Man of the Year Read online

  “Testicles. It’s the British way of saying balls.”

  Gretchen looks up, giggles, then blushes pink across her lily skin.

  “Did someone say balls?” Frank sweeps into our dining room, a scruffy dumpling in a silk kimono. “And I thought I was just coming for a bagel!”

  “God save the queen,” Papa murmurs.

  “All the queens,” Frank chuckles, grabbing a bagel. He is the hairiest person I ever met. Like, Planet of the Apes hairy: short and round with black chest hair so thick you can’t see his nipples or make out whether he has a bellybutton.

  “I was in a tree on the field in front of my high school kissing my first crush,” he told me one night when he was babysitting and Amanda and David had gone to bed. “Fell twenty-two feet. I was in a body cast for eight months and they shaved me from head to toe before they put me in. When I came out, I looked like this. Eat your heart out, Burt Reynolds! But those were the worst months of my life. I felt prickers and itches all over and I couldn’t move. My sister would sit by the side of my bed and slide a ruler under the cast to scratch but it didn’t help. My father said it was volontà di Dio—God’s wrath for kissing a boy. He didn’t say anything to me ever again after that.”

  “Do you miss your dad?” I’d asked.

  “Every day, ragazzino. Every day. Cherish that Papa of yours.”

  “By the way, got a call last night,” Papa says as Frank heads back to his apartment. “Special guests coming to stay with us for a while. They’ll be here later today.”

  “Ooh,” Frank says and stops at the door to inquire: “Boys or girls?”

  “Who? You didn’t tell us that,” I say, ticked at Papa’s typical last-minute surprise.

  “Well, I’m telling you now,” Papa says. “Remember our friends Howie and Carly? They just got married.”

  “Married boys?” Frank skitters back over, wraps an arm around Papa.

  “Not Carl, Carly. Sorry, Charlie. They’re on their honeymoon. Cross-country road trip, from Berkeley to Salem. They called from Philly. We’re the last stop before they go back again. They’ll stay for a week. Maybe two.”

  “Salem would make anyone turn around and go home,” I grumble.

  “Hey,” Papa says in his straighten-up tone. “You’ve got Grandma Wini and Grandpa Sam here. You never complained about coming for holidays or summer vacations in the past. Plus your Aunt Leslie, Uncle Rick, and Cousin Greg live in Marblehead, too…”

  “And Grandma Charlotte and Uncle Morris,” Mama adds her side of the family.

  “And them,” Papa admits, no fan of his motherin-law but always happy for a bourbon and a cigar with old Mo. “You’ve got your whole family. And now you’ll have some very cool roommates for a couple of weeks.”

  My father met Howie at Antioch College in 1969. Papa was ten years older, in from D.C. looking for interns to help fight the war on poverty. Howie was a junior assigned to tour him around campus. Instead of choosing any of the applicants, Papa asked Howie to come back with him. “He was smart, and he made me laugh, a real star. So I ended up hiring him. We had a hell of a time.”

  “Is he the hippie?” I ask.

  “He’s … a free spirit.”

  The name conjures vague memories, positive ones, but another disruption in our lives? “I don’t want them to come,” I say petulantly. “I don’t want anyone to stay with us.” A glance from Gretchen confirms that I’m acting like a little kid. “I mean, because we’re still getting used to a new city. And now we have to get used to more strangers?”

  “Friends are a part of life,” Papa says. “The best part. If you don’t spend real time with friends, you’re not living life.”

  “Aren’t we living?” Amanda asks.

  He shakes his head. “Only if we do certain things. How do you really know if you’re alive? Hm? How do you know?” he says to me.

  “Your heart beats,” I say flatly.

  “Mechanics.” Papa’s voice rises. “Did you wake up ready to go today?” he asks, looking me in the eye, making sure I’m listening. “Did you play music today? Did you have sex today? Did you sweat? See a friend? Cook something delicious? Did you help someone today? That’s how you know you had a good day. That’s when you know you’re alive.”

  Papa’s enthusiasm for living is infectious. He has a way of rallying us like troops, a natural leadership that I envy.

  Gretchen giggles again, squirms in her seat. Then she gives me a look that screams let’s go.

  “What’s up?” I ask as we climb the stairs to my room.

