Authors: Gregory Martin

Stories for Boys: A Memoir (23 page)

BOOK: Stories for Boys: A Memoir

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I had never before seen a grown man weep, much less weep so fully, so openly, uninhibited, completely without restraint. Hawkeye Pierce was wild with grief and remorse. I can’t remember if I was weeping, too, or if my father was weeping. That’s not something I can consciously recall. I had no idea then about the burden of memory and its costs and consequences. That was something I would still have to learn.

Fairies

OLIVER LOST ANOTHER TOOTH-HIS SEVENTH OR EIGHTH. We’d lost count. He put it under his pillow at bedtime in his wrinkled and worn tooth fairy envelope. The next morning, Christine and I were in the kitchen drinking coffee and making lunches for school, when we heard the boys’ bedroom door open. Oliver usually woke up about half an hour before Evan. Christine looked at me, her face panicked. “Did you put a dollar in the tooth fairy envelope?”

“That’s not my department,” I said.

Christine glared at me, wishing that this was somehow not as true as it was.

We went out to the living room. Oliver was sitting in the middle of the couch in his pajamas, his unhappy face still warm and red from sleep. The envelope was in his lap.

“Good morning, honey,” Christine said and sat next to Oliver. I sat on the other side of him.

“You forgot,” Oliver said.

Christine hesitated. Then she said, “I’m sorry, Oliver.”

“I know there’s no tooth fairy, Mom. I’m eight years old. No Santa Claus, either.”

“No unicorns,” I added.

Oliver smiled, though he didn’t want to.

“Oh, Oliver,” Christine said. She kissed his cheek. Oliver didn’t rub this off with the back of his hand.

“Don’t worry,” Oliver said. “I won’t tell Evan.”

“Please don’t,” Christine said. “He’s little.”

“Do I still get my dollar?” Oliver asked.

“You actually get two dollars,” I said. “There’s a one dollar fine when the tooth fairy forgets, and a sweet, innocent child has to figure out the hard truths of life all on his own.”

“When Mommy forgets,” Oliver corrected. “Two dollars, Mom?”

“Of course, Oliver,” Christine said forlornly.

“Mommy will forgive herself sometime next week,” I said.

“It’s okay, Mom.”

“Oliver,” I said. “I should probably tell you something else.”

“ What?”

“You know how Easter is this Sunday.”

Oliver nodded.

“There’s no Easter bunny, either.”

“Gregory!”

Oliver erupted in a fit of giggling. His eyes were wide.

“It’s hard, I know. But it’s true. Rabbits don’t have much to do with eggs. You just don’t see it in nature. Chickens and rabbits are hardly ever friends.”

“You can’t tell your brother that,” Christine said.

“You’ll still get your chocolate,” I said.

Oliver’s giggling was making it hard for him to catch his breath.

“And Oliver,” I said, “you know that old man, Karl, who walks around the block every morning, right when we’re on our way to school, the old man with the cane. You know, Karl?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s not real, either.”

Oliver wheezed for breath. There were tears in his eyes.

“Life just sometimes isn’t the way it seems. Karl is just a figment of your imagination.”

Oliver shouted, “Dad!”

I had bailed Christine out yet again. I was feeling pretty good about the way things were going. “I’m really sorry, Oliver. Growing up is hard.”

“Dad!” Oliver shouted again.

“What?”

“You have to stop. I peed my pants.”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“You’re too old to pee your pants,” I said.

“It’s okay. Go to the bathroom,” Christine said. “And then you have to take a bath.”

Oliver went into the bathroom. Christine went to pick out his clothes for school.

SO THIS SWEET, good moment – the tooth fairy story – happened, and not five minutes later, while Oliver was taking a bath and while Evan was still sound asleep, I thought of my father and his suicide attempt and his molestation and his secret life.
Life just isn’t the way it seems.
My mood turned black. I thought, “Does
everything
have to be about that?” I was tired of thinking about my father. And I was tired of remembering, at innocent and ordinary moments, that I’d failed to explain to my children why their grandparents had divorced.

Two years had passed, and still I had not told the boys anything. I had not told them that their grandfather was gay. I wanted to. I wanted them to know. It seemed like every month a new state was taking up the issue of gay marriage, and it seemed like every month another teenager killed himself because he was being mocked or threatened or bullied for being gay, and I wanted my sons to know that I considered this the most important moral issue we faced as a country since Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, that this was not just important, generally, but that it was important to me, to their aunt Molly and her partner Anne, who was not yet officially Aunt Anne. It was important to their grandfather, even if he wouldn’t talk about it.

