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One night Mom got bad drunk because she'd had a fight with Harvey. Her latest boyfriend. I didn't know what he'd done to her, but I knew it must've been bad. I hated all her boyfriends, but Harvey was worse. I think he was rotten to her. I'm not exactly sure of the details. I mean, I'm not sure rotten exactly how. But I still think he was.
I was lying awake, which was not so very unusual in itself, and I smelled smoke. When I got out to the living room she'd set the couch on fire with her cigarette. I got there just as the first little flame shot up. I ran some water in a pot and threw it on the fire. It splashed all over her face and she came around, and boy, was she pissed.
So I said, "Hey, what was I supposed to do? You set the goddamn couch on fire."
She slapped me. She used all kinds of cuss words, and normally she didn't care if I did, too, but I had to leave God out of it.
She looked kind of pathetic, slumping there all wet with that damp cigarette butt in her hand. She had a new perm, and I think she thought it looked great, but it always ended up flat in some strange ways where she'd been lying on it. She'd gained a lot of weight and she was wearing one of those mint green polyester things that made her look like a pale avocado.
She must have caught that in my eyes but she didn't seem to want to fight back against it. Lately she seemed to get into being pathetic, like it had some value she was ready to cash in. It's like she was practicing, trying to get really good at it.
She started to cry again, and Bill started to cry, we could hear him back in my room. She looked in that direction, almost like she'd get up and go to him, but the drunk sag took over and she slumped down further.
"Maybe he'd be better off," she said. Real quiet.
"Maybe he'd be better off if what?" When Mom was drunk she had a bad habit of picking up in the middle of a conversation she'd forgotten to start.
"See if you can get him back to sleep, would you, Cynnie? It's so hard."
"What is?"
"You know. To take care of him."
"You don't take care of him. I do." And I went back to my room, or I should say Bill's and my room. He was standing up in his crib, holding the rail, saying my name. Well, sort of. Cynnie, that's what everybody called me. Bill called me Thynnie, because his tongue was thick, from the Down's Syndrome, and that was the best he could do. And it sounded okay to me, the way he said it.
A lot of people thought Bill wasn't very cute. Maybe because his face was kind of puffy and he never closed his mouth. I think they didn't look at him right. He had the biggest, sweetest brown eyes, and right that minute he had the biggest tears rolling down his face.
"Thynnie," he said again, and bounced up and down a little in the crib, which was his way of telling me that what he couldn't say was very important. Bill was three years old but he still had to be in a crib because he was still a baby in his head. I'm not sure why everybody thought that was such a tragedy. I mean, people like babies, right? I know I do.
I whistled a little tune for him. I whistled the French national anthem, because the teacher made us sing it in French class so much I still had it stuck in my head.
When I'd finished a line he sang it back to me. Not with words, but the way people do when they forgot the words. And he bounced a little on every note. It was not my imagination that Bill could do that. Just because he wouldn't do it in front of anybody else didn't mean I was making it up.
I picked him up when he reached his arms out, and he buried his face in my neck and kept saying something. I couldn't make it out, but I knew for sure it was "Thynnie" because that's the only word Bill knew how to say.
He knew I was upset. I could never fool Bill.
He pointed to the living room. He always liked to watch TV with me. It seemed to soothe him. I carried him down the hall--no easy task, he was pretty darn big--and snuck a look around the corner. Mom wasn't around. She must have gone to bed. Good.
I turned on Jay Leno, because it didn't matter to Bill what we watched.
We sat on the couch together, way at the end to avoid the wet burned spot, and I put my arms around him, and he put his head on my shoulder. Every time I looked down, he was looking up at me.
I kept saying, "It's okay, Bill. Everything is going to be okay."
But nothing felt okay. And I could never fool Bill.
Kiki--that's our older sister--she said Bill's "profoundly retarded." She said that's a tragic thing. She's all grown up and moved away from home, so she's my authority on everything. Except Bill. I had this theory about Bill. I didn't exactly ask what "profoundly retarded" means, but I know when you say something profound you're being very deep and meaningful, so I figured that's why Bill knows so much, like whether I'm sad or scared or upset.
After a while he fell asleep with his head on my shoulder and I put him back to bed. I couldn't sleep with the smell of smoke to remind me, so I went outside and climbed up into my tree.
I had a branch that I lay on like a momma lion. I saw one in a film once at school, lying on a big limb, straddling it, all four legs hanging down. I could do that. Only, Momma Lion had a tail that twitched, while the rest of her looked plenty relaxed. If I'd had a tail, I think it would have hung down like the rest of me. I wasn't feeling all that twitchy.
With my cheek on that cool bare wood I could keep one eye on the house without feeling like I was any part of it. Either no one caught on to where I was, or more likely, they didn't care to look. I mean, the less commotion in that house, the better.