  “How come ya parents ah always talking about that kinda stuff?”

  “What kind of stuff?” I reply, knowing full well it’s Papa’s plainspoken style that’s rattled her. But I don’t care. I like it, and I wish he’d speak that way with me all the time.

  “Sex and stuff.”

  “Well, he wasn’t really talking about sex, he just said the word.”

  “And balls.”

  I shrug.

  “My parents would kill me. Especially on a Sunday. And how come ya all read at the table?”

  “That’s what we do on Sunday mornings.”

  “Don’t ya go to chuhch?”

  “Jews don’t go to church.”

  “But they go to a temple or something, right?”

  “I guess. But we don’t.” Which is a fair point, now that I think about it. Where would my bar mitzvah be, anyway? In the backyard?

  “Then what’s so Jewish about you? And that weahd guy who lives out back. I think he might be a fag.”

  “He’s gay, if that’s what you mean.”

  Gretchen frowns. I don’t need her to tell me how different we are from everybody else in this stupid city. That was clear from the moment we sat on the front steps that first Saturday on Chestnut Street and got the stink eye from our neighbor Glovey Butler. The gray matriarch of Salem society is our most formidable neighbor, installed right next door with a houseful of familial ghosts and a very-much-alive grandson named Johnny. Our neighbors live in fear of crossing her path. Papa lives for winning her approval.

  The Salemites don’t quite know what to do with a family like ours.

  Mama is brilliant: a computer programmer taking a break to stay home with my baby brother but never not working. She’s comfortable around a jigsaw, handy with a slide rule. In other words, she’s not your average Chestnut Street lady.

  My father is purposefully anti-average: sporting a dandy bow tie, a carefully waxed handlebar mustache, and hair almost to his shoulders, he turns heads. I have no idea what the welfare recipients or the physically and mentally disabled folks he gets jobs for think of him, but I know he spends the majority of his days thinking and working on their behalf.

  As for me, I haven’t developed Papa’s social conscience or his taste for ties, but I do wear my hair long, in tribute. I still have a bit of a lisp, and I like the Mets, not the Red Sox, so I’m primed for pummeling by the townies.

  I picked my room based on how far it is from everyone else: third floor, end of the hall, glossy green paint on old wood floorboards, deep closet to hide stuff, and a marble fireplace. Two windows face east, toward the metal peak of the neighbors’ widow’s walk. I can’t help but picture leagues of ashen old Glovey Butlers wearily looking out to sea for the husbands who will never return. How many of them have hopped the fencing meant to contain the grief-stricken and landed in these thorny piles of chestnuts below us?

  I open the door and Gretchen’s hand flies to her face.

  “Ugh! What is that stink?” she screeches.

  “Bunny Yabba’s crate. I need to change it. Just follow me.” I open the back window, and lead Gretchen to my private hideout—a long flat roof, still wet under the late September morning sky.

  “Aw, wicked!” she says as she takes in the view. I gaze up at the peaked roof where I sometimes climb to be alone. It’s my “Secure Position” and I consider showing Gretchen, then think better of it.

  Maybe
she senses my hackles rising. Or maybe she just wants to show me that different, like me, is good in her mind. Exotic. Sidling up next to me on the flat copper ledge, Gretchen Pelletier puts her face right up to mine and says, “Kiss me.”

  We touch lips, mouths searching for the right angle, eyes open. It’s my first time with a girl who didn’t have the bottle spin her way. I reach for her forearms, pebbled into gooseflesh. Her white-blonde hair, pale lips, golden freckles, and the memory of those little blond wisps at the edge of those yellow panties collide in my mind. My lungs collapse around the crazy bong-bong, bong-bong of my heart.

  The tip of her tongue tastes like smoked salmon, spearmint Dentyne, and … ash?

  “Did you smoke something?” I ask, pulling away.

  Gretchen frowns. “Yeah. I pinched some Salem Lights from my ma’s purse. So?” She pulls a crumpled pack from her back pocket and holds it out to me. “Want one?”

  “I think I … Let’s try again, instead?” Gretchen nods and closes her eyes this time. I taste her again and move to put a hand on the soft new bump on her chest.

