Suddenly, from the kitchen, Mom says, “He brought me a present. Did he tell you? From that trip to Detroit.”
Dad sighs, as if half hoping she’d forgotten. “There was a gift shop in the restaurant where we came up with the skiing idea,” Dad says. “After dinner, and way too much to drink, I bought a goofy little long-stemmed thing that held water. It was like a pitcher for watering flowers that were hard to reach—or something. I really wasn’t sure what it was. It looked like something I’d swiped off another table, to be honest. But when I had this sales territory in Detroit, I would drive there from Chicago and didn’t have to worry about stowing things on an airplane. So I bought this useless pitcher thing that I thought she’d like, and when she saw it she said, ‘How much did you have to drink before you bought this thing?’ And the answer is a lot.”
The laughter that follows sounds like applause. The way Dad tells a story, how he holds for a punch line, the details he parcels out—the kid gloves, the stapled lift ticket, the image of him spread-eagled on the hood of a Buick like a highway deer—I admire all these things from the top of the stairs.
It’s another peek behind the curtain of the grown-up world. This is what happens when Dad is on a business trip. This is what a grown-up party looks like. Adulthood is what happens after bedtime.
Mom and Dad argue too. “They’re fighting,” Jim or Tom might say in a whisper. From behind the closed kitchen door, while they’re reviewing the day over coffee after dinner, we might hear a hand slap on the table and the silverware jump. The argument arrives as a low, urgent murmur through the closed door. We turn the TV up louder and try not to listen.
Some nights, though I maintain eye contact with the TV, I can’t un-hear what’s said in the kitchen. Mickey Mining wants to transfer Dad. Overseas. To Belgium, which I know only from the Perkins menu as a modifier of waffles.
“It’s only for five years,” Dad says.
“We’ll miss you,” Mom says.
“It’s a promotion,” Dad says.
“Jim starts high school in a year,” Mom says.
And that’s it. Moving to Brussels is never again mentioned in our house.
At bedtime, I’ll listen down the hall. Sometimes Mom goes to bed before Dad. They watch the ten o’clock news together, but Dad stays downstairs to watch Johnny Carson’s monologue. This summer, it’s all about Watergate: Watergate lawyers, Watergate burglars, Watergate hearings, the Watergate building. I don’t know what Watergate is, but it sounds like Mickey Mining, like a brand name affixed to everything.
On nights they’ve argued, I’ll listen down the hall to see if Mom and Dad have made up. Dad says they never go to bed mad at each other, but I’m not sure. I go to bed mad at one of my brothers almost every night. And so I cock my ear toward the hall. Standing at his dresser, divesting himself of his billfold, handkerchief, change, traveler’s checks, money clip, and car-key wallet—the cargo of his workaday life—Dad will often sound a low and sonorous fart that reverberates off their closed bedroom door, with its simulated wood-grain finish and simulated copper doorknob.
On nights they’ve fought—and a tension suffuses the house the way Pepto-Bismol paints the stomach pink in commercials—I listen for Dad’s valedictory fart, the day’s closing bell. Mom’s reply is always the same: “Oh, Don!”
In later years, when Steve Martin briefly penetrates his consciousness, Dad will offer a theatrical reply: “Well, ex-cyoo-oooze meeee!” And down the hall, secure under our blankets, Tom and I will giggle ourselves to sleep in relief.
When it’s summer, we can sleep in. There’s no bus to catch, no gig line to check. All I have to do today is tag along to the beach with Tom and his friend Buffy Wagner. Buffy’s real name is Jeff, but he has a dog called Buffy and the name somehow transferred. It could be worse, and usually is. At school, Andy Crump is Candy Rump. His brother, Buddy Crump, is Cruddy Bump. It’s a delight to discover and then deploy these spoonerisms. I have classmates who answer exclusively to Ginsu and Gizzard and Spock. When the teacher calls on them in class—“Kenny?” “Joel?” “Peter?”—there’s a beat before they recognize their own given names. The girls have nicknames too, bestowed by the boys, who torture their surnames into something else: the Grunter, the Crippler, the Hustler. In these nicknames are the echoes of our Sunday-morning screenings of professional wrestling on channel 9, full of Crushers and Sodbusters and Undertakers.
My brother John is Junie, short for Junior. Amy is Mrs. Beasley, for a doll she resembles. Tom is called Waxman—we don’t know why—by Jim’s friends the Pikala brothers, whose own names are Porky and Shorty. If those aren’t their birth names, I haven’t a clue what they are. Even Mom and Dad call them Shorty and Porky. Porky Pikala has a fake front tooth attached to a retainer. When he pops it out—as he frequently does by request—his smile resembles a two-car garage with one door up. He’d fit perfectly among the NHL stars pinned up in the basement, that gallery of crossword-puzzle smiles. Jim’s other friends are called Fluff and Oz. The guy who drives the Zamboni at BIG is called Posh. Jim got a job at the Met from a guy named Smoke. One of his bosses there is called Twister.
Tom, Buffy, and I are accordioned into the backseat of Mr. Wagner’s green Volkswagen Beetle. The opening chords of “Band on the Run” cry out on the radio. The freshly laundered beach towel on my lap smells pleasantly of Tide. I pop the top on our bottle of suntan lotion and take a deep snort. It is a coconut-scented nasal decongestant. The summer of ’74 smells like this. It sounds like the deejay True Don Bleu on 630-KDWB spinning “We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.” Everything rhymes the summer I’m seven.