Eli the Good Read online

  When we rode back by my house, I realized that Daddy had already left for work at the station. I had wanted to tell him good-bye. When I noticed his truck was gone, I stopped in the middle of the road and stood with my legs on either side of my bike, watching the house as if he might magically reappear. Edie had sped on past me, but now she had noticed that I was stopped in the middle of the road, staring at the house like a dullard. She hollered and laughed at me but I couldn’t move for a time, and eventually she rode away, putting her arms in the air to ride with no hands.

  I ran up the path as dusk came in with purple and red and a kind of whiteness I cannot explain. The light was different that summer, a clean light that filtered through the leaves and made them look like pieces of typing paper that had been cut in the shape of leaves. When the sun went down, everything cooled instantly, leaving the world to smell like cooked greens.

  I sat in my secret place: the roots of my beech tree, where I could look out over the valley, waiting for my mother to come onto the porch to call my name. This was the only time of day when I felt she actually knew I existed, when she stood there on the porch, holding on to the banister and calling for me, the pulsating air of the gloaming around her.

  I waited, my chin resting on the tops of my knees. The sun was melting fast, spreading out along the horizon like butter. The breath of wind that had been stirring the leaves stopped. All birdcall ceased. Not one dog barked; no one hollered out as they ran across a yard. Everything became completely still as if the whole world realized this moment without knowing it. This hushed time of day carried its own scent, too, a low sweetness like honeysuckle that hadn’t bloomed yet, like honeysuckle that didn’t even know it was about to bloom. The sun sank lower and lower and then: “Eli!”

  My mother’s voice. If I had moved from my spot and crawled out onto the edge of the bluff, I could have seen her standing out on the back porch, her elbows in her hands as she scanned the yard. “Eli! It’s time to come in now!”

  I held my breath and felt like the whole world was waiting with me.

  “Eli?” A question now. The shoals of the river were quiet; all the other kids had gone home. It was the same every day of summer. Now she would call out more firmly — “Eli!” — and then I would stand and take one final look at the sunset before running through the woods, down the old path, and into our backyard.

  My mother didn’t see me coming out of the trees. She walked to the corner of the screen porch, leaned against one of the posts, and called my name again, a long stretching of the two syllables of my name, turning “Eli” into a little song that I never tired of hearing.

  It’s important that you know this: my mother was beautiful. Everybody said so. She must have driven the boys at the high school absolutely crazy, pacing back and forth in front of the blackboard while she tried to teach them biology. Her hair was always just right, even though she didn’t pay a bit of attention to it. Daddy always said she was one of those women who have a talent for pulling her hair up in a matter of seconds without a thought. Usually she pinned it up with a single barrette in the center of her scalp, showing off her broad, smart forehead. Her eyes were green and clever, alert to everything happening around her. At the same time, there was a distance about my mother that was most noticeable in her eyes. A mystery there kept everyone — even me, especially me — from getting too close, although we all wanted to be close to her more than anything, wanted to know everything about her.

  She was only thirty-three years old that summer, and her beauty was in full bloom, a kind of peach tint that overtook her face and caused her to glow from within. People stopped talking when she dashed by on the street. There was something about the way she moved. She was set apart from the other women we knew because of the gracefulness she possessed. It was more than that, though. She was unusually confident, a strength that showed not only in her eyes but also in the determined steps she took in everyday motion. She always looked as if she had somewhere important to go.

  “There you are,” she said, her voice no more than three breaths, and the screen door cried open as she stepped down from the porch and onto the top step. She put her hand on my head as I leaned into her, my face against her waist. She smelled like lemon Joy, and I knew she had been washing dishes. For the rest of my life that scent has conjured up longing in me. “I’s getting worried about you,” she said.

  “I was right there,” I said, pointing to the ridge. “Watching you.”

  “It’s just you and me tonight,” she said, and opened the door to the screen porch. “Your daddy’s going to be real late, and Josie is fixing to go to the drive-in with Charles Asher.”

  “Can I go with her?” As we stepped into the house, I could smell the dishwater and the coffee she always kept warming on the stove. She drank two pots a day, sometimes, even in the hottest part of summer. From the bathroom down the hall, I could hear the muffled sound of Josie’s radio, playing Bob Seger.

  “Nawsir, you cannot.” Mom tipped a stream of coffee into a cup and leaned against the counter, taking a drink while she held one elbow in her free hand. “You have to stay here and keep me company.”

  “I’m going to watch Josie get ready,” I said, heading down the hall.

  “All right, then,” she said. I looked back to see her smiling at me with her hooded eyes. Sometimes she looked at me like that, with a strange mix of amusement and love and puzzlement. There was a wall between my mother and me that I couldn’t accept, even though I knew what it was: she loved my father more than me. This was hard for me.

  Once I had spied on my parents watching Johnny Carson together when I was supposed to be in bed. They were lying all curled up together on the couch, one of Daddy’s legs thrown over both of hers. My father realized about the same time as me that my mother was crying. He asked what was wrong, and she rolled over so he could run his thumb down the side of her face. She kissed his whole face, a dozen times on his eyes, his lips, his cheeks, his forehead. “I love you too much,” she said, still crying. “More than anything. More than anybody.”

