Townie by André Dubus III Page B

kitchen we’d cook something, pasta and a quick tomato sauce and garlic bread we warmed in the oven. Maybe a bacon and cheese omelet. This was something I looked forward to the most; it seemed I was hungry all the time. At home across the river, unless Bruce had given our mother a new check, something he was able to do less and less now, there just wasn’t much food in the house. Breakfast was usually a Coke from Pleasant Spa bought with change we’d found in our mother’s purse or under the cushions of our wicker couch. When other kids filed into the cafeteria, we didn’t have the money so drifted out back where the pot heads stood on the grates, too cool to sit with the others, passing a pipe around, a bag of potato chips, too.
    Suzanne was selling dope. One afternoon I stuck my head in her bedroom doorway, and she was sitting on her mattress with Glenn P. rolling dozens of joints from a garbage bag full of Mexican gold. Edgar Winter was playing on her record player. Kids at school walked up to her with a hungry look in their eyes, and my sister had cash and after school she’d sometimes buy us subs, potato chips and Cokes and candy bars, our first real meal of the day. When Mom got home from work at close to eight o’clock, she’d open a can of Spaghettios or stew for us and heat it up on the stove. Sometimes she’d fry us Spam, or make that Frito Pie, too tired to do much else, too broke to buy much else. And Bruce didn’t cook. He’d drink bourbon in the kitchen with her and talk about the new job he had in Boston doing the same thing she was, getting slumlords to rid their buildings of lead paint. She’d nod her head, moving quickly in her work clothes, a far-off look in her eyes, as if she was trying to put back together how her life had taken her here to this: this milltown, this canned food she never would have used when she was first married, these four hungry, depressed teenagers, this hovering man who wasn’t their father.
    Those Wednesday nights at Pop’s apartment waiting to eat, he probably asked me questions about my life—school, homework, friends—but what I remember is feeling like a liar and a fake. I’d be in a T-shirt and jeans I’d washed earlier so they wouldn’t smell like dope. I probably told him I was getting good grades, mostly B’s, which, miraculously, I was, but I left out that I regularly skipped half my classes, slept late, and didn’t go to school several days a month, that I was flunking algebra because it was the first class of the morning when I was most high, that Jeb and I and our friend Cleary spent our afternoons looking for a house party where we could get a free buzz, or we’d be downtown in one of the shops, usually the Army and Navy store distracting the man behind the register so Cleary could stuff a T-shirt or a pair of socks or wool cap down his pants. Sometimes we called the cops on ourselves. One of us would lower his voice and report kids throwing eggs at houses and we’d give them the street, then run there with eggs in our pockets and as soon as we saw the cruiser we’d pelt it and run. One time a cop stuck his head out the window and shouted, “I’ll shoot you fuckin’ assholes!”
    We’d end up down by the river and stand on the railroad trestle over the swirling brown water below, betting who had the balls to stay on the longest before the train came, and what would be worse? Getting hit by the Boston & Maine? Or having to jump into the Merrimack River where you’d probably be poisoned to death before you drowned anyway?
    There were girls in these neighborhoods who just gave it away. One was Janice Woods, who at fifteen had cropped blonde hair and breasts and hips and liked to walk up to guys and stick her fingers down their pants just so she could feel them get hard in her hand. Lately she’d been coming around, spending afternoons with Jeb in his room.
    I could have told my father about her, or her father, Daryl Woods, whom our mother got