Stephen Dixon - 30 Pieces of a Novel

He takes the sandwich out of the refrigerator, scrapes off as much of the mayonnaise as he can from it, smears on mustard, and eats it, has some milk, cookies, a plum, washes up and gets in his short-sleeves-and-shorts pajamas, and lies on the bed with a book and opens it and thinks, The fan! and plugs it in and turns it on to SLOW and gets back on the bed and thinks, When I grow older I’m never getting married. It’ll end like this if I do — things are passed down from father to son more than they are from the mother, not just looks but I bet the kind of woman you choose for a wife — with my son’s mother locked in her room and me some other place cheap and dirty because I have so little money or have given most of it to her for my son and not calling him also because I’m too upset and am afraid of getting my wife on the phone who I now hate more than anything but both of us believing the worst thing possible has happened to our son when it hasn’t, he’s actually glad they’ve split up because now he doesn’t have to hear them arguing back and forth almost every dinner and Sunday mornings and sometimes from the second his father comes home from work and from time to time telling each other they’re going to kill the other — not so much that but that they’d be better off dead than living with the other — and the only way to stop that from happening is never to marry and have a child, never, because you don’t ever want to put him through that and make your own life horrible and crazy and mean besides; and he grabs the pillow from under his head and throws it across the room and then jumps out of bed and knocks all the treasures off his desk and picks up some and throws them against the wall and yells, “Shut up!”—to the fan—“just shut the hell up!” and pulls its plug out by the cord and pushes the fan over and would kick it if it wasn’t that he had bare feet, and pounds the closet door with his fists and screams, “You bitches, you louses, you rotten bastards, I hate you, I hate your guts!” His mother comes in and says, “What is it with you; why are you acting like this?” and he says, “Nothing, go away,” and runs to the night table and turns the light off and gets back in bed and under the covers and faces away from her and wishes he had his pillow to lie on but isn’t going to get it till she’s out of the room, and she says, “That wasn’t a nice thing to say,” and the room’s still a little lit from the hallway light and he closes his eyes tight and she says, “And especially not after all you know I’ve recently gone through with your father, besides the things I’ve tried to do to make your homecoming as nice as it can possibly be for you,” and he says, “Leave me alone; I can’t stand either of you,” and she says, “Gould,” and he doesn’t say anything, and she says, “Gould, that was awful, apologize,” and he holds his breath till he can’t hold it any longer and lets it out slowly so she won’t hear. She turns the ceiling light on, picks up the stuff he threw around, puts some of it in his wastebasket and the rest on his desk, brushes off his pillow and drops it at the foot of his bed, then turns the light off and leaves the room, and he thinks, I wish I could fall asleep right now, but so what, because even if I do I’ll have to wake up in the morning.

THEY NEVER HIT each other. Oh, he raised his fist plenty of times, and threatened to clip her in the jaw or give her a nose job free, or his hands, sometimes, as if he wanted to strangle her. And she raised her hand also, saying how she’d like to slap his ugly face, and he’d say if she did he’d really crack her in the mouth, hit her so hard, he once said, that he’d knock her out cold and then he would just step over her and not give a plug damn whether she was alive or dead. To that she said, “Try it, you just try hitting me, and I’ll get the police in here so fast you won’t even see them coming through the door and have you manacled and carted off to jail.” And he said, “And who’d take care of you then?” and she said, “I’d manage; I for sure don’t need you,” and they’d bicker like that, shouting across the dinner table, and that’d be when Gould would usually throw down his napkin and run to his room and slam the door, but he’d still hear them shouting for several minutes after, sometimes on and off for another hour or two, and even when he was asleep their shouting would wake him sometimes, and some of what they were shouting was about him: “How could you threaten me like that in front of Gould?” and his father would say, “Who threatened who? You’re the one that said you’d slap my puss,” and she’d say, “But only after you started it,” and his father would say, “Started it how? If you mean I initiated it this time, that’s because you both initiated, continued, and finished it the last time, so it wasn’t over for me yet, though you for sure got your licks in. Believe me, this was started a long time ago, years, maybe a few weeks after we met. I never should have hooked up with you, certainly never married you. My brother was right a hundred percent about you, a thousand,” and she’d say, “Just as my dad had the goods on you, and same figures,” and it’d go on; Gould would often clamp his pillow to his ears, and later, even if he was asleep, one of them would usually come into his room — they must have decided who would go in to him or the other would send the more guiltyfeeling of the two — and if it was his father, he’d say something like “Gould, you up? Your light’s not on so I thought maybe you were asleep by now,” or if his light was on and his eyes open his father would say, “Gould, everything all right?” and he would think, How could everything be all right? but he’d say, “Yeah, I guess so,” and his father would say, “But you don’t know, is that it?” and he’d say, “No, I’m okay, I’m okay, what?” and his father would say, “Good. Listen, I’m sorry — we both are — about the argument before. We do go at each other every now and then, don’t we? and I’m not trying to pass it off here as if it’s nothing. But we’re all made up now, everything hunky-dory again, and we’re sorry it ever happened, especially when you were there, but it’s not going to happen again, I promise,” and he’d think, Yeah, tell me more, as if I haven’t heard it all before. “If there ever is another argument between your mother and I — and people who live together have their differences, you understand — it’s going to be done in a reasonable way, not with such loud voices or anything,” and Gould would say, “I’m glad,” and his father would come closer, maybe sit on the bed if Gould was lying on it and wasn’t drawing or doing homework at his desk, and say, “But I still haven’t got from you if you realize how disturbed we are as to how the argument might have affected you,” and he’d say, “It’s okay, I understand, it’s over; I’m much better now,” and his father would say, “Fine, that’s good, what I wanted to hear, thank you,” and pat Gould’s cheek or rub his hair and Gould would think, Sure, it’s what you wanted to hear, and sure, it won’t happen again till the next time when they shout and scream and raise their fists and hands and curse at each other like they hate one another and forget he’s sitting there or anything or is alive and it doesn’t touch him. One day one of them’s going to kill the other: his mother is going to get so angry she’ll grab a kitchen knife and stick it in his father’s chest when he has his fist up ready to hit her, or his father will slam his mother so hard the first time she’ll bang her head against the wall and break it so her brain becomes dead, or he’ll strangle her or shake her so hard he breaks her neck and she dies on the floor. Then the one who killed the other will go to prison and he’ll be sent to live with his uncle, who he doesn’t like and who will beat him every night because he’s so mean, just as he’s heard his father say his uncle’s beat his own wife and kids; or he’ll be sent to a home with rough boys and get beaten every day and night by them and also by the people who run the home till he runs away and is caught and beaten and then runs away again and escapes because he knows how, this time, and he’ll get on a railway car and get halfway across America on his own before a hobo climbs into the car and steals his shoes and beats him to ribbons and tries to stick his penis in his behind and threatens to slice his penis off if he doesn’t do what he says and throw him off the car when the train’s moving at fifty miles an hour; or he, rather, jumps off the car to keep the hobo from sticking his penis in him and rolls down some steep rocky hill, his head bumping on every stone along the way till his eyes fall out and his face is torn to shreds and his brains are bashed to mush and start spilling out of his ears and he’s dead.