Miles.

by Adam Henry Carriere.

Miles.

"Miles is Adam Henry Carriere's same-s.e.x Bildungsroman about coming of age in the '70's among Chicago's very rich. Like Danse Macabre, his online literary magazine, this book is full of life's delicious, opulent things. One way writers with such socio-economics have traditionally established their value is by the delicacy of their appreciation and presentation of the material and sensual worlds. Proust's style is every bit as lapidary as his gemstone collar studs, and Carriere's phrases are fine as his food and furniture, resonant as the cla.s.sical alb.u.ms his protagonist purchases in abundance.

"Young h.o.m.os.e.xual love is crystallized in facets of the first water, and set in narratives that glimmer like platinum. Carriere's hero suffers all the emotional difficulties that obtain in those parts of the world where poverty hasn't choked adolescence to death. But even in Miles' Young Wertherian sorrows, he walks with all the unquestioned self-a.s.surance of one who knows that he is ent.i.tled to be gravitated upon, and gratified by, this planet of his."

~ Tom Bradley, author of Bomb Baby and My Hands Were Clean.

"A five star coming of age gay story that has the emotional intensity of a symphony (musical references abound)--but avoids all the pitfalls of over-wrought sentimentality, not to mention the same old, same old gestures of disaffected youth. The writing is fresh, often beautiful, and the descriptions of Chicago in the 70s--neighborhoods, diners, schools, and suburbs--provide a colorful backdrop to the narrative. Miles (the protagonist) relates self-discovery and journey from adolescent to adult in his own unmistakable and charming voice (which is to say I liked Miles right away): his intellect, humor, empathy, and honesty. Young love, like so many other themes in literature, is not easy to write--but I feel that Carriere is at his best when describing the complex, often awkward, and unforgettable moments of attraction (the longing, excitement, tenderness), as well loss and mourning. The dialogue? Well, that simply rocked. One great scene followed another and many memorable lines make up this book. A gorgeous work."

Kathryn A. Kopple, author, Little Velsquez (Mirth Press).

A brief word to the ether-bots, lawyers, and aggrieved pa.s.sed partic.i.p.ants:.

Im told it is advisable to point out the story youre about to read is conspicuously a work of fiction. The furthest, most indistinct similitude between the imagined characters of this story and real persons, whether man or woman, living or dead, is the sheerest mishap of happenstance and in no way intended. To say it plain, no such persons as these ever walked G.o.ds green earth.

Likewise, the occasions, affairs, and scenes of the story are similarly imagined, and exist nowhere but in air, ether, and ones own mind.

Adam Henry Carriere.

Nevada, 2012.

I.

Men at some time are masters of their fates:.

The fault is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Julius Caesar.

I stood there staring, and remembered.

We used to be able to feel the cold November wind through the closed window of our cla.s.sroom. The panes were thin, and the wood around them old and rotting. The ugly radiator below the sill never kept up with the unwanted ventilation. The thin, leafless branches of the dark grey courtyard tree tapped and scratched against the window and side of our school building, an imposing, gothic horror of a place, surrounded by a prestigious and exclusive lakefront university, of which it was a nominal part. The entire Youth Pilot Inst.i.tute facility had that wonderful air of benign decay so many of us confuse with elegance. In the hot and sticky Chicago summer, my school looked and felt like a mislaid Cambridge, while in the bitter winter, it could have been a proud emba.s.sy to a Hapsburg or Romanov court. The rainy spring brought images of the blossom around the Sorbonne, while in the toxic fragrance of a colorfully muted autumn, my favorite season, our school impressed you as a haunting remnant of our civilization's better days.

My fellow students had been a mixed lot: male and female, black, brown, yellow and white, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Moslem, atheist and agnostic, Chicagoan and suburbanite. However, we shared two important similarities: we were all bright enough to be accepted into the place, and had families that could afford the Youth Pilot Inst.i.tute's extortionate tuition.

Even though the Inst.i.tute had no definitive dress code, we all dressed stylishly and well, hoping to blend in better with the energetic, high-brow college-types who buzzed back and forth through the school grounds during their cla.s.s day, occasionally putting in grudging internship hours with us, as well. The lower grade kids looked like yuppies from Lilliput, while the bulk of the Inst.i.tute's fashion independence came from the middle graders, who were at that age where a good deal of their individuality was derived from how they dressed. Rarely could you tell the difference between us upper graders and the collegians too many of us tried to emulate, except for a handful of misfits like me. I was in a "high-cla.s.s hippie, low-cla.s.s outdoorsman" phase in those heady days of my Junior year, rife with jeans, various combinations of t-shirts, sweaters, and flannel shirts, a brown suede fringed jacket if it was above freezing, a thick Navy pea coat liberated from my Dad if it wasn't, and hiking shoes, whose steel-tipped toes usefully served as concealed weapons, though I never had occasion to use them as such.