  “Bring that filthy behavior indoors!” Glovey Butler caws from her third-floor rear window, bath mat still dripping dust and debris as she shakes it weakly. “This is a neighborhood, not a cowshed. And you, boy! Leave that poor girl alone. I’ll be sure to let her mother know just what kind of a gentleman you are not.”

  We scramble back inside and fall on the bottom bunk, laughing. Her willowy throat rises and swells. Atjeh scrapes at the corner of my latched door and I let her in.

  “Can’t kiss in front of a dog,” Gretchen smirks.

  “I know. That’s why we came inside.” She guffaws, moves to me to kiss again but I pull back, reach for my comics pile by the bed. “You like Morbius?” Gretchen sits up on her elbows, looking confused. “Morbius. The Living Vampire?” I say.

  “Is that … like … a movie or sumthin’?”

  “Comic book character. You know. ‘Mystery. Mood. Menace. In the fearful tradition of Dracula’?”

  We sit quietly for a minute or two. I can tell she wants to fool around some more but I can’t find my way back. She’s pretty enough. She’s funny. Annoying, but funny. And she keeps sitting closer to me until I can feel the warmth of her leg through my jeans.

  “You want another bagel?” I ask. Gretchen twists up her face and holds her hands out, exasperated, like I just missed the easiest catch ever thrown.

  The Best Way to Come Together

  An hour later, Amanda and I are camped on the front steps of the house, waiting for Howie and Carly. The granite is still morning-cold but this October Sunday has warmed to T-shirt weather. Atjeh bays from the backyard. She nipped at a baby in a stroller on the morning walk with Papa, and ended up tied to the shedding Seckel pear tree.

  I guess we’re getting used to this. The eighth house. The Salem house. When we moved in, Papa and Mama unveiled a freshly polished brass plaque engraved in deep, all-cap letters: THE COVES, and screwed it so firmly to the front door that its face started curving in, like it was vacuum sealed to the house, as if to say, after seven houses in twelve years, this will be the true home.

  “New Yorkers think of Salem as a backwater,” my father said. “A cultural and intellectual wasteland. I am here to tell you that we are creating a new reality in the City of Salem. These streets, once populated by small minds, shall be expanded with new ideas, new ways of thinking. We will wage the war on poverty from this port. And if the lid on the coffin of sanctimony and moralizing needs one final nail in it, let us be the ones to hammer it in. Welcome home, family.”

  Then he handed me his Canon.

  “Get closer. Frame the shot! Wait…”

  My parents stood straight, smiled. Mama laughed, sticking out her topographical tongue—that deeply textured part of her we never see—and Papa curled the long whiskers of his handlebar.

  We have arrived, they say with their eyes. We have settled.

  “Now!” The camera clicks and whirrs.

  Amanda fills the time waiting for our guests with speculation about them, pondering the baby girls they may have one day. “I could babysit,” she says dreamily.

  “Maybe triplets,” I suggest, trapped beside my lifetime companion whose focus is limited to cute things and stuffed things. “Maybe all boys, all the same age, and all the youngest black belts ever.” She scowls, then drifts off, considering an alternate universe for the imaginary family these people we don’t even know are yet to have, sucking her fingers and watching the passing clouds.

  “Remember when Mama made the strawberry shortcake in the tent in the Everglades?” she asks, randomly segueing to a moment I remember well. “How did she do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I confess. It was Amanda’s birthday, and we were camping, partway into a three-month cross-country drive from Marblehead to Mexico. The trip was intended to be a break between selling the latest house and all our frivolous possessions and buying some land in the country where my parents planned to begin a new life homesteading. But two and a half months into the drive, Papa reconsidered, and, renewing his dedication to fighting urban poverty, turned tail in Mexico and headed for New York. But in the back of the Jeep Wagoneer, drowned out by the Cat Stevens and Neil Young eight-tracks, my sister and I were blissfully unaware of our changing fortunes.

  Amanda turned four in the Everglades. I was six and a half. Papa took us for a walk to look for alligators and when we came back, there was Mama, emerging from the big canvas tent with a double-decker strawberry shortcake. Whipped cream and berries on top. Even candles. No sign of an oven. No campsite refrigerator. But that was Mama, always creating something from nothing.

  “That was amazing,” Amanda says through the fingers in her mouth.

