Chapter 14

14

It’s time to talk about Liz Dutton, so check it out. Check her out.

She was about five-six, my mom’s height, with shoulder-length black hair (when it wasn’t yanked back in her cop-approved ponytail, that was), and she had what some of the boys in my fourth grade class would call—as if they had any idea what they were talking about—a “smokin’ hot bod.” She had a great smile and gray eyes that were usually warm. Unless she was mad, that is. When she was mad, those gray eyes could turn as cold as a sleety day in November.

I liked her because she could be kind, like when my mouth and throat were so dry and she gave me what was left in that Burger King Coke without me having to ask her (my mother was just fixated on getting the ins and outs of Mr. Thomas’s unwritten last book). Also, she would sometimes bring me a Matchbox car to add to my growing collection and once in awhile would get right down on the floor beside me and we’d play together. Sometimes she’d give me a hug and ruffle my hair. Sometimes she’d tickle me until I screamed for her to stop or I’d pee myself…which she called “watering my Jockeys.”

I didn’t like her because sometimes, especially after our trip to Cobblestone Cottage, I’d look up and catch her studying me like I was a bug on a slide. There was no warmth in her gray eyes then. Or she’d tell me my room was a mess, which in fairness it usually was, although my mom didn’t seem to mind. “It hurts my eyes,” Liz would say. Or, “Are you going to live that way all your life, Jamie?” She also thought I was too old for a nightlight, but my mother put an end to that discussion, just saying “Leave him alone, Liz. He’ll give it up when he’s ready.”

The biggest thing? She stole a lot of my mother’s attention and affection that I used to get. Much later, when I read some of Freud’s theories in a sophomore psych class, it occurred to me that as a kid I’d had a classic mother fixation, seeing Liz as a rival.

Well, duh.

Of course I was jealous, and I had good reason to be. I had no father, didn’t even know who the fuck he was because my mother wouldn’t talk about him. Later I found out she had good reason for that, but at the time all I knew was that it was “You and me against the world, Jamie.” Until Liz came along, that was. And remember this, I didn’t have a whole lot of Mom even before Liz, because Mom was too busy trying to save the agency after she and Uncle Harry got fucked by James Mackenzie (I hated that he and I had the same first name). Mom was always mining for gold in the slush pile, hoping to come across another Jane Reynolds.

I would have to say that liking and disliking were pretty evenly balanced on the day we went to Cobblestone Cottage, with liking slightly ahead for at least four reasons: Matchbox cars and trucks were not to be sneezed at; sitting between them on the sofa and watching The Big Bang Theory was fun and cozy; I wanted to like who my mother liked; Liz made her happy. Later (there it is again), not so much.

That Christmas was excellent. I got cool presents from both of them, and we had an early lunch at Chinese Tuxedo before Liz had to go to work. Because, she said, “Crime never takes a holiday.” So Mom and me went to the old place on Park Avenue.

Mom stayed in touch with Mr. Burkett after we moved, and sometimes the three of us hung out. “Because he’s lonely,” Mom said, “but also because why, Jamie?”

“Because we like him,” I said, and that was true.

We had Christmas dinner in his apartment (actually turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce from Zabar’s) because his daughter was on the west coast and couldn’t come back. I found out more about that later.

And yes, because we liked him.

As I may have told you, Mr. Burkett was actually Professor Burkett, now Emeritus, which I understood to mean that he was retired but still allowed to hang around NYU and teach the occasional class in his super-smart specialty, which happened to be E and E—English and European Literature. I once made this mistake of calling it Lit and he corrected me, saying lit was either for lights or being drunk.

Anyway, even with no stuffing and only carrots for veg, it was a nice little meal, and we had more presents after. I gave Mr. Burkett a snow globe for his collection. I later found out it had been his wife’s collection, but he admired it, thanked me, and put it on the mantel with the others. Mom gave him a big book called The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, because back when he was working full time, he’d taught a course called Mystery and Gothic in English Fiction.

He gave Mom a locket that he said had belonged to his wife. Mom protested and said he should save it for his daughter. Mr. Burkett said that Siobhan had gotten all the good pieces of Mona’s jewelry, and besides, “If you snooze, you lose.” Meaning, I guess, that if his daughter (from the sound of it, I thought her name was Shivonn) couldn’t bother to come east, she could go whistle. I sort of agreed with that, because who knew how many more Christmases she might have her father around? He was older than God. Besides, I had a soft spot for fathers, not having one myself. I know they say you can’t miss what you’ve never had, and there’s some truth to that, but I knew I was missing something.

My present from Mr. Burkett was also a book. It was called Twenty Unexpurgated Fairy Tales.

“Do you know what unexpurgated means, Jamie?” Once a professor, always a professor, I guess.

I shook my head.

“What do you reckon?” He was leaning forward with his big gnarly hands between his skinny thighs, smiling. “Can you guess from the context of the title?”

“Uncensored? Like R-rated?”

“Nailed it,” he said. “Well done.”

“I hope there’s not a lot of sex in them,” Mom said. “He reads at high school level, but he’s only nine.”

“No sex, just good old violence,” Mr. Burkett said (I never called him professor in those days, because it seemed stuck-up somehow). “For instance, in the original tale of Cinderella, which you’ll find here, the wicked stepsisters—”

Mom turned to me and stage-whispered, “Spoiler alert.”

