Driver's Education Read online

  “What wasn’t to like?”

  “How about the ending?”

  My mother twisted in her seat so she faced him completely. “But he married her! They got married!” she said, touching his wrist. “Charlie and Julie!”

  My father said, “But who wants a girl like that?”

  She laughed, first quietly and then with great heart. She kept her fingers pressed lightly to his wrist. Said, “Oh, Ali.”

  When we returned home that evening, they danced alone, without music, in a darkened living room, which they often did, while I lay on my bed, projecting scenes of rockets blasting away from earth on the ceiling with my mind.

  • • •

  We went to the Avalon to see a movie on every Friday of 1956, and each time there were two constants: my father never liked the endings, and I always saw the boy.

  First: a note regarding my father and endings. From what I can gather, and from what I can remember, the man had never liked them. They were either too short or too long; the protagonist was either too brave or not brave enough; he either deserved the girl or he didn’t; whoever was telling the story had always gotten it terribly and irrevocably wrong.

  This revisionist streak ran deep in my father from as early as I can remember. Before she’d given up on God completely in November of that same year, my mother would wearily insist that my father read Bible stories to me each evening—and the frustration was there, too. Eve ate the apple, causing her and Adam to be banished from Eden—but not before Adam fried up the serpent for dinner, using its skin to fashion a pair of scaled loafers. Noah populated his ark with two of every species of God’s creation, and as he poured down rain for forty days and forty nights, Noah taught them all to do circus tricks. Dogs jumped through hoops; elephants tiptoed on their hind legs; bears wore skirts and danced to polka music.

  Moses split the Red Sea and then promptly invited the Jews to go body surfing on the ensuing walls of waves.

  “Ali,” my mother would say, her head slipped through the door of my room. “Knock that off. Tell him the truth.” I’d pull the sheets up to my chin.

  My father would answer, “If we’re going to bore him with all this nonsense, he may as well learn something from it.”

  Nothing changed when we began frequenting the Avalon. Endings were always rewritten, always reconceived. In Giant, after Bick tells Jett that he’s not even worth hitting, he should’ve taken the wine in the man’s cellar, instead of demolishing the shelves and the bottles they held. In Lust for Life, when art and passion and agony eventually cause van Gogh to commit suicide—My God, my father would say, if painting makes you that mad, why not throw in the towel and open up a hardware store? In Casablanca, my father would’ve hatched a plan so he could have it both ways. In The Ten Commandments, he took issue with at least three of those stone-chiseled rules.

  At the time, I relished in my father’s imagination—the way he could retie knots that already seemed so perfectly fastened. I’d listen to his version of stories, and then I’d rescript them, recast them, reshoot them in my mind; I’d project them onto the same ceiling in my room. But then, this was when I was eight years old. Well before I knew the difference between a storyteller and a liar. Well before I knew on which side of that delineation my father fell.

  • • •

  And now, the boy: sometimes he’d be ducking into one of the theater’s dark enclaves—the rounded space, for example, behind a five-foot-tall urn that stood to the left of the theater’s grand staircase. I’d see his eyes dart from around the urn’s concave edges, scanning the lobby for ushers, for Earl. His fingers would click along the porcelain as he surveyed the room. And from where I stood, between the thighs of my mother and my father at the concession stand, I could almost hear the dull tapping. I’d release my mother’s hand, and as my father searched his pockets for cash I’d creep over to the urn, biting my upper lip as I peeked behind it. Always, though—always the boy would be gone.

  Other times I’d see him in the actual theater. He’d be sitting calmly, in plain sight, his chin resting on the seat in front of him. Sometimes he’d be near the back of the orchestra; sometimes he’d be near the front of the balcony. He’d look halfway calm—or, at the very least calmer than he appeared when I spotted him in the lobby: his hands wouldn’t fidget, and his gaze was stoic and focused. Still, even in those quieter moments, there was something wild about him—something unwritten, untamed. I’d look forward to where he sat near the screen, or I’d crane my neck back so I could spy him in the balcony, and I’d catch the whiteness of his eyes, which seemed too bright. Impossibly white. Technicolor white.