  I don’t believe I ever completely forgave her for that.

  Strangely enough, there was no distance at all between my sister, Josie, and me. Although she was six years my senior, we got along better than any other brother and sister I knew.

  “Hey, little man,” she said, looking at me by way of the mirror when I walked in. She never called me Eli, only this nickname she had given to me when I was a baby. She was leaned in to the mirror so close that her nose almost touched the glass. Her eyes were those of a lost girl. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had recently had her entire history called into question, and this had marked her, had made her harder and stronger. I did know that she was searching for something that summer.

  I pulled myself up onto the vanity counter and watched her. I loved the careful way she went about putting on her blue eye shadow, how she spent much more time and patience on this than on anything else. She mouthed the words to the song playing on the radio: Beautiful loser, where you gonna fall?

  “Mom’s going to die,” I said, and left my eyes on her pants so she’d know what I was talking about.

  Josie had this pair of pants that was always causing trouble, and she had them on that evening. They looked like the American flag — each leg was striped in red and white, and above that was a blue block pecked with small white stars. Our mother hated these pants, which only added to Josie’s love for them. In fact, whenever she wasn’t wearing them, she hid the pants, afraid Mom would find them and throw them away. She had shared the hiding place’s location with no one else but me, and I knew how much this meant, to be trusted in such a way. She only kept three things in the hiding place: the pack of cigarettes she sometimes smoked from, the pint of Jim Beam she had stolen from Stella’s house, and the pair of flag pants that our mother hated.

  “She’ll get over it,” Josie said. “If she don’t, then tough.”

  “I hate it when you all fight,�
�� I said, but Josie didn’t answer. She was putting on her lipstick, a frosty pink that was almost white. She didn’t wear much makeup — only eye shadow and lipstick — but she and Mom fought over that, too. Mom said that when she was young, girls didn’t wear makeup until they were grown. Josie’s reply was always that she was grown. She ripped off three squares of toilet paper, folded them, blotted her lips, and handed them to me without glancing my way.

  “Daddy’s never said anything about them,” she said. “And he’s the one who was in the war. Not her.”

  I looked down at the perfect bloom of her lips for a time before I realized that stillness had seized her.

  Josie was looking into the mirror as if transfixed. She sang one verse of the song — beautiful loser, read it on the wall — beneath her breath, concentrating on each word. There was a tight look of disgust on her face, a scowl that didn’t really change the shape of anything. Still, she looked awfully cool to me, standing there in flag pants and what she called a peasant blouse and her black hair so long that she could sit on it. The top of her head shone in the light of the bare bulb hanging over the bathroom sink.

  Josie stood there like one of the mannequins in the window of the Cato’s downtown, staring without blinking. The drip of the faucet grew louder. Finally, she let out an exaggerated sigh. When she put a hand into her hair and lifted it, the clean green-apples smell of her shampoo washed out over me and caused my mouth to water.

  Josie put a knuckle against my arm and let her eyes touch mine, her sign that she was finished. She took a step back as I slid from the counter, as if she didn’t trust that I would be able to get down properly. When I was smaller, she had slid her hands under my arms and helped me down, but I wouldn’t let her do this anymore.

  Just as I hopped down, Mom appeared in the bathroom door, which I had left ajar. She had a talent for magically appearing as if out of thin air. She held a cup of coffee with a fist of steam rising from the surface.

  “Josie, I told you plain and simple I didn’t want to see those old pants again,” she said.

  Josie crossed her arms. “Why?” She leaned out with the one word. “What is the big deal?”

  “Your daddy almost got killed fighting for this country,” Mom said, just as she always did. She lived with Vietnam stamped across her face as much as our father did. “I won’t have you out in public with the flag plastered across your hind end.”

  Josie kicked the door with her sandaled foot. “I hate you!” This was becoming a daily declaration in our house, and it always made my stomach hurt to hear such a thing spoken out loud. I couldn’t imagine a worse thing for one person to say to another. There was a secret between them that I didn’t know about yet. I hated seeing them into it like that. There were times when Mom drew her hand back, but let it quiver in the air, never striking Josie. Once Josie had sidled up as close as she could to Mom and screamed in her face. It was getting worse. I despised the way they looked at each other, the disappointment flattening their brows, their voices scratching up from way back in their throats.

  Mom looked Josie in the eye, unfazed by her outburst. “March in there and pull the pants off and hand them to me,” she said. “They’re going in the fire barrel.”

  Josie took a step forward. “If you do that, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  Mom took a slow drink of her coffee, and as she brought the cup down, she gave a crooked little grin. “The way you’ve been acting lately, that might not be such a bad thing.”

  Josie took one big step out of the bathroom and stomped down the hallway, trying to make her way to the back door. We followed on her heels, and just as Josie reached the kitchen, Mom caught her by the wrist. She pulled Josie in toward her, their eyes boring into each other. Mom spoke solidly, each word measured into the same amount of force: “You’re not going out dressed like that.”

