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the mayonnaise was. “Don’t tell your mother to
shut up. Rodney. Rodney, come back here.”
    Breathing
a long sigh, Rodney gestured me into his room. He handed me the plate of
sandwiches. Then he shut his bedroom door firmly and locked the flimsy knob.
    Ethel’s
voice was growing louder now. “Don’t tell your mother to shut up, Rodney!
Rodney! Don’t you dare tell me to
shut up!   Rodney! You come down
here! Rodney! Why don’t you shut up,
Rodney! Why don’t you shut up, then! Rodney! You come down here! You shut up, Rodney! You shut up!”
    Rodney
pulled a pair of Cokes from underneath his bed and ripped them free of the
stiff plastic spine. “It’s like living in a madhouse,” he said, not even
looking at me. I felt complicit in a frame of violence I couldn’t understand. I
just sat there hoping his mom wouldn’t remember what I looked like. I just
hoped Rodney’s mom wouldn’t remember my name.
    “Sometimes
I think she’s the biggest asshole in the entire universe,” Rodney said, pulled
the television closer on its wobbly castered frame and switched it on. You
could hear the charge of it before you saw the light abrupt to its screen. Suddenly
we were in any house, every house; suddenly we were drifting again through the
regions of my exile. We watched cartoons, movies, detective and western
programs while I listened to the outside hallway for the steps of wounded Ethel
on the thin carpet as she moved, slowly and eventually, to her own bedroom down
the hall, awaiting the moment when I could escape this house and my own
complicity in Ethel’s systematic humiliation by Rodney, the most remarkably
powerful person I have ever known in my entire life.

 
    10

 
    I
CELEBRATED MY birthday in secret that year, on a day I firmly refuse to
commemorate or even mention. There was something firm and round about the new
age that filled my body like an old song, or smoke from a cigarette. Usually I
didn’t return home until one or two a.m., since Rodney and I regularly stayed
up drinking Ethel’s whiskey or smoking Rodney’s grass. My feet staggered and
slipped against the knotty carpet as I let myself in the front door. My tongue
felt thick and swollen. I staggered down the dark hall, already sensing the
thick silence behind Mom’s steadfast door. “Mom,” I said, leaning against her
door, uncertain of the floor’s balance. “Mom, it’s me. It’s your son, Mom. It’s
Phillip.” I heard my whispered words deep in my throat and chest, resonating
like bones. I could hear her taking a breath as my hand gently grasped the
loose aluminum doorknob. The knob ticked in its frame when I turned it. Its
resistance was at once strange and comforting, like the taste of a new tooth.
Mom’s door was always locked. She never let me inside anymore.
    “Mom.”   I tried to sound firm, sober and
mature. “There’s money on the kitchen counter. There’s still some Colonel
Sanders in the fridge. It’s cold, Mom. Just the way you like it. And coleslaw.
Have a banana. Bananas are filled with potassium.” Motes and air whirled in
Mom’s dark room, rustling and indifferent. This was the sound Mom lived. The
long slow pause in her heart where she gathered language and waited for history
to resume again.
    “Thank
you, Phillip,” she said, as obliquely as she might acknowledge some porter in a
hotel. “Thank you very much.”
    “I’m
in my room, Mom, if you need me.” I felt the pulse of alcohol in my blood as if
the entire house were contracting gently around me. Then I heard the
unmistakable gurgle of liquor being poured into Mom’s smudged glass.
    “You’re
a very good boy, Phillip. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine, I’ll be all right. Just
make certain you’re going to be all right too.” There was a rustle of
newspapers. I could feel the darkness assembling in Mom’s room, like clouds and
gulls around some alien shoreline. For months I thought I was the one who had
eliminated the buzzing opposition of