My brother sits on the other side of the backseat. He keeps pushing down on his knuckles with his cheek until they pop. Our brown paper bags are stacked between us.
I feel a pull toward the playground and the yard, a tug like a string stretched to a breaking point. I want to crawl into Bonnie’s lap, to sleep. But the highway—there are other cars on it going so fast they look like blurs, like the wings of a hummingbird. The green signs go by overhead with names of places on them: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento. It feels exactly like flying in my dreams, like my arms stretched behind me, legs tucked and I’m leaping, higher and higher until I’m up above all of it, looking down. And there, from that perch above the clouds, I see a stone wall that rises to a gray tower. I can just walk across the cloud and let myself in. When I close my eyes, I see all the people from Synanon: crying and dancing and laughing and screaming and riding swings and eating macaroni and cheese. Bonnie, Clubby, Dmitri, Cassidy, Guy, Noah. And Dad. I close my eyes hard to see Dad, but I can’t. He’s blurry like the cars on the highway. So I open them and see Mom hunched over in the front seat, her round Dutch cheeks covered in tears and my brother with his mouth tight and his fists clenched, staring out the window at the strange cars and highway signs.
* * *
MOM WAS RIGHT about the music boxes. Grandma and Grandpa’s house is filled with them. There is one in the bedroom that has a picture of a blue windmill and one in the living room made of old wood. They play pretty songs when you open them. There’s another in the kitchen where we eat Dutch cheese and rolls. In the living room there’s something called a grandfather clock. There are some small clocks sitting on shelves, some are made of crystal, some of metal, one is made from a green stone and has a white face with no numbers. That one’s my favorite.
In Synanon we had tables and chairs and poster board and a big swing set and dishes made of plastic. We ate and made crafts at short wooden tables. This house is filled with paintings and furniture that’s been carved to look like waves or flowers or faces or buildings. There’s an old fisherman in a ratty hat staring down at the dining room table, a cat made of glass that prowls on the shelf in the living room. There’s a painting on tiles of little rivers that go right through a city in Dutch. The couch is creamy white with little green flowers and stuffed thicker than any pillows I’ve ever seen. I wonder if a king lives here since Grandpa’s golden chair looks like a throne.
I like Grandpa Frank because he talks to us and whenever we leave to go somewhere, he gives us a “smack on the fanny,” which means a hard hit on the butt. He’s funny about it, lining us up one by one. It’s true that his hands are very strong. He lets me grab his fingers and squeeze as hard as I can while he laughs.
He’s always making little jokes with us. We’ll say, “What are we doing today, Grandpa?”
And he’ll say, “Today, we are going to the dump.”
We’ll laugh and say, “No we’re not! We’re gonna play!” Because we know he’s going to take us to collect golf balls in his golf cart or to see his boat, the little white one he keeps at the dock.
Grandma will lean in and say, “Stop teasing the boys, Frank.”
“Jokes! It’s important to laugh, you know.”
Grandma is skinny with blue-white hair and small teeth so that you can barely see them when she smiles, if she smiles. Her face is bunched up, like she’s hiding something, something that escapes little by little through the day as she sits in her favorite chair in a thin blue robe across from Grandpa, drinking from a tall cup filled with ice and “Dutch.” That’s what she calls it: “Frank, dear, will you refill my Dutch?” Grandpa gets up from his throne and walks over to a small counter where he pours an orangish-brown liquid from a crystal bottle into the tall glass. It smells like sweet gasoline. She drinks the Dutch all day long every day and as she gets sleepier, her meanness leaves her like air from a balloon so that by the time dinnertime comes, she wants us to come sit by her. She smiles with her little teeth and says, “Hi schweety, are you happy here? Would you like a piece of candy?”
Mom says Grandma’s family lived in America before she moved to Dutch. Her dad was a coal miner and their family did something called quaking, which made them Quakers, so Grandma couldn’t do fun stuff like dance or play cards. One day she moved to New York to become a nurse which is where she met Grandpa who took her back to Dutch.
The mornings are worse for her. She says, “I have such a headache. Frank, dear, will you bring me my pills?” She shuffles her feet when she walks like she’s afraid to take steps too big while Grandpa Frank gets her pills or her slippers or her breakfast or another sweating glass of Dutch delivered at eleven fifteen A.M. sharp.
Mom is gone in the afternoons when Tony and I play outside on the grass. Grandpa sits on his chair and calls out, “A dit dit dit … Watch out for the bees.” I don’t know if this is Dutch or if it’s just how grandpas talk because I’ve never known another grandpa. They were in our storybooks with their white hair and bent backs. They have something to do with the moms and the dads. They seem permanent, like the trees. Grandpa tells us we have to be nice to Mom. She’s been through so much.
Grandma says at least she “finally got away from that awful place and good riddance to that drug addict ex-husband of hers.”
I know she’s talking about Dad but in Synanon everyone was a drug addict so I don’t understand why she’s so mad about it. Anyway we never used the words “drug addict.” We would just say someone was a Dope Fiend. People said this with pride and I’m pretty sure that’s what we are and if someone were to ask us whether we are white or black or Dutch or Italian, I’m not really sure but I know we’re all Dope Fiends because that’s all anyone ever talks about.
Tony draws monsters. I draw superheroes. Tony draws big battle scenes with tanks and soldiers and explosions, beasts with horns and big teeth that drip blood. They hold axes and clubs and guns in their claws. My superheroes fly through the air trying to kill the monsters. It’s never clear who wins. Grandpa says we should draw something nice for Mom so I draw a picture of her with long hair because even though it’s shaved all the way to the scalp and everybody stares at her when we go to Goodwill, she says it used to be long and pretty and that’s the way she likes to see herself in pictures. Plus she says men like long hair and she wants to be pretty for a man and no man wants a single mom with a bald head.
Mom gets an album and shows me photos from when she was growing up in Holland. She shows me the house where they lived. She says she grew up speaking Dutch which sounds like if you speak with peanut butter and crackers in your mouth. She didn’t come to the United States until she was fourteen and there was no one to speak Dutch with anymore so she spoke English or she didn’t speak at all.
She tells me there were bomb craters all around the neighborhood that she used to play in. They were like giant tears in the earth, like a piece of the earth had been scooped out. There was a war and Grandpa fought in it and that’s when she was born and afterward she lived in a big house but there was still rubble everywhere and those giant holes in the ground right in the middle of where everybody lived.