  “Watch me,” Josie spat, her voice filled with a venom found only in an overdramatic actress. Mom sometimes said that Josie had watched too many bad Bette Davis movies on the late show. Still, defeat showed in Josie’s eyes as she stood there in a staring standoff with our mother. At last she ripped her wrist from Mom’s grasp and bolted back down the hallway. She ran into her bedroom and slammed the door.

  We stood there without moving or speaking until Josie came back out, dressed in a different, regular, pair of bell-bottoms. Mom stood with her arms folded as Josie passed by her, giving one final glare of defiance to our mother and running her hand over my head as she passed. There was no victory in Mom’s face as she watched Josie walk out the back door, going to stand beside the road until Charles Asher came to get her in his beautiful 1966 Mustang, which I coveted.

  The firecrackers started popping as soon as darkness grew thick. Everybody had started celebrating freedom a full month before the actual Fourth of July. As soon as school had gotten out at the end of May, the fireworks had started up every night. Bottle rockets fizzed up into the air, and Roman candles shot out spinning balls of fire. There were fireworks for sale at little shacks set up alongside the road. The men who worked at these stands never wore shirts, and sometimes their girlfriends sat there with them, fanning themselves with magazines and rolling their cold Dr Pepper bottles across their foreheads.

  “Turn it up,” my mother said, nodding to the television. “I can’t hear on account of them old firecrackers.”

  My mother and I were having supper together, sitting cross-legged on the living-room floor and eating from metal TV trays straddling our laps while we watched Happy Days. This is something that Mom would have never ever done if Daddy and Josie had been home. We also would not have eaten something as simple as macaroni cooked in tomato juice, but it was my favorite meal, and I loved the way Mom kept salting hers and leaning over her bowl with her shoulders hunched up, eating steadily without taking her eyes off the television, which she hardly ever watched.

  “Who’s that?” she said.

  “That’s Potsie. He’s Richie’s best friend.”

  “What’s that redheaded one’s name?”

  “That’s Ralph Malph.”

  “Lord have mercy, what kinds of names do these people have?” She frowned at the screen. “Fonzie, Potsie, Ralph Malph. Real people don’t have names like that.”

  As the show ended, I realized that the whole room had gotten dark as we ate in the blue glow of the television. There was something about that eerie tint to the room that made it feel close and comfortable, the way a warm quilt changes a winter’s day. The windows were open, and I knew that people out on their porches could hear the voices on our TV. Normally we would’ve been out on the porch, too. In the summertime, we always ate supper and then everyone made their way onto our screen porch, my father’s favorite place in the wide world. He announced this all the time. “We sure are lucky,” he’d say, settling into his chair. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than right here.”

  Mom set her tray on the floor when Happy Days was over. “Oh, my God, it’s completely dark,” she said, as if shocked. She leaned back against the couch, not looking much older than Josie to me. She studied me for a time, and at last a smile broke out on her face. “We ought to dance,” she said.

  She jumped up and clicked on the lamp, snapped off the television, and started going through her albums that stood in a metal stand beside the record player. Friends of Josie’s were always saying how our parents were cool, since they listened to things that most other parents did not. My mother loved rock ’n’ roll. When she was younger, she and my aunt Nell had been crazy about the Doors.

  She flipped through the albums, ticking them off one by one. “Linda Ronstadt? Nah. Oh, here’s Cat Stevens.”

  “We can’t dance to him,” I said. “Do we have ‘Waterloo’?”

  “Your sister would die if she found out we’d been dancing to ABBA,” she said, keeping her eyes on the records. Josie sometimes went into long speeches about why ABBA was ruining music, but I still liked them anyway. Mom kept going through
the albums until she held up one with a golden-faced man on the cover. “Here we go,” she said, nodding. “Van Morrison.”

  Mom slid the album out of its jacket and held it between two flat palms as she put it on the record player. “You used to love this song when you were real little. I’d put you on my hip and dance all over the house.”

  She set the needle on the first groove: “Brown-Eyed Girl.” As the guitar picked out the beginning, Mom started snapping her fingers and moving her shoulders up and down. She sashayed across the living room, took my hands, intertwining our fingers as she spun me around the room. The song built to its chorus of celebration, and then she let go and danced in front of me, her eyes closed as she sang along, lost to the music. I danced, too, moving my legs in opposition to my arms, the way Josie had taught me. We were a dancing family.

  Occasionally Mom opened her eyes to watch me and hold her hand out to let me twirl. She threw her head back, laughing, then went back into the reverie that the music washed over her. “Sha la la la la la la la la la la tee dah,” she sang. She swayed and moved around the room like a fine dress caught in a breeze. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, dancing there in the shadows of the living room. I thought that this was maybe the happiest I had ever been in my whole life.

  While my mother and I danced, the shape of our family was changing without our knowledge. Although we could not have not known as much while we spun and laughed, two things were happening on opposite ends of the county that would mark us forever.

  Now that I am grown, I can float like a spirit over the distance that separated us from my sister, who was at that moment watching a preview showing of The Omen at the Sky-Vu Drive-In on the other side of town. Knowing Josie as well as I do, I can imagine exactly what was happening with her that night, especially since she told me some of it later.