They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

V

82 V Z didn’t like to visit his parents, but we’d go. I went with him, though I didn’t ask him to do the same, slipped off by myself to my own hometown. But I liked watching him fight his mother to do the dishes; I liked watching him sit stiffly in their living room. You too are human, I thought. His mother coming and going from the kitchen, refilling plates of crackers and carafes well before they emptied. His mother’s hands in passing swept over the top of Z’s head, curved round a shoulder, as though remembering the child loose-skinned and yowling, sunburned and too thin, the years between that body and this gone at her touch. Z didn’t pull away. Your hair’s thinning, she said to him once, and laughed. I know, he said. Oh dear, I was just kidding, she said. I looked at him—it was true, the hairline shell-shaped around the widow’s peak; I hadn’t noticed. From your mother’s side, his father said, the genes. Don’t blame me. 83 Z’s father was a doctor, a decade retired. He spoke with his hands officiously fingertip to fingertip, though the knuckles of the fingers had thickened, the arch strained. And that’s what my hands will look like, I thought, noting how rarely he got up, how his wife pushed things closer to him on the table. Z’s father watched me, as though hunting out illness. He would have liked to test me, I thought, as he caught me staring off, it would have seemed to him at nothing, though out the window there had been a cardinal, the first that spring. He would have liked the whole clinical workup: run a fork along the bottom of the feet, the toes nodding, give all the commands: Who is the vice president? Count backward from one hundred by sevens. Close your eyes. He didn’t approve of my drinking, so we always brought the wine. They would ask Z something about his magazine, something general that they wouldn’t have to have read it to ask; the conversation would turn to politics. Z didn’t bring it up; it was always one of them. Z’s mother had been in Chicago in ’68 during the convention and this story always worked its way in. Z’s father bailing her out. The first few times it had been a good story, easy to picture, her in overalls, a cabled sweater, thick hair slipping from its braid as it did now. I got up before she could and added cheese to the cheese plate. My novel sat on the coffee table; I had signed the front flyleaf for them, With love always. Sometimes they would say of Z’s magazine, That was an excellent article, or I’m not sure about… Z argued with his parents, he never held back, though I tried to stop him, to offer something light, a distraction. Or else 84 to prove my appeal I would side against him—because it should all have been a game: his father’s irrefutable fingers, his mother breaking in with some snipe at the president, or to tell how she saw that famous actor once, too, at another protest, what they had said to each other. I would try to say this or that, about how everything was different now, only to be disagreed with by everyone. Which I’d hoped would resolve things—unite them in opposition—but it rarely did. We could use that money at home, his father said, meaning the war. Z hadn’t been disagreeing with this, but now the conversation proceeded as though he had. Z started to respond, to talk of transitions and reparations, but his father waved a hand and, following it, the evening returned to its accustomed stiffness. Someone announced some opinion. In the dusk of the room there was no real answer, and I watched the low light pierce the wine, with my wrist I tilted the glass through a slow revolution. If the sky were always this color, I said, how would we live? Everyone looked at me or away, and Z’s mother said, It’s past time for dinner. She rose to gather the plates. I followed her to the kitchen, wrapped the ends of each cheese. • When...