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 [Fiction]


 [Getting Off Clean cover]

From Chapter Two of Getting Off Clean

By Timothy Murphy



We live in the middle-class part of West Mendhem that I've always jokingly called the ghetto, the oldest pocket of town, where saltboxes gave way to little one-plot Greek Revivals that gave way to one-plot Victorians that eventually gave way to one-plot split-levels and Cape Cods like the one we live in. Beyond the ghetto, West Mendhem suddenly uncoils into hills and winding roads, farms, the great lake, and the raw new fourteen-room neo-this-and-that houses that squat in tree-shorn developments with names like Yankee Mews or Good harvest Homes. Excepting these developments, this is my favorite part of town, where I biked away whole afternoons when I was younger and where I cruise aimlessly now when I'm restless after work, edging my mother's 1979 hatchback close to the shoulder of the road to make room for passing Volvos and Saabs. I like it out here because you can forget it's the twentieth century, or you can almost forget this is America, pretending instead that you're in the Vichy countryside, racing along as fast as you can to deliver Resistance plans to some nuns in a remote farmhouse.

Our neighborhood is the buffer zone between the rest of leafy, bucolic West Mendhem and the sooty, decaying threat of Leicester, whose defunct factory smokestacks you can actually see from the windows of our house. When Leicester's "complexion" -- as one of my junior high school teachers once delicately put it -- started to change in the 1970s, the neighborhood was the first rung a lot of white Leicester families (including mine)could grab in the middle of their frenzied exodus from the old city. Kids who would have grown up little Catholic punks in Leicester instead grew up little Catholic punks just over the border, this while their infuriated parents mourned the loss of their native city and cursed the arrival of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other assorted boat people who were -- even as we speak -- turning beautiful old Leicester into a filthy warren of drug dealers, knife-wielders, lazy welfare recipients, and other sorts of miscreants. They shouldn't have left so easily, these parents (including mine) would say to each other; they should have stayed, shown some gumption, fought for their neighborhoods. But they didn't, and when they moved into one of the half-dozen towns that ringed Leicester, they stopped going back there to eat, to shop, to pray, or to visit, because by now almost everyone, including the terrified elderly, had left as well.

To me, it's the sleeping giant just at our backs, the once-thriving hulls of black textile mills and Art Nouveau bridges that gird the sluggish Merrimack River, the repository of memories that makes up the history of my dispossessed suburban family and all of my dispossessed suburban cousins. It's where my mother and father grew up, on opposite sides of the river in the days when Italians and Irish had rumbles because they were the only ones to define each other's difference. It's also where my parents met, at a bar just after Thanksgiving 1963, everyone still mourning the killing in Dallas, she with her mostly Italian friends from St. Agnes Academy, he with his, mostly Irish, from City Catholic Prep. She was finishing the nursing program, now disbanded, at Leicester General Hospital, her mind filled with four-color textbook illustrations of nervous systems and clear mason jars of human brains and lungs suspended in formaldehyde. He had just come home from four years in Boston, attending business school by day, and bartending at night, living with two roommates in a basement apartment on Bay State Road, now back to a retired, widowed mother still shell-shocked at the loss of her eldest son, her only other child, in the Korean conflict. (That was our other grandmother, the meek one, who died -- of nervous exhaustion, I think -- when I was ten.)

I've always wanted to know what he said to his friends when he saw her, what she said to hers, duck tails and loafers with pennies on one side of the room, sweater sets and pedal pushers on the other, cigarette smoke and cheap beer coursing between in a show of Roman Catholic daring, and finally what they said to each other. They had lived for twenty-some years in the same city and never seen each other before, but surely he had a friend who knew one of her three sisters or friends. It's so difficult to picture sudden romance between them, something with strings rising in the background, difficult to picture anything other than the worn-in, slightly contentious "Hey, Art?" "Hey, what?" "Hey, Art?" back-and-forth by which they ferry what seems to be only key information to each other these days.