Our curriculum emphasized a cla.s.sical, liberal arts education, delivered in a college seminar manner. It was all very progressive, to the point of being chic, but it actually made spending every weeknight in a pile of books, breaking your a.s.s to be a scholar, seem fun. Our teachers were the font of this. Like the students, our "adult resources" represented virtually every demographic niche, from the tough old battle-axes that had forgotten more about geometry than an aeronautics engineer was ever likely to learn, to the middle-aged, ex-campus radicals c.u.m social engineers who couldn't do anything else except teach. We also had our fair share of stereotypical schoolmarm history freaks, grandfatherly language dominies, and hyper-talented liberal arts maestros with fresh ink on their doctorates that scared everyone else on the staff because of their brains, degrees, and youth.

Nicolas Mikhailovitch Rozhdestvensky was one of these.

Just as there was no dress code, there was also no set way to refer to our teachers, except for the crazed and permanently menopausal Mrs. Jinak, who was known throughout the Inst.i.tute as "The Psycho b.i.t.c.h". One could be an invariably dull 'mister', like Mister Greene; or an aging 'professor' who ought to be at Yale or Stanford, but, like Professor Fleming, chose to write the texts they use there instead; or a military rank, for those middle-aged, ex-armed forces officers about to begin their decline, like Captain Selby; or 'doctor', for the conspiratorial ex-government scientists like Doctor Clemens, Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Porton, so we would maliciously gossip. As for the awfully young Rozhdestvensky? Well, our short, lemon-faced Princ.i.p.al Connelly (always a terse 'sir' to his face, but 'old boy' when he was out of earshot) snarled Nicolas Mikhailovitch, harshly enunciated to emphasize his (implicitly unimpressive) Slavic heritage. Students who had the good fortune to attend his music cla.s.ses called him Papa Rozh (p.r.o.nounced Rawsh), Papa Nicolash, or just Nicolasha. He had only joined the faculty in that autumn of my eleventh year, but had quickly become everyone's favorite, including mine.

Nicolasha's parents were native Russians, violinists with the Kirov who had defected with their teenage son, already a prodigious cellist, when their company toured the eastern United States. The family was well-received by the close-knit arts community in Washington, D.C., and taken under the wing of another defector from the Soviet Union, a famous cellist who had become musical director and chief conductor for the National Symphony Orchestra. He saw to it that the Rozhdestvenskys were taken aboard the NSO as soon as possible, and that young Nicolasha received the best music instruction available - namely, himself. As one of the only students of, arguably, the world's finest cellist, Nicolasha was blessed with unmatched instruction and attention, but cursed with the very high expectations that came with such an honor. His public debut, playing a Prokofiev concerto written for the elder cello master himself, was strangled in the grip of stage fright, producing a form and function disaster, an embarra.s.sment to his parents, and a blow to his beloved mentor. So unnerved was Nicolasha that he retreated to Georgetown University, where he earned all three degree levels in music history and instruction on academic scholarship, but never played in front of an audience again. We student types were exceptions to this. Even then, it was never the cello.

I guess Nicolasha never watched the news or read anything in the papers about child molesters, or the sad, very American spectacle of gossip, charges, lawyers, reporters, lawsuits, book and movie deals, talk show visits, and general strife that accompany such stories (regardless if they be true or not), because he was the warmest and most openly affectionate teacher any of us have ever had, and didn't seem to give a d.a.m.n to what anyone else would or could think. Everyone got a kind hand on their shoulder, a gentle rub of the hair, a fond touch on the arm, a kindly grin, or an affectionate bear hug, a hug as big as Russia itself. Sometimes you got hugged alone, and sometimes you shared the hug with four others, but it was always done with a wide smile and a gregarious laugh, and was a full and tight hug, not one of those cheesy hugs relatives give each other. The only people who were safe from Papa Rozh were his fellow teachers, who didn't talk much to him (and he didn't talk much to back), and the Princ.i.p.al, who saved all his hugs for his seven adopted children at home. Everyone giggled and blushed when they became the object of Nicolasha's beaming attention, but a lot of us were sustained by the glow he brought to the hallowed halls and cla.s.srooms of the Youth Pilot Inst.i.tute. I know I was.

