Social Blunders Read Free Page B

And anyway, I deserve to know who my grandfather is.”
    I stared at her with all the anger I could pull off, but since her head was in the refrigerator, my anger was neatly deflected. “You and Eugene decided I need something to do?”
    Eugene smiled and nodded his head. “I said you should transfer your obsession to a suitable substitute other than your abject failure as a husband, and Shannon told me about the football players who group raped your mother and made her pregnant. That must have been a tremendous burden on your ego during the formative years—to know your very being is based on humiliation.”
    “So I opened the safe and borrowed the pictures,” Shannon said. “Now, it’s your turn.”
    I stared at the four photos. Five football players. Numbers 72, 56, 81, 11, and 20. Seventy-two and fifty-six were in the same picture. Big boys with burr haircuts and square heads. Eighty-one was thin and wore glasses. Eleven had the confident smirk of a high school quarterback. Twenty was black. He was noticeably shorter than the others and the only one grinning at the camera.
    “What do you expect me to do?” I asked.
    Shannon brought out the remains of a strawberry pie. “Those men violated Lydia. As her son it’s your duty to wreak vengeance. Destroy their wives, ravish their daughters, shame their sons, drag them publicly in front of the media and show the world what scumbags they are.”
    Eugene smiled and nodded again.
    “That was thirty-three years ago, Shannon. They were just boys then.”
    Shannon focused on me with the fierceness of her mother. “They raped Lydia, for Godsake. They stood in a circle and pissed on her torn body. You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.”
    “I can’t?”
    ***
    Shannon, with Eugene in her wake, left for wherever women in the prime of their youth go in the morning. By eleven she had a Saturday lab class at UNC-G, where she was majoring in anthropology. I have no idea why she chose anthropology; maybe nobody knows their kids.
    I stared at the manila envelope a while, then walked to my room to fetch the Grape-Nuts I kept hidden for times when Gus fixed breakfast and disappeared into her rich personal life that I know nothing about. She’s been with us ten years, and she still won’t tell me if she’s married or has children of her own or anything. Shannon probably knows.
    Back in the kitchen, I poured two-percent milk over the Grape-Nuts and ate without looking in the bowl. Two-percent milk is another of those decisions the women had made for me. When you don’t have money, you think people who do have money can do anything they like. Don’t believe it.
    Finally I stood and washed the cereal bowl and spoon, but not the beans plate or pan—the subterfuges we have to scheme through in our own home—and walked back to the table. The envelope held one sheet of paper from a yellow legal pad.
    William Gaines
    147 N. Glenwood
    Skip Prescott
    14 Corner Creek Drive
    Cameron Saunders
    16 Corner Creek Drive
    Babe Carnisek
    1212 W. 23rd
    Jake Williams
    2182 Bronson
    The father thing has caused me a lot of discomfort late at night when thoughts range out of control. As a kid, I used to make up scenes where my real father was a famous baseball player or a CIA spy or something—anything, so long as he had an excuse to deny me up until the point of my daydream.
    “I was being chased by the Mafia, son, and if anyone found out I had a boy, you would have been in the gravest danger.”
    “I understand, Dad.”
    In school when I should have been studying geography, I drew pictures of Dad. Mostly he looked like Moose Skowron who played first base for the New York Yankees. Sometimes he looked like John Kennedy.
    But then Lydia spilled the beans about the group rape thing, and I had to face the fact that I am a child of violence. When I first started writing stories, I wrote the scene over and over.
    “Try this on for size, you slimy slut,” the quarterback growled as he shoved