They married in May of 1965, then settled back in Leicester, in a three-room apartment just a mile's walk in any direction from everyone they knew, into a carefully budgeted life. They filled the place with just enough affordable Danish modern furniture to make it livable; socializing revolved around weekend excursions to Salisbury Beach or Saturday nights playing cards or Monopoly with my mother's sisters and their husbands, all of whom had no choice but to become best friends. Brenda came in 1966, me three years after, and we moved to a one-story ranch-style house in one of the planned neighborhoods on the semi-suburban western outskirts of the city. Then the big surprise, Joani. My mother sat around watching the Watergate hearings with utter indifference during her pregnancy, concerned only with the proper development of her third child.

We were now a completed family. By then they were preoccupied, like everyone else, with the thought that the public schools were going down, even the relatively good ones of our semisuburban neighborhood, and they followed their friends and their relations out of Leicester and into the provinces, to West Mendhem, were we live today. "Why not?" they said. The time was right -- Leicester was changing, we needed good neighborhoods and good schools, and my father had been promoted from bookkeeper to salesman, with a route that kept expanding thanks to his easygoing, no-pressure rapport with the area's shop owners and restaurateurs. He didn't glad-hand them; he asked them about their wives and their kids and their entrepreneurial aspirations while he took his lunch at their bar counters like the other local businessmen; then, somewhere in between, he'd tell them what new cheese wheel or pepperoni stick they couldn't be without. He was a regular guy, not your regular salesman, and they liked him immensely.

Now, at seventeen, to remember growing up in this house, in this family, seems to be about remembering what it was like to be buffeted by currents stronger than myself but not knowing how to negotiated them. There was always the purposeful screaming of Brenda and my mother, and the less deliberate screaming of Joani -- sick with this or that cold, falling down the stairs, getting some smelly old blanket or stuffed toy taken away from her for washing -- and at the center of it all, my father's silence or his philosophical little laugh, "heh," not much more than a hiccup: my father, who seemed capable of endless reserves of patience, or self-removal, a Zen-like quietude surrounding him and his ball game, him and his newspaper, him and his paperwork.

I grew up, somehow, in the middle of it, carving out a narrow private chamber between the outside world of school and beatings and hated baseball and soccer practices, and the Fitzpatrick-Ianelli world of silent men and unsilencable women. I filled it at first with drawings and funny little lifelike props cut and pasted out of construction paper, then later with books and old movies and magazines and piano lessons, all sorts of faces and voices that blessedly looked and sounded absolutely nothing like what surrounded me at home, in school, around town. There was the soporific drone of teachers, the unspeakable curses of older boys before they threw my schoolbag into the street, the nightly brawls between Brenda and my mother over punky boys or failed classes or Brenda's general bad attitude, the interminable slurred, slow grind of Joani's conversations with herself.

But there was also the strange, archaic, formal, dazzling syntax of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the honeyed, regal comportment of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind or Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Philadelphia Story -- modes of speech and behavior like I had never seen from anyone in my family or in West Mendhem. In People magazine and Vanity Fair there were reports of people with inestimable sums of money and schooling and experience, even the reports of some ordinary people who had fallen out of step with ordinariness and ended up having marvelous lives. And from sheet music the elaborate machinations of Mozart and Brahms and George Gershwin, and, even more extraordinary, my growing ability to translate their black markings into tricky chords and phrasings, on the upright piano we had gotten from my grandmother when she sold her Leicester house, in the living room with the accordion doors shut on either side so as not to disturb the television in the den or the squabbling in the kitchen.

I didn't hide these elements of my private life, but at the same time no one inquired about them. They were largely quiet things, I pursued them on my own time, and it's almost as though everyone observed an unspoken rule of no entry in this province of mine. Either that, or they simply didn't care. I was bookish, I was creative, I was artistic, I was private, I didn't make any trouble. Now I look around my room at the books I've collected, the books I somehow managed to hear about, seek, find, purchase, and devour, and I'm almost shocked at what I've managed to get away with while everyone else was making noise in other quarters of the house. I'm shocked at everything I know that no one knows I know. No one ever said, "What are you reading? What's it about?" It shocks me -- no one every thought to ask.

Copyright © l997, Timothy Murphy.



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