  “That was,” I say.

  A caw beside us shatters the shared memory, “Idle hands!” Glovey Butler, the Old Mother Hubbard lookalike, materializes without a sound. We stare at her, not certain how to reply. “… are the devil’s playground,” she completes the adage, frowning with yet more disappointment, if that is possible. “Why are you just sitting there? Don’t you go to school?”

  “It’s Sunday,” I remind her.

  “It’s Sunday, Mrs. Butler,” she corrects.

  “It’s Sunday, Mrs. Butler.” I sigh.

  “I didn’t spend a decade of my life working to put Chestnut Street on the Commonwealth’s Register of Historic Places just so a child of the Lower East Side or wherever it is you immigrated from could scamp up the place. And you,” she lowers a withering glance my way, “neighborhood molester of young women? I’ve got my eye out.”

  “Hello, Glovey,” Mama says, behind us. “Actually, we’re from the Upper West Side.” She hands us each a plate with a peanut butter, honey, and banana sandwich and potato chips.

  “Mrs. Cove,” Mrs. Butler replies coolly, and turns her back on my mother, slipping into the dark foyer of her own home.

  “We’re still hoping you’ll come for dinner sometime soon,” Mama calls after her before Glovey can completely shut us out.

  “A formal response will follow a formal invitation,” says Mrs. Butler.

  “I understand. Just you wait. I have a new recipe for Moroccan game hen.”

  The old crow slams her door. Mama turns her attention back to us. “Guys? I am as excited as you are. More so, probably. But we don’t know when Howie and Carly are going to arrive,” she says gently.

  “I’m not excited,” I tell her, “I’m bored.”

  “Hmmmmm. Well, you might want to play or do something else while you’re waiting, don’t you think? It could take a long time.”

  She’s interrupted by the high nasal honk of a powder-blue Volkswagen minibus gliding freely from one side of Chestnut Street’s extra-wide, brick-lined expanse to the other.

  Amanda leaps up and runs to the street, ignoring Mama’s “Wait! Here!”

  I stay put, watching. The sound of that bus, the color, the daring weave through this r
egistered historic place … A spaceship is approaching 31 Chestnut Street, only without the mashed potato mountains or mysterious electrical outages to warn us in advance.

  Behind the glint from the submarine windows there are smiling faces, and on the front of the bus is a sticker of Minnie Mouse, hands behind her back, skirt in swing, eyelashes batting.

  “Hello, bambinos!” the woman who must be Carly calls from the passenger window, her long, straight black hair flapping against the side of the bus as it jerks to a stop in front of our house.

  “Hi! Hi!” Amanda is a flurry of giddy words, wobbling on her oversized Stride Rite clogs. “Mama said you weren’t morning people and that it’s six hours from Philadelphia if you don’t stop and that you might not even be here until DINNER! And we’re not even done with LUNCH!”

  Carly opens her door and leaps out. Kneeling down, she looks us in the eyes and says, “We are NOT morning people unless we’re coming to see you, but we’re YOUR people. So today, we are morning people because we are so excited to visit!” She opens her arms and Amanda immediately steps forward into them. I hold back, but Carly extends an arm and waves me into the soft embrace. The way she hugs—but doesn’t squish—us makes me melt against her. In a flash, this stranger becomes the object of my desire, her softer skin, her greener grass, her unconditional affection, palpable, fragrant. Oh, I am desperate for it.

  “Ooooooohhhh!” She sighs happily, eyes scrunched tight. “You are delicious little dumplings made by the Hunan Princess herself!”

  “Who?” I ask.

  A low-voiced reply comes from the other side of the bus as Howie strides around and toward us, “The Hunan Princess is your sweet, sublime, beautiful, light-ray mamapajama, hombre.” His arms are outstretched for a hug and the sun makes his hair glow copper, falling in long waves below his ears, upside-down swells curling to frame his square jaw. Strands fall from the top of his head into his eyes, which search my own with what seems to be an honest desire to know me. His smile is infectious, his dashiki completely out of place, as are his brilliant orange silk pants, speckled with white and green Japanese flowers. A riot of color and spirit, he moves toward us, gallant smile turned up, chin pulled down, head cocked to the side. The most handsome man I have ever seen.