My cla.s.s had music history for last period, around two-thirty p.m. It was always a wonderful way to end our long, dreary day. You could feel the change in atmosphere just by walking in the cla.s.sroom, which had pictures and posters of all the great cla.s.sical composers surrounding a map of Europe on the wall opposite our leaky windows, and was littered with virtually every musical instrument and tool you could imagine, including a stand-up piano that Nicolasha usually sat on when he lectured (and leapt off of to make a point). He could efficiently demonstrate a few notes on most of them, but really swept into our hearts when he would seize our sole violin to perform whole stanzas of a particular piece or composer. Nicolasha seemed to know volumes about the masters and all their works, from Handel all the way to the 20th Century composers, which we could tell were Nicolasha's real favorites.

Nicolasha and I became friends on that particularly raw autumn afternoon, a day I can remember like it was yesterday, not entire years ago. The dingy grey sky was covered in a familiar November cloud blanket and was filled with a sharp wind, blowing the leftover leaves along the bleak sidewalks and hardening lawns. We had been grilled in an oral quiz by Professor Tanaka, our Asian History teacher, and just finished an essay test in Italian from Signore Abbado - this was how our teachers liked to finish things up before a holiday. No matter what Nicolasha had planned, it would be a relief. As we filed into the room, he smiled at each of us in turn from atop the piano, violin in hand. I took my usual seat in the first desk nearest the door and readied my music notebook in the customary silence of the room.

We were a well-behaved cla.s.s, unusual, I suppose, since most of us were deep in the post-p.u.b.erty adolescent blues, but it was easy to see why: we loved Nicolasha and everything about his cla.s.s, we were usually s.h.a.gged from our typical study routine by the time we got there, and none of us were very friendly with each other. We were all too diverse and out-of-water, as it was, to really become close. Our intellect and parental income tax brackets may have brought us there, but our disa.s.sociated neighborhoods (and suburbs) kept us from being much more than acquaintances. A lot of times it felt like we were in training to become our parents. Maybe that was part of our bond with Nicolasha. He made us feel like this big, warm family, at one with the music we listened so closely to.

It also occurred to me that Nicolas Mikhailovitch Rozhdestvensky was a little out-of-water with the rest of the world, and the only thing that kept him from completely separating from the outside was his pa.s.sion for music.

Nicolasha's idea of a test was to tell us all about a composer, play little bits and pieces from his body of work on the record player or right there in cla.s.s with an appropriate instrument, and then, have us listen to a different full-length composition and write a descriptive essay about whatever images, thoughts, or feelings the music inspired in us. This beat the h.e.l.l out of reading and re-reading your textbook and notes for a couple of hours the night before, and trying to spit it all out the next day.

Nicolasha had spent the last few days telling us about Dmitri Shostakovich, and, boy, what a chord those lectures struck in me. I especially liked the newer guys, like Edward Elgar, Paul Hindemith, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten, because there was just so much more oomph in their stuff for me. But Shostakovich? He was the best of all. Talk about big music. You could hear the tank battle taking place, right there in the middle of the Eighth Symphony! Some downright silly stuff, too, like any of his Ballet Suites, probably the real source for all that great, goofy music in the Warner Brothers cartoons. Nicolasha said that if orchestral music had a fifth gear, Shostakovich was it.

Thus did I make not one but two Russian friends that autumn.

We all got ready to write as Nicolasha shut the cla.s.sroom door and turned on the phonograph. The Age of Gold Suite emerged. The Introduction, its nervous, playful woodwinds chased by the string section, warned off by the urgent crash of the percussives, leading into a sneaky, childlike march that ends with a militaristic waltz. I saw many of the other guys begin to write, attracted to the hint of martial fervor in the beat. Then the Adagio softly began, a pastoral, longing melody carried by a flute against the strings. I later read this was scored as a seduction scene between a devilish Western ballerina and a good-hearted Red Army soldier. Hm.

