We're All in This Together (4 page)

I could not recall ever having spoken to Steven Sugar, or even having heard his voice, although he was a familiar sight in
the halls: a chunky kid two grades ahead of me, who clomped from class to class in his combat boots and baggy desert-toned
fatigues, usually followed a few steps behind by the lieutenant, Tolson.

Still, before all of this-before
GET OVER IT SHITHEEL! YOU LOST!
before
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT SHITHEEL!
and, before
COMMUNIST
SHITHEEL!
were scarred in blazing pink across my grandfather's billboard and Al Gore's face—I didn't know if I ever spared Steven Sugar
so much as a single conscious thought.

Now I imagined him punching through the dark suburbs on his bicycle, the summer night rushing through his brush cut, the newspaper
satchel packed with spray cans clattering against his hip, a vessel of absolute calm and purpose, locked and loaded, a true
believer and an armed combatant. The vision amazed me, and a part of me envied him, this budding fascist who had fucked up
my grandfather's Sunday
New York Times
and written right across his First Amendment rights. I could only marvel at his confidence, at his criminal's justification.
I did not understand Steven Sugar's motives, but I sensed his satisfaction, like a dark mass on a radar screen, like an iceberg,
and grand like an iceberg, too.

I pictured Steven Sugar, hunched under the tent of his blankets, as he crinkled through the purloined newspapers by flashlight.
He turned over the last unsullied islands of the Mediterranean, the white beaches and the ancient piles of stone, and he licked
his lips over column inches of the weddings of well-to-do young women in Manhattan, with Ivy League degrees and careers in
handbag design.

What did it mean to him? Did he imagine laying waste to these beautiful landscapes, and rolling tanks through rustic villages?
Did he fantasize of ripping these bright new wives from their honeymoons and their husbands? Or, maybe, he hated our little
Maine town, and longed more than anything just to travel far away, to start again, and make his life in another country altogether.
Was it possible that Steven Sugar read the wedding announcements for research, for that time ten years from now when he would
be a surgeon (or a hedge fund tycoon), and it would be time to marry his own twenty-six-year-old producer of a children's
television show (or director of marketing at a glossy magazine), his own pretty, pale-eyed Hannah (or Caroline)? Maybe it
didn't mean anything to him. Maybe Steven Sugar stole from my grandfather's newspaper for the simplest reason—just because
he could.

Just because he could.
The idea raised the skin on my forearms and caused me to breathe through my mouth.

My grandfather placed an expectant hand on my shoulder, and repeated his question. "Well, what is it? What do you really think,
George? Is he crazy, or he is angry?"

"No," I said. "I don't think Steven Sugar's crazy. I think he's just angry."

Papa squeezed my shoulder and walked across the room to the window. "Then that makes us even, because I may be crazy, but
I surely am angry, too." The old man bent over the rifle and peered into the scope. "And I've come to realize that the only
way to talk to these monsters is to speak in a language they understand."

3.

The difficulty of communication was, in fact, the source of my own personal distress. I wasn't getting along with my mother,
and I didn't care to get along with Dr. Vic. Of late, I suffered not so much from a feeling that my voice wasn't being heard,
as from a sense that I was speaking an entirely different language. Or perhaps, I thought, to their ears my voice was soundless,
on the wrong frequency, like a dog whistle, and they only waited for the moment that my lips stopped moving to smile, and
shake their heads, and explain what it was that I failed to understand.

We had moved into Dr. Vic's place that winter, a sprawling new three-story that sat right on the shore of Lake Keynes. From
the window of my attic loft I had an obstructed panorama of the lake, which spanned a couple of miles across, toward pine-covered
foothills and farther away, to a bald mountainside where tourists came to ski in December. This vantage point also offered
a clear view of the deck, and the landing where Dr. Vic tied up his putt-putt and his kayak.

Earlier that summer they were engaged, and since the weather warmed up, my mother and her lover had kept a nightly ritual
of dancing on the landing at the end of the deck. They took a portable stereo out with them, along with a stack of CDs, a
couple of mugs, and a can of insect repellant, and sometimes stayed for hours, slow dancing until the early morning. Their
object was to find their "wedding song," the perfect song for their first dance as a married couple.

