Brock Clarke - Exley

Things I Learned from My Dad, Who Learned Them from Exley (Lesson 4: Shame: Don’t Tell Your Mom)

It was another Sunday. This was when I was probably seven years old, when I was still in the grade someone my age was supposed to be in, still only reading books someone my age was supposed to read. Mother was sitting at the kitchen counter, reading stuff for work. I was sitting next to her, reading the Sunday comics. My dad came in from the living room, jingling his keys. “I think I’ll take Miller to the zoo today,” he said.

“The zoo?” I said. I mean, I knew what a zoo was. I knew there was one right in town. I’d been to it before, with my preschool class. I’d been to it with Mother, too. It was fun when I went with my class. When I went with Mother, everything was wrong. The polar bear looked sick. The monkeys had some sort of skin problem, or at least they kept eating their skin and then gagging on it. There seemed to be more concrete in the pens than when I’d been with my class. The zebras stank so bad that Mother and I had to hold our noses until we got to the reptile house, where all the lizards were sleeping except for the one that was dead. When we got back in the car, Mother seemed to be trying hard not to say something. “Well, that was fun,” she’d finally said.

“Yes,” my dad said. “The zoo.”

“Really?” I said. We’d come back from eating breakfast at the Crystal not fifteen minutes earlier, and during breakfast my dad hadn’t asked me if I’d wanted to go to the zoo or anything like that.

“Really?” Mother said to my dad.

“Really,” my dad said. He looked her right in the eyes when he said this. She looked back at him, then back down at her work.

“That sounds like a nice idea,” Mother said. “I can’t wait to hear all about it when you get home.”

“Good,” my dad said. His lips were set close together. He nodded at me in a determined way. “Let’s go, bud,” he said.

We went, but not to the zoo. I knew that when we got to Factory Street and my dad pulled to the curb and parked.

“This isn’t the zoo,” I said.

“Don’t tell your mom,” my dad said.

My dad got out of the car, and I did, too. We stood there for a while. There were two bars right next to each other. I didn’t know they were bars then but I know that now. One was called C.’s; the other, M.’s. My dad seemed to be trying to figure out which one we wanted to go into. We stood there for a long time. We might still be standing there if an ambulance hadn’t pulled up in front of our car. The ambulance guys jumped out of the ambulance with their gear and sprinted into C.’s.

“Why don’t we go into M.’s,” my dad said. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what M.’s was or why we would want to go into it at all. The place had windows, but they were black, or at least darker than normal windows, and I couldn’t see inside. My dad took my hand, and we walked to the door. He opened it with one hand and gently pushed me inside with the other.

The place wasn’t as dark as the windows, but it was noisy. There was music playing from somewhere. The music was loud and angry. It sounded like it sounded when someone stuck something they weren’t supposed to into one of the machines in metal shop. My dad and I just stood there until the song, or whatever it was, ended. Finally it did. We walked to the bar. There were stools, unlike at the Crystal. My dad picked me up and put me on one of the stools and then sat on the next one to the left. There were a couple of empty stools to my dad’s left. There were a couple of empty stools to my right. Then there were two guys. They were wearing orange ski hats and had patchy beards. They looked older than my dad: there was white in their beards, and the hats had black stains on them. The guys didn’t seem to notice us at first. They were drinking bottles of Genny Light — I remember seeing the label — and looking at one of the televisions. There were two televisions, one above each corner of the bar. The two guys were watching the TV to the right. I couldn’t see what was on it, although I heard voices coming from it. And then another song started playing, with a clang, and someone in the bar shouted. The voice came from behind me. I turned and saw two guys throwing darts at a board. And behind them I saw what looked like a small old lady sitting by herself at a table, a juice glass on the table in front of her.

“You guys got IDs?” a woman’s voice said. I turned back around and saw a woman standing on the other side of the bar. She was around my dad’s age. Her hair came down to her shoulders, where it flipped out, making the letter J on one side, and the backward letter J on the other. She was wearing a white shirt with no sleeves even though it was almost Thanksgiving. Outside, it felt like it; inside, it was warm. The woman had her hands on the bar and was looking at us seriously. I glanced over at my dad. He had a nervous expression on his face. My dad’s coat was off his shoulders and halfway down his arms. It was like he was trying to take it off and it got stuck on his elbows.

Then the woman started cracking up. “I’m just messin’ with ya,” she said. My dad smiled at her and let his coat slide to his hands. He stood up a little, put his coat on the barstool seat, then sat down on it. I kept my coat on. She asked my dad what he wanted to drink. “Genny Light,” he said.

“Right,” the woman said. She reached below the bar, came up with a can, opened it, then handed my dad the beer. My dad took it, drank it in one drink, then raised his finger for another one. The woman got it, then asked me, “What about you, little guy?” I knew she was asking what I wanted to drink. I looked at my dad to see if it was OK if I had strawberry milk. That’s what I normally drank on special occasions, but I couldn’t tell if this was one or not. But my dad wasn’t paying attention. He was squinting at the TV on his side of the bar; then he turned around and looked at the rest of the bar. I turned around, too, to see what he was seeing.

“Pretty interesting, huh?” the woman said to me, then waved her arm at everything in the room. She pronounced “interesting” like this: “innerrestin’.” That was the way some people in Watertown talked. Mother would sometimes tell stories about going to the supermarket, or stories about work, and when she’d do the voices of people who were in the stories, she’d use more r’s and n’s and fewer g’s than she would normally use.

I shot my dad another quick look, but he was back to squinting at the TV and not paying attention to me. So I said to the woman, “I’ll have strawberry milk, please.”

She gave me a disappointed look. “Uh-oh,” she said. She ducked underneath the bar again, came up empty handed, then raised her index finger and disappeared into a room off to the right that I hadn’t noticed before.

“The Crystal closed today, Tom?” one of the guys in ski hats asked my dad. I knew the guy wasn’t really wondering if the Crystal was closed. I knew he was wondering why my dad was here and not there. I was wondering the same thing.

“The Crystal is not closed today or any other Sunday, D.,” my dad said, still looking around the bar.

“What the fuck ?” one of the dart throwers said, loud enough to be heard over the music, and the other one laughed like this: “Heh-heh-heh.” Then suddenly they were standing next to my dad and I could see them better. One of them was black; the other was white. They both had buzz cuts; besides me, they were the youngest guys in the bar. They were soldiers. I knew that from the buzz cuts and because you never see a white guy and a black guy in Watertown hanging out together unless they’re soldiers. The white guy was taller than the black guy. He put his hands on the bar and leaned over it and looked toward the room where the woman had gone. Then, still leaning over the bar, he reached over and under the bar, and just then the woman came back. She had a carton of milk, but no syrup. She saw the white guy and scowled at him, and the white guy saw her scowl at him but didn’t move. The black guy backed away from the white guy; he put his hands out, palms up, and shook his head and said, “What the fuck?”