Nicolasha's wide, light blue eyes caught mine staring at his face, a full-bodied, closely-shaved face with unkempt, unsettled brown hair, and the thick nose, jaw bone, and eyebrows of a moujik Slav that had been softened by a lifestyle far superior to that enjoyed by those ancestors who had contributed to his gene pool. His eyes plunged into mine with undisguised melancholy as he put the violin to his cheek, closely accompanying the record's soloist to the hypnotic gypsy stanza that was enriched by the orchestra behind it, flowing onward until the background players ceased and the solo violins of the recording and Nicolasha played in flawless unison for a few magical seconds, twisting the notes downward until the clarinets, strings, and flutes rejoined them. My teacher left off there with a self-effacing shrug and another glance toward me. I was embarra.s.sed, and quickly started writing.

The famous xylophone Polka followed, attracting many of the girls to their notebooks, and finally, the proud, peasant Dance, a tense, raucous spin that really has to be a ball for a musician to play. But my mind was still on the violin solo in the Adagio. I heard such sadness and longing there, something I could identify with at that point in my little life. Nicolasha's eyes seemed so far away. Did he see his parents? His boyhood friends still in Russia? His old home in Gor'kiy?

Home. Now there was a real joke for me. It had been a joke for a few years by then, but really turned into a laugh-a-minute that autumn. My home was a distinctly unmusical one in those halcyon Carter days, in many respects. I was bored to tears with the gooey, synthesized mush Top-40 music had become, and was proud of being the only member of my cla.s.s that had neither seen "Sat.u.r.day Night Fever", nor bought its soundtrack. All of a sudden, here came this young bear of a teacher, a real-life human teacher, completely in love with all these dead composers who got talked about and played with openly expressed love, love which flowed right into all of us. And that was it for me. I had become a regular listener to a small, "mom & pop" cla.s.sical radio station, and went out and bought almost every record Nicolasha played in cla.s.s, much to the chagrin of my Dad, who had evidently come to the conclusion that a Brink's armored car might actually go to the cemetery with him when he died, because he resented my acquisitiveness, or the impermanent happiness the music gave me, I couldn't tell.

Our eyes met again, and I knew. Nicolasha saw all of this, and let me see something inside of him, whatever it was. I was eight years younger than he was, yet he trusted me, which I thought was pretty cool.

The final bell rang. The rest of my cla.s.smates threw in their papers and charged out the door to begin the much-antic.i.p.ated Turkey Day weekend. I had put the finishing touches on my last sentence and handed it to Nicolasha, who stood near me in the doorway, wishing his students an enjoyable Thanksgiving, a happy holiday, a safe weekend, and a good evening for good measure. I gathered my books and put on my Dad's old pea coat while Nicolasha followed suit with his papers and the KGB-style black leather trench he had worn since the cold weather began, probably the only piece of clothing he owned that was worth more than twenty bucks.

(Nicolasha had two suit jackets to his name, one grey and the other brown, both tweed and fallen on hard times, as well as a couple of identical pairs of tight blue jeans, white b.u.t.ton-down shirts, and a few lackl.u.s.ter knit ties, all in earth tones. He never wore a belt, or any other jewelry, and had a single pair of black loafers worn with a series of grey wool socks, all in desperate need of replacement. What did he do with his salary, I used to wonder, gamble?) "You played that solo really well, Papa Rozh."

"It is one of my favorite Shostakovich melodies. I could not resist." He tucked the violin case under his arm and waited for me to exit before him.

"It sure is sad, though. Are you thinking of home when you listen to it?" I peered at the alb.u.m cover in Nicolasha's brown leather tote.

"Home?" He handed me the record.

"You know, Russia," noting the alb.u.m number in my mind.

We walked down the cavernous, nearly empty hallway, past a couple of lower graders, who got patted on their backs and shoulders while they bundled up at their lockers. He remained silent until we got outside, where a few parents waited in their idling cars for their kids. The sky was already beginning to darken, and the cold lake wind hit us hard on the face.

"It certainly feels like Russia here sometimes!" His rich, pleasant voice had only a tiny trace of accent. I went to give the alb.u.m back to him, but he held up an unlined hand. "You can have that, if you would like. I have a different reading at home."

I smiled happily. "Are you sure? This is really cool. Thanks, Nicolasha."

He put his free arm around my shoulders and gave me a gentle cuddle. "Happy Thanksgiving." My eyes closed with a smile as I leaned into his embrace.

I thanked him again and ran off to catch my southbound commuter train. Up on the thick wooden beams of the platform, I watched Nicolasha walk slowly towards the lake, and waved at him when he turned around to glance at something. A silver double-decked electric train rolled to a halt in front of me. I couldn't see if he waved back.