The sounds of Dr. Vic's music collection drifted up in a tinny echo, and if I wanted I could watch them from my window. Instead,
I sat beneath the sill, back against the wall, and hated myself for even wondering what song they would pick, for surreptitiously
playing along with their stupid game. Between songs I caught snatches of their conversations, their laughter, the clink of
their toasts.

Frequently, Dr. Vic's taste sent my mother into paroxysms of laughter, and I would hear her rolling around on the deck, overcome
by it, as if he were the funniest guy in the world. The sound dropped through me like a heavy object released from a great
height, and never seemed to hit bottom.

One night I heard her scream with delight at the discovery of a Don Johnson CD. It was like finding his porn stash, she whooped.
My mother laughed and beat her bare feet on the deck.

"Come on," said Dr. Vic. "You liked him, too, you know you did. You know you never missed an episode."

This was porn, she howled, this was emotional porn.
Crockett
Sings Just for You\
My mother began to weep as she laughed.

"Wait a second, wait a second. 'Heartbeat' is good. Seriously, you've got to admit that 'Heartbeat' is a pretty good song."
Now Dr. Vic was snickering, too.

A few moments passed before my mother could speak again. She thought she'd fallen for a respectable country doctor, Emma gasped,
but in actuality, she had fallen for a nine-year-old girl from 1984, and oh, my God, was it wrong that she loved him anyway?
Because she did. She loved him, loved him, loved him.

Their kisses were inaudible, but I was old enough to know that was what came next. Sometimes they listened to CDs until the
night turned gray, and after I fell asleep Dr. Vic's middle-aged music, the Wynton Marsalis and the Phil Collins and the terrible
seventies pop which all seemed to bear edible names—Bread and Juice Newton and Humble Pie—infiltrated my subconscious and
provided the soundtrack for my dreams. I chased after them in these dreams, my mother and her fiance, as they strolled arm
in arm along crowded sidewalks and through parks and malls. I ran beside them and jumped around and screamed for my mother
to listen to me, to fucking turn that shit off and listen to me, because I had something to say, something very important
to say. At most, Dr. Vic might shush me, or my mother might give him a look of apology, but they never stopped, and in the
morning there were tears of frustration crusted beneath my eyes. I was embarrassed by the childish obviousness of these dreams,
and the way that I could feel them gathering inside of me even when I was awake, each angry observation floating up like a
little black balloon, until night came again and my sky jostled with them.

It seemed that I was letting go of those balloon strings all day long: every time I saw him rub her shoulders while she sat
reading a book; every time I saw her standing outside with him in a cold drizzle, holding the umbrella while he walked his
dogs; every time we drove somewhere and Dr. Vic told me to go ahead and take the front, and I knew that it was something that
they discussed in private and decided to give me.

To them, I was just the jealous kid of a single mother, with no understanding of sex or intimacy, or the difference between
a lover's love and a child's love, and why an adult needed both. To me, this was a slanderous lie. Dr. Vic was the exception.
We had lived all over and my mother had dated all sorts of different men, and there was never a problem before.

In Blue Hill, there had been Paul, the raccoon-eyed owner of a pottery studio for tourists, who helped me fire and paint a
cookie jar in the shape of a Jerry Bear for Emma's birthday. When my mother worked at the University of Maine, she dated a
German graduate student named Jupps, who would let me watch anything I wanted on television, and laugh uproariously, no matter
if the show was about ski slope accidents, or the big bang. The first year we moved home to Yarmouth, before Nana got sick
and before my mother took the job at the local branch of Planned Parenthood and met Dr. Vic, she went out with Dale, the editor
of the local weekly, the
Amberson
Common.
Dale
and I used to play a game where I tried to guess the classifieds that he made up, things like,

Wanted:
SWM seeks cheeseburger, Coke, respect

CAN YOU PITCH?
Lefthander wntd. Must be bipedal, animate. Respondents should report immed to Fenway Park, Boston, MA.

After they broke up, Dale posted me a classified that said,

Old White Dude:
OWD can provide referncs, illeg firewrks, home remdies, etc. Cool kid always welc.