  He was always alone.

  From what I can recall, it was only when the house lights dimmed that he seemed fully at ease, when he seemed to inhabit his own skin completely. As the rest of the audience dissolved in the theater’s enfolding darkness, as I held my breath and my chest burned, he became some breed of fantastic: you could feel him on the back of your neck, in the spot where your shoulder blades pinch together. His presence was so striking that when the show stopped and the curtain fell and I began breathing normally again, I’d instantly turn to look at him—but whatever had felt so remarkable in the dark would’ve ceased by then. He’d be by himself and shrunken, lodged awkwardly between normal and mysterious.

  We grew together that year, the boy and I. On the first Friday of March I came to the theater with Band-Aids on both my elbows and a gash under my left eye—war wounds from a particularly bad run-in with a bicycle. Under the Avalon’s meteoric neon sign, I noted that he bore the same scrapes and cuts. At the end of April, when the weather had finally turned warm enough for my mother to allow me to wear shorts in the evening, the boy arrived at the theater with the same grass stains on both his knees. That summer, as my hair grew long and the sun teased out the blond from the russet—so did it for his. On Thursdays I’d bruise myself, intentionally, to see if his skin would bloom with the same purples and greens—always, it did.

  The whole thing was at once comforting and beguiling—comforting in the fact that there existed this version of myself who seemed to inhabit a world that I was desperate to understand, beguiling in that we dealt in each other’s secrets even though we’d never spoken. Until November.

  • • •

  What happened that month was this: my mother stopped coming to the movies.

  At first it was a simple thing not meriting explanation. On the first Friday of the month, I waited in our family’s Buick, which was parked in the driveway. It was windy, and the sycamore that stood over the garage rained down yellow, orange, red. My parents were taking longer than usual to join me, and as I worried that we might miss the seven o’clock showing, my father emerged from the front door, alone.

  Once he’d sat down in the driver’s seat and shut the door, I asked, “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s not coming tonight.” He started the car and said, “You want to sit up front?”

  I told him no, I didn’t.

  At the Avalon, we orbited around each other gracelessly, terribly unbalanced. A triangle with two points; dual parts of a trilogy. I was either standing too near to him or too far away. At the concession stand, my father ordered three boxes of popcorn, only to send the third one back. Two people behind us, the boy looked on.

  We left a seat between us. It wasn’t a decision that was discussed or plotted. Rather, it simply happened, with a tacit sense of necessity. Just how in the car the seat next to my father’s was hers, so was the case with the middle seat at the Avalon. Still, I remember how my father looked at me from across the vacant space seconds before the lights dimmed. I remember the dullness in his eyes, the awkward way he shifted his body as he tried to lay a hand on my shoulder, how he couldn’t quite reach his elbow around the high-backed seats.

  The next week, my mother was absent again. And the week after that, and the week after that. She’d already seen High Society, my father told me, one day while I was at school and
he was at work. Or she wouldn’t be able to stomach A Kiss Before Dying, as she’d never been a fan of Joanne Woodward. She’d suddenly and inexplicably taken up bridge. My father did this, though: he wove up elaborate excuses to tell me, to tell himself, and neither of us ever believed them.

  On the fourth Friday of November, the picture was The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and while I assume my father was displeased with the ending, neither of us spoke about it afterward. Before we left the theater, while my father talked to Earl, I excused myself to the bathroom—where, incidentally, I saw the boy. Except for the two of us it was empty, and when I entered he stood before a sink, rubbing soap into his hands. In the mirror he watched me as I passed behind him to the urinal, as I unzipped my pants and stood awkwardly on my feet’s outside edges. He ran the water hot until steam began pooling in the sink’s basin.

  “Where’s your mother been?” The question came as I was buttoning my pants, and when I heard it I stumbled backward. His voice was exactly like mine, but also different. It held the same tenor, and the question lifted at the end in a familiar, self-conscious way—yet something was off, unsettling. As if it were coming out of one speaker instead of both.

  “Busy,” I told him. “And she sees a lot of movies on her own.”

