taste of tears in her nose and throat. She hated to cry. Strong-willed, one of two girls in a Catholic family that consisted of, her blue-collar construction-worker father, her washed-out mother, and seven brothers, hellbent on college in spite of her father's belief that the only things girls learned there were how to stop being virgins and how to throw over the church, she had shed her fair share of tears and more. And if her own family thought she was hard sometimes, it was because they didn't understand that when you went through hell you came out baked by the fire. And when you had to burn to have your own way, you always wanted to have it.
'You know something?' Arnie asked.
She shook her head, still feeling the hot, slithery burn of the tears tinder her lids.
'You'd make me laugh, if I wasn't so tired I could hardly stand up. You could have been out there swinging the tyre irons and the hammers along with the guys that did it. You're probably happier about it than they are.'
'Arnie, that's not fair!'
'It is fair!' he roared at her, his eyes suddenly blazing with a horrible fire. For the first time in her life she was afraid of her son. 'Your idea to get it out of the driveway! His idea to put it in the airport lot! Who do you think is to blame here? Just who do you think? Do you think it would have happened if it had been here? Huh?'
He took a step toward her, fists clenched at his sides, and she had all she could do to keep from flinching backward.
'Arnie, can't we even talk about this?' she asked. 'Like two rational human beings?'
'One of them took a shit on the dashboard of my car,' he said coldly. 'How's that for rational, Mom?'
She had honestly believed she had the tears under control, but this news - news of such a stupid, irrational fury - brought them back. She cried. She cried in grief for what her son had seen. She lowered her head and cried in bewilderment and pain and fear.
All her life as a mother she had felt secretly superior to the women around her who had children older than Arnie. When he was one, those other mothers had shaken their heads dolefully and told her to wait until he was five - that was when the trouble started, that was when they were old enough to say 'shit' in front of their grandmothers and play with matches when left alone. But Arnold, as good as gold at one, had still been as good as gold at five. Then the other mothers had rolled their eyes and said wait until he's ten; and then it had been fifteen, that was when it really got sticky, what with the dope and the rock concerts and girls that would do anything and - God forbid - stealing hubcaps and those . . . well, diseases.
And through it all she had continued to smile inside because it was all working out according to plan, it was all working out the way she felt her own childhood should have. Her son had warm, supportive parents who cared about him, who would give him anything (within reason), who would gladly send him to the college of his choice (as long as it was a good one), thereby finishing the game/ business/vocation of Parenting with a flourish. If you had suggested that Arnie had few friends and was often bullyragged by the others, she would have starchily pointed out that she had gone to a parochial school in a tough neighbourhood where girls' cotton panties were sometimes torn off for a joke and then set on fire with Zippo lighters engraved with the crucified body Jesus. And if you had suggested that her own attitudes toward child-rearing differed only in terms of material goals from the attitudes of her hated father, she would have been furious and pointed out her good son as her final vindication.
But now her good son stood before her, pale, exhausted, and greased to the elbows, seeming to thrum with the same sort of barely chained anger that had been his grandfather's trademark, even looking like him. Everything seemed to have fallen into a shambles.
'Arnie, we'll talk about what's to be done in the morning,' she said, trying to pull herself together and beat back the tears. 'We'll talk about it in the morning.'