Inner Tube: A Novel Read Free Page A

cheese twists between us. A smell of cologne clings to the white shag carpet and the mighty thrumming of the furnace sends a buzz up through the floor to our bellies, recently packed with peas and lamb chops and spumoni. After the usual finagling with the sitter, we have been permitted to seal ourselves into the parental bedroom and watch their set. They are dining with friends at the country club, Mom in a brand-new dress. The thin, striped box and gray tissue are still on the bed behind us. I throw a cheese twist in the air, catch it in my mouth, and Carla giggles. The cartoon show is over and Carla gets up to change the channel. There are no arguments; we have canvassed TV Guide during dinner and agreed on what to watch.
    Here, then, in all its triviality, is the lush life aspired to in those years. So it went in a thousand other suburban fastnesses across the land—the lamb chops, the new dress, the freshly bathed children safely encapsulated.
    We were really at no great remove from the L.A. sound-stages where the households of Ozzie Nelson and Donna Stone and Beaver Cleaver carried on their bloodlessly engineered relations. There we were in achingly white Cape Cod Colonials, each with tidy hedge and lawn, and inside the same vast Formica surfaces that Harriet polished so tirelessly, the same wide staircases down which Wally and Dave and Ricky scrambled on their way to baseball practice, the same spacious dens where Ward Cleaver tamped his pipe over actuarial tables. Surely my own family was as deserving of renown as these others.
    I suggested this once to my mother, that we ought to have our own show. “You’re prettier than Donna Reed,” I said.
    “And a hell of a lot better actress,” she said, and drifted outside to sweat and pull weeds.
    What we wish to believe is this: that all those shows were worse than ridiculous, that they presented idealized, dangerously illusory figures, and that our inability to live up to them brought on guilt and disappointment. (How eager we were some years back to accept the specious rumor that Jerry Mathers—the actor who portrayed Beaver Cleaver—had died a mud-sucking grunt in Vietnam.) But this is fatuous, self-flattery at its cheapest.
    No need to look elsewhere for disappointment. That predetermined Maple Street existence was very much our own, in all the canned events through which we moved like chess pieces, in the good cheer we displayed so methodically, in the very drabness of our squabbles over report cards, dating etiquette, crunched fenders.
    What, if anything, can be concluded from all this? That I can no longer make distinctions, cannot see the differences between desert and suburb, video village and hometown? That I am a purveyor of counterfeit analogies? Very well, then, shove all aside for realism. Clear the decks for truth, and I will fill in the rest of that Friday night twenty-five years ago.
    The movie we have chosen is a bore: too much dialogue and not enough of the giant clams. Carla tinkers restlessly with tubes and jars on Mom’s cosmetics tray. I remind her that we aren’t supposed to touch anything in the room. Carla is two years older and says so what to that. She sprays herself with an atomizer, smears her lips red. She opens a drawer, ties a scarf around her neck, and dangles off the end of the bed, waving her tongue like a lizard. All right, this is more interesting than the movie. We bounce on the heavy mattress awhile, then she paints me too. We rub mouths, wet and slick, tasting of soap, until the oily red is spread over our cheeks. There’s even a streak on the coverlet and that means trouble. So I pretend to be mad, wrestle past her kicking legs so I’m on top, tickling her stomach till Carla begs me to stop or she’ll wet herself, so I do.
    And hours later the folks come home, drunk and bellowing. Mom bungles into my room and frightens me with her poking and her broken-glass voice. I curl against the wall to escape her reeking breath.