I I.

A surfeit of the sweetest things

The deepest loathing to the stomach brings.

A Midsummer Night's Dream The turkey was dry and tepid. The cabbage was strained poorly, the mashed potatoes weren't mashed very well, the stuffing had too much celery in it, and n.o.body looked twice at the lima beans, not even my mother, who prepared the meal. A completely inconsequential football game between two teams who were already out of the playoffs droned on in the background. Every light in the living room, kitchen, and family room was on, yet, the small dining room in which we struggled through the Thanksgiving meal seemed ill-lit. Certainly, my spirits were.

I think my family was cursed.

My mom, Frederika, was a tall, well-proportioned woman with thick, dramatic brown hair. A real hard case, some cop might have said. As pa.s.sionate as she was hard, the kind of pa.s.sion that let the heart and the soul control a life that would otherwise have been regimented and accomplished, pa.s.sion that remains an anomaly for a pure-bred German.

Her parents gave up a small foundry and the rest of their family in Saxony after Hitler took over. The rest of their relatives died during the war. They moved into a small apartment above a bakery in Roseland, the largely Catholic, multi-ethnic neighborhood on the far south side of Chicago. Her father went to work at the nearby steel mills, and her mother worked in the bakery downstairs. Mom was born a year after that, right there in the bakery. She grew up to be a strong-willed, bright woman, raised by the hard-working women of the bakery. Grandfather died in an accident at the mill when she was ten, but they were able to make it through on the last of their savings and the kindness of the bakery women.

OK. When Mom was downstairs one morning, she heard the women gossiping about one of their neighbors, a Polish laborer with two young boys. The laborer had gotten blind drunk the night before, which had been his wedding anniversary. Mom was intrigued. He was despondent over his wife's death to tuberculosis earlier that year, and confided to the bartender that his younger boy, Simon, wasn't really his, but rather the illegitimate son of his sister from Cracow, who fell in love with a young German Jew refugee. They both died during the war, too. He had been visiting Poland weeks before the invasion, and she gave him her baby to take back to America. My Mom went to school with Alex and Simon, and had a crush on both of them. They were inseparable, but polar opposites: Simon was gregarious and visceral, tall for his age and wiry, with trim, curly brown hair and eyes, while Alex was a shy, artistic, private child, somewhat short and plain-looking. Their bond was baseball, and they attended almost every White Sox game together, first with their father, and then alone, as soon as they were old enough to take the street car to the park.

Simon and Alex came to the bakery one rainy afternoon. The White Sox were playing in Cleveland, and the ladies had the game on the radio. They came to buy some bread for dinner that night, but really wanted to hear the game. So, business being slow, the old ladies, Frederika, Simon, and Alex huddled around and listened with glee as the Pale Hose crushed the Tribe, 10 to 2. The whole time, Simon and Frederika's eyes were never far from each other. Before leaving, he asked my mom if she would like to come home and have dinner with them. My grandmother waved her off with a smile.

Mom and Dad pretty much fell in love that night.

High school went by quickly for both of them: they excelled in their studies, both competed in sports, and went to a lot of White Sox games with Alex, who really didn't have any other friends and had a tough time getting along with his hard-working father. Alex liked painting and drawing, which weren't very reputable pursuits to anyone who lived in Roseland, and was a sharp contrast to Simon, whose sterling academic record and athletic accomplishments had gained the notice of the local congressman, a big-hearted Machine hack named Kasza, who also attended too many White Sox games. Alex's father (and Simon's guardian uncle) worked for the honorable gentleman's ward organization from time to time, and Kasza liked the idea of promoting a fellow Pole to one of the national military academies. However, the glow of Simon and Frederika's romance dominated everyone during what always sounded to me to be a warm, happy time for both families.

Until our curse made another appearance.

As they all geared up for graduation week, one night, a ma.s.sive fire swept through the corner bakery, and killed both Frederika's mother and Simon's uncle, who became trapped in the upstairs apartment. The entire neighborhood grieved for Alex, Simon, and Frederika, who spent the rest of that horrible night crying in opposite corners of Palmer Park.

Their adult lives began there. Alex blew off the cap and gown ceremonies and took a train to New York and fell in with the Greenwich Village art scene, where he began to make a name for himself as a painter and a sculptor. