Hob Broun - Inner Tube

I came awake to the sound of running water. Carla emerged from the kitchen with a drinking glass and became in the blue cast of the streetlamp a character from a 1915 children’s book. I pretended to sleep, my lids raised just enough to see. She had a man’s white shirt on and her hair spilled over the collar in a way that made me dizzy. Pressing the glass against her swollen brow for a moment, she looked down at me with what I imagined to be tenderness. I would never know. She placed the glass on the floor next to me and went back to bed.

I did not sleep again until the sun was up, and briefly then. But Carla moved on in that time. Her note said she was taking an early train in order to catch a friend’s on-campus dance recital. For breakfast I had a bowl of coffee ice cream. I dusted and mopped and rearranged the contents of the refrigerator. Finally I went in and sat on the bed. I noticed that it was snowing, had been for some time. There were pigeon footprints on the white sill. I would never know. Rolling onto my stomach, I inhaled what I could from the indented pillow.

The phone rang only minutes after I plugged it back in. It was Ted. He sounded unhinged. He told me he’d been drinking all night, submerged in remorse and confusion.

“I don’t understand what she does to me. It’s unearthly. She’s so steady. She’s so impervious. How do I figure out what goes on inside her?”

I hung up on him. What he had to say I already knew.

THIS, SOMEHOW, IS MY fourth day off in a row and I feel listless, out of touch. Didn’t I have more stamina when I was young? Wasn’t it easier keeping the balls in the air? I head out for the Boyers place to say how’s business, hoping something or other will chime.

They’re in the garage, packing up orders — boot knives, freeze-dried stroganoff, like that. The slogan is stenciled on the wall: YOUR KEY TO SURVIVAL IS KNOWING WHAT THE DOOMED WILL NEVER LEARN. Last year Sonny went up to Denver for a three-week course in mail order merchandising.

“Where you been holed up?” he says.

Dawn turns her back, picks at a line of window putty.

“You know, the usual places.”

She’s wearing cracked mules and a coral housedress; her soft swaying bulk seems lethal. Sonny busies himself moistening strips of package tape on a gray sponge ball, and something strains against the seam of his mouth. It’s awkward in here, thick with the poorly hidden anguish of a hospital waiting room. Always expecting bad news, these two. Maybe they’ve had some.

“So how’re the boys?” I say clumsily.

Dawn sends a black look to her husband. “Off at Curry’s on a sleepover.”

Sonny, breathing hard, makes a wet weave of the tape.

“Clear them out to clear the air,” she adds cryptically. Her tough, shiny hair is rumpled, like a doll’s pulled from the bottom of a toy box. “Not like they done anything.”

I notice the can of Mace fastened to Sonny’s belt and I wonder about domestic strife with so much weaponry at hand. I study cobwebs, look at my watch.

“It’s not any of their decision,” Sonny says.

Dawn brushes past me. “Ain’t anybody’s.”

Then, through gypsum board, we can hear her clanging and banging in the kitchen. The chalkboard is in there, the textbooks reinforced with masking tape, homemade stools where the boys sit to receive instruction from their mother — a little diorama of the pioneers.

Sonny drops onto a stack of sealed cartons; his lips contort. “They say if you give respect you’re supposed to get it.”

Things aren’t chiming so much, but I’m curious, drawn in. Otherwise I’d make some sense, say, “Came at a bad time,” and get moving. All these tools collected here, canteens and manuals, the hard details, convince me there’s something to look for. I want to light a cigarette but I’ve left them in the car.

And now Sonny has on his bully pulpit face. He wants me to know that every American child will consume by the age of eighteen the energy equivalent of sixty thousand gallons of gasoline, that in a minute’s time twenty-five babies are born for whom there are no protein resources.

“Dawn doesn’t want to grow up.” He shrugs. “I just don’t get through to her.”

“Why can’t you meet in the middle?”

Smiling, Sonny confides that later in the week he is scheduled to enter Cherry Ames Hospital for a vasectomy.

“Dramatic,” I say, but it isn’t the word I want.

“I know, I know. My old man was alive, he’d say just chop the damn thing off and be done with it. I come from five brothers and three sisters, fruitful. But that was then and this is now.”

Suddenly I feel like a tired cop pressed by duty against the rancor of strangers. I really want that cigarette.

“And it’s no more than what she wants for herself. She’s got to grow up and face up.”

He looks straight at me, his tight eyes asking me to take sides.

Trying to change the subject, I ask, “Still planning that extension off the back of the house?”

But for Sonny there is only one subject. “Crying for the space, God knows. All squeezed like we’re in a toothpaste tube. Something to face up to is the plain and simple limits of where we’re at. I’m not getting rich with this mess,” slapping the cartons under him, hunching himself as if yoked, in traces. “Just to get us all through, all together. I’m no fucking swami.”

The family man deflected by his family. He looks up, down, looks ahead, looks for an escape hatch. The only reassuring thing I can think of is it isn’t me.

“Self-sufficient,” I remind him. “You’re keeping an edge.”

He agrees reflexively and begins an aimless rummaging through the clutter of his family business. What the doomed will never learn. But it seems that Sonny, if only for the time being, has gone off the edge of his map. This comforts me; I feel less out of touch. And probably Sonny will regain his bearings in the clean, fresh, pastel symmetries of Cherry Ames, in the confidence of highly trained professionals and the irrevocable snip.

No daughters for Dawn. I see her sulking at the sink, molars clenched as she peels crust from a skillet. Her grudge will be immaculate and worth holding on to. Her back will be a broad wall in the bed, her face thick and curt in the long mornings.

I am expecting to be asked for dinner, and certain I will stay.

SON OF A LOAN officer, debating team captain and cum laude grad, Tory essayist, figure man, braggart, moralist, fixer, my father goes through life with antennae fully extended, alert for the smallest threat and ever ready for battle. No grievance escapes notice, and no surly mechanic or slow-witted bank teller escapes imperial rebuke. He is a tireless author of letters to the editor, will hang on the phone an hour or more, waiting his turn to cross swords with a radio talk jockey.

Never, in any comradely way, have we been close, but at the time when such things still mattered, I did all I could to displease and disappoint him. We overlapped, then, as adversaries, like ink stains on an office blotter. His dictates and my flaunted heresies notched together, achieving an intimacy that we never could.

When Carla and I were still quite small, he began to organize us in dispute games, assigning pro and con roles on a current events topic or courtroom recreation. The winner was rewarded with a blue ribbon strip pinned on by the loser. Another learning experience was trying to mediate between him and our mother — in short, learning not to. Their harsh, spiraling set-tos were precious to them, the cream in their coffee, oddly but consistently comforting, and not to be intruded on. Later, having the eligible skills, Carla and I were allowed to come in and widen the war, sniping away at targets of opportunity until we, and usually mother too, were routed by Gordo. His triumphant rages would immobilize the house. He’d bellow and stamp like some parodic Lear while we hid out in our rooms.