  I pushed hair away from my forehead and so did the boy.

  “No,” he told me. “She doesn’t.”

  The faucet he was using still choked out scalding water. As I began soaping my hands at the sink adjacent to his, he did the same.

  “And you’d know, I guess, right?”

  “Cool it,” the boy said. “You would too.”

  There was a silence, then, in which we both heard the perturbed buzzing of the bathroom’s lights, in which the popcorn exploding behind the concession stand sounded like mines combusting in a field.

  “My dad’s waiting outside.” I shut off the faucet and began drying my hands, spending too long on the spaces between my fingers.

  The boy said, “You know what happens to her, don’t you?”

  I punched him and both our noses bled.

  HOW TO TAKE THINGS APART SO YOU CAN PUT THEM BACK TOGETHER

  Finn

  Randal and I agreed to meet this afternoon on Thirtieth Street, under the languid shadow of my office. Since last night the temperature has gone from miserably hot to stifling to suffocating: streets and subways are plugged with sweat, the stench of 8 million people plus us. I’m wearing this black ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME T-shirt that Karen got for me when she visited an aunt in Cleveland, on her way back from Toronto. I zoom in on Randal, who has a Coke can pressed to his face.

  “It’s hot,” he says. “It’s just so fucking hot.”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  He adjusts his backpack on his thin shoulders and then moves the sweating can to his left cheek. We’ve both got packs. And we’ve stuffed them full with items we’ve deemed essential. Toothbrushes. Camera batteries. Doritos. Two sets of underwear. In Randal’s case: three individually wrapped sporks.

  “You just—you never know.”

  I fix the cap to the lens. In my back pocket: the hamburger wrapper where I’ve written down the address.

  I say, “We should definitely get going.”

  We catch the M train at Bryant Park and ride it south to Houston and Second Avenue. It’s hotter downtown: there are fewer patches of cool ground where the sun’s been hidden by skyscrapers, more open sky, more bricks baking in the heat, more halal meat charring on stands erected along the sidewalks. On Houston we walk east, toward the river. We pass the Sara D. Roosevelt Park on Chrystie Street, where a group of teenagers in flaccid jeans are smoking Swisher Sweets and listening to a hip-hop song, the one that everyone’s already heard 3 million times this summer.

  “That song,” Randal says. “That fucking song.”

  At Allen we turn right and we walk by places we know. Places like Lolita Bar and Rockwood Music Hall and Congee Village. And then, farther south, there are wholesale kitchen supply stores, pushing blenders and cutting blocks and things whose names I don’t know. The storefronts have signs written in English, rarely with small Chinese characters scrawled under them in bright red. I film a food processor. Randal asks why, and I tell him I’ve always wanted one.

  He says nothing, he just tightens the straps on his backpack and nods as we move farther south.

  And then we’re below Broome and we go right on Canal and the Chinese begins to overtake the English on the storefronts and the streets get more crowded. We pass under lower Manhattan’s concrete mixing bowl, where the off-ramp for the Manhattan Bridge plunges into Bowery and Chrystie and Canal. Periodically Randal asks me to slow down so he can peel his sweat-soaked shirt off his sticky skin.

  “What time does this place close?” he asks.

  “Seven?” I say. “Maybe eight? I don’t know. It’s a meat market. When do meat markets close?”

  We keep going.

  On Canal near Mott there are the jewelry shops—thousands and thousands of them. In their windows are displays of mock red velvet necks draped in spectacular golden lotuses. There are rings with squares of jade or pearl globes and pink-beaded necklaces and jeweled statues of fat happy Buddhas. There are watches, handbags, DVDs of movies that haven’t hit theaters yet, and all the men who are selling them tell us and 1 million tourists that they have a special deal for us, a special deal only for us!

  Then, down Mott, the greengrocers: boxes stacked thousands of miles high with dried peanuts and shriveled mushrooms that look very illegal. Stands hawking apples and oranges and pears, but also exotic, fascinating-sounding fruits like rambutans and mangosteens and pomelos. And fishmongers—so many fucking fishmongers. Tubs of raw grey shrimp, jagged bouquets of detached crab claws, whole fish shoved into buckets, their gaping mouths and black eyes the only things to stick out through the ice.