I liked them all—even Jupps, who reeked of mouthwash and sometimes unnerved me with his maniacal laughter. That was because
these men simply accepted my presence, and let me determine the level of our interaction. They had, so to speak, paid their
dues.

The evening after my grandfather used me for target practice, I offered to take Dr. Vic's two yapping little Pekinese—"the
Laddies," he insisted on calling them—for a walk while dinner was on the patio grill. This was something I had been doing
a lot lately, to Dr. Vic's obvious pleasure. "Even after the longest winter, there is a thaw," I overheard him whisper to
my mother.

But my mother knew me better. Now, sitting nearby on a lawn chair, she indicated her suspicion with a deep breath.

"Don't put up with any guff from those rascals, okay?" said my mother's fiance. He chuckled and sipped his glass of white
wine. His clip-on sunglasses were slightly askew.

"Nice shades, Doc," I said.

"Thank ya very much," he said, like Elvis.

I turned from him to sneer at my mother. She shrugged, tapped her finger against the zipper of her shorts. I rolled my eyes
at her. She tapped the zipper of her shorts again. I looked downward—then jerked up my fly and started into the house.

"You know, Emma, I think that our young George here, may just have stumbled upon one of the great secrets of manhood here,"
said Dr. Vic, and I didn't have to see the huge, open-faced smile that he was giving to my mother to know it was there. "Back
in my single days, I took the Laddies from pillar to post and back again. It might seem a little devious, but a regular guy
has to make his breaks where he can, and not everybody can play guitar. For a regular guy, a dog is the next best thing to
being a musician. You might even say that the Laddies are 'The Bomb.'" He emphasized this statement with index finger quotation
marks. "You might even say that they're 'The Shit.'"

This was typical of Dr. Vic, to make a big, cheesy production out of everything, even the names of his dogs. Every time he
spoke, his wide doughy face opening up in a way that reminded me of the singing clams in Disney's
Alice in Wonderland,
I felt a little part of myself die from shame. In fact, I believed that Dr. Vic m

ust be the most embarrassing person in the world.

To begin with, there were the little absurdist poems that he wrote about how much he loved my mother, and what he would do
if she were suddenly transformed into something other than herself, something inanimate usually, like a toaster or a grape—

The Woman I Love Is A Grape (For The Purposes Of This Poem)
By Victor Lipscomb

If she were a grape and I was still an ape

Yd wait for days and try to think of some way

Not to eat her, to reanimate her

But if I had to, I'd be glad to

Because Emma is so sweet.

For our enjoyment, he taped these poems to the fridge, like a first-grader would his watercolors.

Then there was his music, of course, the awful songs Dr. Vic always listened to in his car and in his study, stuff like "Seasons
in the Sun" and "Dreamweaver"; songs that were so damned impossible to stop singing to yourself they were like dippy little
Post-it Notes pasted to the inside of your skull, and until the glue dried up and the note fell off, there was nothing you
could do to defend yourself against the insipid, endless trickling of the Dreamweaver's synthesizer, or to keep from chanting,
helplessly, over and over again, "We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun."

And Dr. Vic talked to his crossword puzzles; every time he found the answer "Yoko," or "Ono," he cried out, "There she is
again!" like he was in a bingo parlor; and when he poured wine for my mother, he stood with a dish towel over his wrist and
twirled the end of an invisible mustache while he waited for her to nod; and in restaurants, Dr. Vic liked to hand his credit
card to the cashier and make an introduction, "Peter: Paul, Paul: Peter"; and finally—and I thought, most tellingly of all—there
were the utility pants he wore, which drooped from the weight of all the hard candies and dog treats that he stuffed in the
tiny pockets, so that much of the time he walked around with one hand holding up his belt, like a goddamned clown.

There was a horrifying optimism in everything he did, which struck me as completely false, even as I knew that he could not
be more sincere—that he was, really, incapable of insincerity. Everything about him—his clomping steps, his bright, solid-colored
L.L. Bean shirts, the deflated tube of a belly that hung over his belt—testified to this irrefutable fact.