Bobby’s invitation to dance.
His dancing was something to see. His sense of rhythm did not in any way derive from the granite cornices and box hedges of Cleveland. Dancing, he was an original—his hips swayed with a voluptuous certainty more graceful than lewd, and his arms and legs cut their own brisk, surprising pattern through the confined air of my son’s room. Once the song ended he’d smile and shrug, as if dancing had been a slightly embarrassing failure of wit. He’d return by visible degrees to his continuing impression of the pallid suburban boys mothers are supposed to delight in.
Sometimes Jonathan grudgingly joined us dancing, sometimes he sulked with his knees drawn up to his chest. I wasn’t a fool—I knew no fifteen-year-old boy would welcome his own mother’s participation in his social life. But Bobby was so insistent. And, besides, Jonathan and I had always been good friends despite our blood bond. I decided that accepting Bobby’s little gifts of music and dance would do no harm. I had been a bit wild myself, at Jonathan’s age, not so very long ago.
Jonathan grew his hair nearly to his shoulders, in defiance of the school’s dress code. He sewed bright patches on his jeans, and persisted in wearing Bobby’s old leather jacket even after the elbows wore through. At home he was largely silent. Sometimes his silence was petulant, sometimes it was simply blank. Although he worked hard at it, Jonathan could not make himself a stranger to me. I knew him too well. His dancing was as hesitant and clumsy as his father’s, and the flippant nastiness he affected had a shallow bottom. Caught off guard, he would slip into acquiescence automatically, without having meant to. He would smile before he remembered to scowl.
One night in January, Bobby called me up to listen to a new record by Van Morrison. I’d settled myself on the floor with the boys, nodding to the music. Bobby sat cross-legged and straight-backed to my immediate left, like a Yogi meditating. Jonathan sat farther away, sulkily hunched, his shoulders curved over his knees.
“This is nice,” I said. “I like this Van Morrison.”
“Van the Man?” Bobby grinned. Sometimes his meanings remained inscrutable, despite his careful intentions. I often just smiled and nodded, as I would to a foreigner speaking indecipherable but evidently friendly English.
At moments, even in his fits of eager incoherence, Bobby made sense to me. He was an outlander, striving to assimilate. Hadn’t I myself been transplanted to a wintery place where most women of my age and station were overweight and undereducated? Years earlier, when I was still making an effort to fit in, the other women at the PTA and the church guild had offered me recipes for parfaits made with pudding and candy bars, and for frankfurters soaked in mustard and grape jelly. I couldn’t begrudge Bobby his own difficulties with the local ways of making do.
“Van’s all right,” Jonathan said. “If you like this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing is he?” I asked.
“Well, folk-y. Moony. He’s a good old boy singing about the love of a good woman.”
“I don’t know, Jon,” Bobby said. “He’s sort of, you know, better than that?”
“He’s okay,” Jonathan said. “Just a little wimpy. Mom, how about if I play you some real stuff?”
“This seems real enough,” I said.
Jonathan looked at Bobby, whose smile had taken on a stiff, worried quality. “That’s what you think,” Jonathan said. He got up and took the needle off the record in the middle of a song, pulled another out of the collection that was stored in a series of orange crates lined up against the wall.
“This is Jimi Hendrix,” he announced. “The world’s greatest dead guitarist.”
“Jon,” Bobby said.
“You’re going to love this, Mom. Really. I’m turning the volume up a little here, because you’ve got to listen to Jimi pretty loud.”
“Jon,” Bobby said, “I don’t know if—”
Jonathan touched the needle to vinyl, and the room exploded with electric guitars. They squealed and shrieked like tortured animals. A thumping bass line started, so loud and insistent I could feel it up my spine. I had the impression that my hair was being disarranged.
“Nice, huh?” Jonathan shouted. “Jimi was the greatest.”
Our eyes met through the storm of sound. Jonathan’s face was flushed, his eyes brilliant. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to blow me out of