  Randal sees the George Meat Market International first. It’s on the east side of Mott, past Pell Street and the Peking Duck House and Hop Kee and Wo Hop: a long white shop that spans a quarter of the block and has slabs of God-knows-what dangling from the ceiling and in open-air cases on the sidewalk. A sign hanging from the store’s awning advertises REAL AUTHENTIC CHINESE BUTCHERS. We walk slowly along the troughs of pork and beef and chicken. We count flies and dodge past tourists and screaming women with canvas shopping bags, stopping in front of a set of pigs’ feet that are attached to strings that hang from the white awning. I feel Randal grab my bare arm, and he whispers some awful joke, like, “Man, these guys will have a tough time getting a foot in the door, wouldn’t you think?” before he pokes one of the hooves, sending it rocking.

  It feels as though we’re standing in the middle of a convection oven, the hot air cracking like whips around us, our T-shirts sticking to our backs in wet zebra lines, and it’s uncomfortable, which is probably why we can’t stop laughing. We poke the foot, make it tap dance, do the cancan—things that are wholly inappropriate and borderline disrespectful. And it’s at that point that one of the butchers—this massive guy with a thick brow and arms the size of palm-tree trunks—ducks out from within the market to tell us, in so many words, that if we push that pig’s hoof one more time, he’ll give us something to laugh about.

  “You coming here you need something?”

  There’s a brief moment when we have to unscramble his words, and then: “Yes. Yes, we need some help. We’re looking for a man named Yip.”

  “You find Yip?”

  “Yes, we find Yip.”

  He cranes his neck back and looks past the customers—the excited rabid women, the tourists in baseball caps, with cameras dangling from their necks—and then back toward the shop. “Yip at this time very busy. Yip a busy man.”

  “He’s expecting me,” I say. “He knows my granddad. They talked.”

  He looks at Randal, and then at me, and then back at Randal again. “You wait here,” he says. Growls.

  The street and the stalls outside the shop
are getting more crowded with pedestrians contending for space. Randal leans into me and asks, Who is this guy again? and I tell him the truth, which is that I don’t know, that I have no clue how he knows my grandfather or how he’s come to play Lucy’s keeper.

  “But—they’ve spoken, right? As in, recently?”

  “I think?” Then, because I can tell his eyes are boring into my skull and I want to throw pigs’ feet at his head, “Yes.”

  “Finn—”

  It’s for an exhausting few minutes that we stand there, dodging women and their bags and the various chopped-up appendages hanging on all sides of us. We see the brute with the cleaver first, motioning wildly, waving his knife as he speaks to a man who’s half his height but twice his width, a man who we surmise is Yip.

  They bark back and forth at each other as they approach, but the brute slinks back when they’re about two feet from us. Calling Yip stout would be generous, I think, because the guy is straight-up fat. Fat and bald with a broad creased face that funnels downward, ending in three slick grey hairs that hang from a cleaved chin. He takes me in his arms immediately, squeezing me around the waist till I have no breath left, till all I can smell is the raw pork on his glowing head. Around us, the click click click of tourists’ cameras.

  “Can you think!” he shouts, and rocks me back and forth. “Can you think last time I seeing this one?” He buries his head in my chest but turns his face toward Randal. “The last time I seeing this one he so small!” He finally releases me. “Can you imagine? He so small and pink I holding him like this!” Yip holds both hands in front of him as if he intends to cup water out of a fountain. “I holding him like little piglet! So tiny! And he moving like this!” He flails his arms and his legs in these waves. “He looking up at me and he dancing like this!”

  I look to Randal, who is now smiling and nodding earnestly, completely infected with Yip’s enthusiasm, and then I look back to Yip, to this bald man who is now holding both my hands in his blood-caked paws. “You no remembering me!” he says. And then, before I can say no: “Is fine! I expecting you no remembering me! I expecting this because the last time I seeing you you so pink and tiny and dancing like this!”