David Prete - Say That To My Face

Say

That

to

my

Face

F I C T I O N

David Prete

FOR MY SISTER

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Cover

Title Page Say That to my Face F I C T I O N David Prete

Dedication FOR MY SISTER

No King, No Puppy

Not Because I’m Thirsty

The Biggest, Most Silent Thing

Four-Foot-Six

Self-Respecting Neapolitans

Bleachers

After We Left Yonkers and Before We Came Back

The Itch

Green

Say That to my Face

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

This was the part of the ride I loved the best. It was my part. When I got up to a good speed and pulled the skid brake, it made the back wheels of my Big Wheel lock and kick out to one side, which sent me into a spin and then a stop. If I got scared and tried to stop the spin with my limbs, chances were I’d get hurt: I could scrape up my feet or tip myself and go shitcan-over-teakettle onto the pavement. Either way, if I tried to stop what it was I had gotten myself into, I’d end up face-ass down on the street.

At four and a half, as I would fall asleep, I’d remember the rides I took that day. I could feel the motion of the skids playing themselves over in me as I lay in bed. Like spending the whole day in the ocean and that same night still feeling the waves going back and forth in my body as if the tide got stuck there. I’d hear the sound of the plastic tire grinding against the asphalt and feel my eyes watering from the wind. It was simply the best thing that ever happened to a kid since the beginning of kids. That’s what I thought about in my fifth year when I would fall asleep.

The other thing I would think about was why there were four different homes in which I was falling asleep.

WHEN MY PARENTSwere married they lived in the Bronx. When they got divorced it was decided that my mother, my sister and I would move a few miles north, into my grandparents’ house in Yonkers. My mom was twenty-one years old and broke. Her parents’ house was small, so my sister, my mother and I shared a bedroom. It was a converted attic with a pitched roof and a crawlspace behind one of the walls. Just big enough for three beds and three dressers. The one decorative touch was an almost-life-size poster of Robert Redford playing the Sundance Kid. Our mother hung the poster directly over the headboard of her bed. We lived in that house with our grandparents from when I was one year old until I was six.

The address was 15 Verona Avenue. Verona Avenue was a long and steep hill. The bottom of the hill intersected Central Park Avenue, which was a major six-lane roadway that ran through all of Yonkers. During a hard rainstorm the water would come down that hill and overflow the gutters. That’s when my sister and I put plastic bags over our sneakers and splashed around in what all the adults were cursing the city about.

After dinner, before we would go to bed, I’d get up on my grandfather’s lap. Everyone knew what that meant. My grandfather would yell playfully but really loud, “ Get the hell outta here! Now I gotta scratch his back? ”

I’d play like he really wasn’t going to. “Ah, Gramps, come ooooooon.”

Then he’d slap me on the back and shake his head at me as if to say, Look at the prince here, sit me on his lap and scratch. We had a pretty smooth routine.

My grandfather was the best back-scratcher I ever knew. The guy was a butcher. He worked with his hands. He understood the force of cleaving and the subtlety of carving. He had thick heavy fingernails, which he kept very well. They were perfect for our routine. He had his clipper and nail buffer (not a file, a two-sided nail buffer), which he kept on his nightstand right next to the whetstone he used to sharpen his butcher’s knives. He took as good care of his nails as he did all of his tools.

There was also a paved walkway that ran from the front of the house all the way to the back, eventually connecting to the back patio. Hugging this walkway was a fence that separated my grandparents’ house from their neighbors’. This walkway was a long enough strip for me to get some pretty good speed on my Big Wheel and hit some nice spins. If ever I rode to the front of the house my mother would yell, “Stay away from the street!” then mumble to herself, “That Big Wheel scares the shit out of me.”

The house at 15 Verona Avenue was where I would fall asleep during most weekdays. House Number One.

If I wasn’t there on a weeknight, it was because I went with my sister to sleep at House Number Two—Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie’s place. They had two daughters, our cousins, Dina and Vicky. They were not our blood relations. They were self-declared family, friends from the Bronx who were so close they needed to be deemed Aunt, Uncle and Cousin. My mother and my Aunt Marie had known each other since grade school. They got married about the same time, had kids about the same time and moved not only to the same neighborhood in the Bronx, but to the same block. We lived at 2224 Grace Avenue; they lived at 2216 Grace Avenue. Some nights, if we were playing at the other family’s house and we happened to fall asleep on their couch, our parents would just leave us there until morning. We got breakfast no matter where we woke up. I guess they were better than family. When we moved to Yonkers, my mother would drive us down to the Bronx and Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie would take us in for the night. This happened about once a week. Our grandparents’ house didn’t lack love, but nonetheless my sister and I often gravitated back to Grace Avenue. Maybe we were leaning toward a type of normalcy or honoring a need we felt for some kind of completion. They had a house with a mother, a father and two kids. We couldn’t get enough of it.

House Number Three was actually an apartment. It belonged to my father. And then there was his girlfriend’s apartment. My father saw my sister and me on weekends. That was the custody agreement. Saturday nights we either slept at his apartment in Port Chester (another suburb about twenty minutes from Yonkers) or we would go to his girlfriend’s place, where my sister and I would crash on a pull-out couch. House Number Four.

I HAD TROUBLEsleeping at that age regardless of where I slept. I never wanted to go to bed for fear that I would miss something. I remember lying in bed hearing adults talking or a newspaper turning or the television and I thought, I gotta get out there. What could they possibly be doing? There is definitely something goin’ on.

The other thing that would keep me awake was the sound of my parents’ voices. The ones that my mind recorded from when they were still married. Not conversations. Fights. And not the words they used to fight with but the sounds they produced while they were fighting. Theirs was not an amicable breakup. There’s a thing that happens to a person’s voice at the peak of rage. Vocal cords no longer become a free channel to express emotion. Vibrations become impeded and grate against the inside of one’s throat. This is what I knew to be the sound of my parents’ relationship ending. When that recorded noise would keep me awake, I would try to replace it with the sound of my Big Wheel. A plastic tire rolling over cement. This worked for me sometimes.