THERE WERE ODD times when I had the impulse to just blurt it out to one of the boys. Your grandparents divorced because your grandfather is gay. That’s why. That’s the reason. I wanted you to know that.

I’d say goodbye to my father and hang up the phone and see that Oliver was studying me, as if he could search my face for the clues he needed to puzzle the mystery out all on his own.

Object Lesson

WHEN I WAS NINE OR TEN YEARS OLD, I WAS DOING MY chores one Saturday morning, vacuuming the upstairs, the main floor, the basement, an hour or so of work I barely resented because that’s just the way it was. Growing up, I had chores every Saturday morning before I could go out and play. I helped set and clear the table every night as well. Old school. My parents did not subscribe to the customer service model of parenting, relentlessly polling their children’s comfort and satisfaction. I was not an indentured servant, and there was nothing to plow, but I was expected to do my share and I did.

I was changing out the carpet tool, the most common attachment, the long one with the foot lever and rotating brush-bar and stiff bristles. I was about to replace it with the small crevice tool, for hard to reach tight places and dusty corners, when my father appeared.

He said, “I want to show you something.”

I nodded.

He picked up the vacuum’s main handle and began fingering the little metal button near its open end, pushing it up and down, so that it recessed and then popped up, recessed and then popped up.

“See that,” my father said.

“Okay,” I said.

“That’s the penis.”

My father didn’t stop to see if this struck me as unusual. He then grasped the carpet attachment and held it low and still for me, as if it might wriggle away before we had the chance to examine it.

“See this.” He pointed to the hole in the metal, the hole in which the small metal button fitted so nicely and securely. You might think I could see what was coming next, but I could not. My father said, of the hole, “This is the vagina.” He looked at me.

I’d never had the word “vagina” before spoken to me directly. It wasn’t a word that came easily to my ears. I was in fourth or fifth grade. I felt dizzy and hot. My father said, “Here’s how it works.” Then he showed me how the main handle slid inside the carpet attachment for a few inches and then how the round metal button popped up inside the hole. My father looked up, satisfied. The basic assemblage of the vacuum was something I understood. Here was an act I was deeply familiar with, an act I had performed without self-consciousness each and every Saturday, for at least two years – we are talking about countless, deft and skilled iterations, in all sorts of rooms and contexts. I took pride in my vacuuming.

“See,” he said. He pressed the metal button with his thumb, pulled the carpet attachment out, and returned to me the main handle. I took it reluctantly. He handed me the carpet attachment, as well, even though I was done with it, for now.

“Go ahead,” he said. My father waited. It was my turn. He was patient. I inserted the carpet attachment into the main handle until the button popped up into the hole.

I looked at my father.

“That’s it,” he said. “Just like that.”

My father put his hand on my shoulder. “Okay, son,” he said, and left the room.

This was the sex talk my father had with me. A few weeks or months later, he handed me a book to read, and I did read it, extensively, and I studied its pencil sketch illustrations, but we never talked about it, not even once. When I was done with the book – when the anxiety of having the book and its contents in my room outweighed my curiosity – I put it on the mantel of the fireplace in the basement. For days it rested there calmly. Then it was gone.

I WISH THE vacuum cleaner story was less strange and more apocryphal. A funny family anecdote – the kind every family has. For more than thirty years, when I’m in the presence of vacuuming, when I hear that unmistakable sound of suction, the words
penis
and
vagina
come to me, unbidden. My father’s anatomy lesson has stayed with me, charged with surreal significance, waiting for me to puzzle it out. He was entirely sincere – he was neither mocking me nor the act of vacuuming. My father was not given to weird or creepy explanations of ordinary phenomena. He was trying to tell me something important. But the penis does not go into the vagina like that, sliding into one bigger hole and then popping up out of another, smaller hole. And the round metal part that goes up and down is never called a penis. It’s sometimes called a “button-lock” and sometimes called a “nipple.” My father had it all wrong.

The Romantic Sperm

I CAME HOME FROM WORK, AND OLIVER WAS SITTING on the couch. He wasn’t reading. He was just sitting there. He looked stunned.

He said, “Dad, you won’t believe what happened.”

“Try me.”

BOOK: Stories for Boys: A Memoir

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