The Proper Words for Sin

Weepers

59 WEEPERS Early in the summer of my twelfth birthday, when my mother found me lying at the bottom of the stairs to the basement, my feet three steps up as if I’d fallen and broken my neck, I vowed to stop pretending I was dead. My mother agreed. “If I find you like this again,” she said, “I’m taking you to see somebody.” She’d told me to stop a month before when she’d seen me lying on the cellar floor. That time she’d let out a gasp that made me pull my legs and arms in tight against my body. “You gave me a fright,” she’d said. “You’re too old for that.” I didn’t want to see whoever that “somebody” was, so I stopped playing dead in the house, but I had other secrets, some of them worse. Jerking off, for one. Taking sips of our neighbor June Hutka ’s drinks, for another. I wanted to own a glass like the one she used for those drinks, keeping it nearby in the afternoons. Thick and squat, it was heavy like the ashtray that sat on the circular wooden table that filled half the Hutkas’ back porch from April to October. My family owned plastic tumblers, old jelly jars, and a set of four glasses frosted with a tulip design that we used for holiday meals, the ones that were celebrated indoors like Easter, Thanksgiving , and Christmas. Besides water and coffee, my parents drank ginger ale and root beer that they shared with me and my younger 60 WEEPERS sister on Saturdays. “Fancy glasses are for drinkers,” my mother said more than once as she handed us root beer in plastic cups. My sister Jackie was nine. She was happy to have root beer even if it came in a paper cup. “They like their drink over there at the Hutkas’,” my father would add, and that was the end of that. Best of all, June Hutka’s glass clinked every time she picked it up, ice cubes swirling into its sides, nothing like the dull thunk of ice against our plastic cups. In the morning she carried a mug of coffee, always a black one with Atlantic City stenciled on one side, but in the afternoon, even when the weather turned hot and muggy, there always seemed to be fresh ice in her glass while she lay in the sun to darken her tan, sitting up only to smoke and drink from that glass. June Hutka had a record player that looked like a suitcase. For three straight sunny days, I sat on the grass where our backyards touched and listened to an hour of the songs on her records until, the third afternoon, June waved me to her porch and told me to help myself to one of the bottles of ginger ale that was half buried in ice inside the small cooler tucked into the shade made by the table. She had me drop two cubes into her nearly empty glass, had me pour a few splashes of ginger ale into it, and then she topped it off from a bottle labeled Four Roses. I’d never seen a whiskey bottle. I picked it up and held it to the light. “You don’t want to take it straight from the bottle,” she said. “And your mother would have my hide.” “Sorry,” I said. “Don’t be sorry. Here, take a little sip of this so you don’t have to be imagining what it tastes like.” I made sure I didn’t act as if it burned all the way down. “I’m impressed,” June said. “I thought your parents were teetotalers.” She sounded like my mother, who was always giving me big WEEPERS 61 words to look up in the dictionary. I took a second sip, kept my expression fixed, and handed the glass back to her. I’d never heard that word before, but it sounded like something I wished my parents weren’t. What I noticed that afternoon was her records were all 78s, which, in 1957, were hardly ever in stores anymore. Some kids my age had stacks of 45s, but nobody I knew owned records like the ones she played. All of the songs sounded as if the singer were more than sad, as if he were in misery. “They’re...