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Mom’s men, but now I knew it was that
gathering darkness. It was descending in the elevator from its high luxury
office building. It was accepting the keys to its Triumph from the black
attendant. It was flying off across freeways and cities. It loved us. It loved
Mom and it loved me. It loved both of us very much.

 
    I
DIDN’T THINK of Ethel as a surrogate so much as a compensation. She could never
take my mom’s place, but she could make that place seem less cold and drafty. Some
days I arrived deliberately early at Rodney’s house, when I knew he was still
in school, and drank generous Manhattans with Ethel while melodramas played at
us from her blurry black and white television (the good color television, of course,
was in Rodney’s room). Eagerly she told me all the lost, distracted secrets of
her prodigal son. “Rodney is actually a very affectionate young boy. Like you,
Phillip, he is patient and attentive. He’s a good listener. He’s considerate
and well-mannered–when he wants to be, that is. He always helps with the housework
if my legs are sore. Sometimes he saves money from his allowance and buys me
little presents. If he’s rude, it’s because he likes to show off in front of
his friends. Young men, as you know, are embarrassed to show affection to their
mothers, particularly when their friends are around.”
    I
wanted to ask her why, but was afraid such an awkward question might give me
away. I might accidentally divulge the secret life I lived in strange houses,
the secret life my mom had begun living behind the bolted door of her minimally
furnished room.
    “Would
you like another Manhattan?” Ethel asked.
    She
showed me her empty glass and I took it.
    “I’ll
get these,” I said, and returned to the kitchen for the Jack Daniel’s. Ethel
had taught me how to mix a number of competent drinks, a feat in which I admit
I took some pride. I returned and sat on the sofa beside the morning’s smeary
newspaper and watched the fabulous television. Ethel was absently handling her
embroidery frame and gazing out the window at the harsh, smoggy sunlight, the
palm trees faded and unraveled like some overexposed snapshot, the uniform
houses and pavements and flashing cars. “People don’t always intend to make
other people feel bad, Ethel,” I told her, though I was never sure she was listening.
“Sometimes people just forget other people are even around. I know it sounds
strange, but people operate that way, I swear. Sometimes they don’t know what
they’re doing. Sometimes they don’t even know you’re there at all.” I was
grasping at straws. Whenever I found myself trying to excuse Rodney’s
disgraceful behavior I became tangled and caught in my own inflexible words. Ethel,
meanwhile, gazed out the window. “Maybe people just don’t know where they are
sometimes,” I said, afraid to stop talking because then the judgment would
come. In the long pause my talk would have to mean something. “Maybe people
just talk without remembering who it is they’re actually talking to. Maybe you
just shouldn’t think about it, Ethel. Maybe you should join a health spa, or
develop an interesting hobby. Do you hear me, Ethel? Would you like another
drink? Ethel? Are you listening?”

 
    BEFORE
LONG I was taking lunch with Ethel every afternoon around one o’clock. The
casual scheme of my domesticity was growing more fulfilled and content. My
paper route, breakfast, morning study sessions (I was currently investigating
Plato, biophysics and Freud), afternoons with Rodney burgling strange homes,
television, evening meals and bed. And every afternoon before I left the house
I would leave Mom’s lunch wrapped in plastic and deposited outside her bedroom
door. Ethel was instructing me in the art of fine sandwich building. Tuna and
chicken salad, avocado and sprouts, bacon, lettuce and tomato, roast beef,
pastrami and turkey with cottage cheese, peanut butter and bananas. Whenever
Ethel sliced the