Mr. Burkett was not to be deterred. He was in full teaching mode. I didn’t mind, it was interesting.

“In the original, the wicked stepsisters cut off their toes in their efforts to make the glass slipper fit.”

“Eww!” I said this in a way that meant gross, tell me more.

“And the glass slipper wasn’t glass at all, Jamie. That seems to have been a translation error which has been immortalized by Walt Disney, that homogenizer of fairy tales. The slipper was actually made of squirrel fur.”

“Wow,” I said. Not as interesting as the stepsisters cutting off their toes, but I wanted to keep him rolling.

“In the original story of the Frog King, the princess doesn’t kiss the frog. Instead, she—”

“No more,” Mom said. “Let him read the stories and find out for himself.”

“Always best,” Mr. Burkett agreed. “And perhaps we’ll discuss them, Jamie.”

You meanyou’ll discuss them while I listen, I thought, but that would be okay.

“Should we have hot chocolate?” Mom asked. “It’s also from Zabar’s, and they make the best. I can reheat it in a jiff.”

“Lay on, Macduff,” Mr. Burkett said, “and damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ ” Which meant yes, and we had it with whipped cream.

In my memory that’s the best Christmas I had as a kid, from the Santa pancakes Liz made in the morning to the hot chocolate in Mr. Burkett’s apartment, just down the hall from where Mom and I used to live. New Year’s Eve was also fine, although I fell asleep on the couch between Mom and Liz before the ball dropped. All good. But in 2010, the arguments started.

Before that, Liz and my mother used to have what Mom called “spirited discussions,” mostly about books. They liked many of the same writers (they bonded over Regis Thomas, remember) and the same movies, but Liz thought my mother was too focused on things like sales and advances and various writers’ track records instead of the stories. And she actually laughed at the works of a couple of Mom’s clients, calling them “subliterate.” To which my mother responded that those subliterate writers paid the rent and kept the lights on. (Kept them lit.) Not to mention paying for the care home where Uncle Harry was marinating in his own pee.

Then the arguments began to move away from the more or less safe ground of books and films and get more heated. Some were about politics. Liz loved this Congress guy, John Boehner. My mother called him John Boner, which is what some kids of my acquaintance called a stiffy. Or maybe she meant to pull a boner, but I don’t really think so. Mom thought Nancy Pelosi (another politician, which you probably know as she’s still around) was a brave woman working in “a boys’ club.” Liz thought she was your basic liberal dingle-berry.

The biggest fight they ever had about politics was when Liz said she didn’t completely believe Obama had been born in America. Mom called her stupid and racist. They were in the bedroom with the door shut—that was where most of their arguments happened—but their voices were raised and I could hear every word from the living room. A few minutes later, Liz left, slamming the door on her way out, and didn’t come back for almost a week. When she did, they made up. In the bedroom. With the door closed. I heard that, too, because the making-up part was pretty noisy. Groans and laughter and squeaky bedsprings.

They argued about police tactics, too, and this was still a few years before Black Lives Matter. That was a sore point with Liz, as you might guess. Mom decried what she called “racial profiling,” and Liz said you can only draw a profile if the features are clear. (Didn’t get that then, don’t get it now.) Mom said when black people and white people were sentenced for the same type of crime, it was the black people who got hit with the heaviest sentences, and sometimes the white people didn’t do time at all. Liz countered by saying, “You show me a Martin Luther King Boulevard in any city, and I’ll show you a high crime area.”

The arguments started to come closer together, and even at my tender age I knew one big reason why—they were drinking too much. Hot breakfasts, which my mother used to make twice or even three times a week, pretty much ceased. I’d come out in the morning and they’d be sitting there in their matching bathrobes, hunched over mugs of coffee, their faces pale and their eyes red. There’d be three, sometimes four, empty bottles of wine in the trash with cigarette butts in them.

My mother would say, “Get some juice and cereal for yourself while I get dressed, Jamie.” And Liz would tell me not to make a lot of noise because the aspirin hadn’t kicked in yet, her head was splitting, and she either had roll-call or was on stakeout for some case or other. Not the Thumper task force, though; she didn’t get on that.

I’d drink my juice and eat my cereal quiet as a mouse on those mornings. By the time Mom was dressed and ready to walk me to school (ignoring Liz’s comment that I was now big enough to make that walk by myself), she was starting to come around.

All of this seemed normal to me. I don’t think the world starts to come into focus until you’re fifteen or sixteen; up until then you just take what you’ve got and roll with it. Those two hungover women hunched over their coffee was just how I started my day on some mornings that eventually became lots of mornings. I didn’t even notice the smell of wine that began to permeate everything. Only part of me must have noticed, because years later, in college, when my roomie spilled a bottle of Zinfandel in the living room of our little apartment, it all came back and it was like getting hit in the face with a plank. Liz’s snarly hair. My mother’s hollow eyes. How I knew to close the cupboard where we kept the cereal slowly and quietly.

I told my roomie I was going down to the 7-Eleven to get a pack of cigarettes (yes, I eventually picked up that particular bad habit), but basically I just had to get away from that smell. Given a choice between seeing dead folks—yes, I still see them—and the memories brought on by the smell of spilled wine, I’d pick the dead folks.

Any day of the fucking week.