spring of 1962, the grown-ups were starting to think they just might be out of the woods, free and clear.
—
And Tom? What did he see when he looked in the mirror?
A carrot-topped pipsqueak, he’d been called by bullies, and he saw that for a while.
He’d seen clownhead when he looked in the mirror for all of third grade.
He’d seen the person his mother would sometimes move from room to room to get away from.
Get away, get away! she’d said sometimes, almost as if to herself.
He’d thought it was a game, until he knew it wasn’t.
For a long while, he’d seen the person his mother had looked in the eye and said nothing to as she left.
In the absence of any kind of explanation from her for why she had gone, he’d formed his own: she couldn’t stand him, couldn’t stand his father—so much so that she hadn’t even been able to leave like other parents did.
She hadn’t taken him aside to try to tell him it had nothing to do with him.
She hadn’t moved across town so that he could be with her on weekends.
She hadn’t called or written (except those goddamn cards), and she hadn’t sent a single present.
He told kids at school that his mother had died.
He even told them how. Her plane went down.
A tunnel she was driving through collapsed.
She was in a bank in Cincinnati and got caught in a robbery, shot right through the head.
Please, Felix said (because one of Tom’s teachers had called him), don’t go around telling people your mother died, because it isn’t true.
Tom had been twelve at the time, and still hurting, though he would never admit it.
He told Felix it might as well be true, and Felix said, no, no, no, and sat him down, squaring himself in front of the boy.
The truth matters, he said. The truth was that his mother was alive and not here by choice.
Tom said, “Nobody gave me a choice.”
Four years later, he still saw that guy in the mirror sometimes. The asshole who said that. He saw the way those words had hit his father in the stomach. He’d apologized and taken it back, but he’d felt bad for weeks.
On good days, that stuff wasn’t there. He just saw a face that was too narrow.
A chin that was too pointy. Hair that didn’t want to stay combed.
Pimples. All of it balanced on a pencil neck.
He hated his hair color, his freckles. Where were all the cool, famous redheaded men, by the way? There weren’t any. Not a single one.
—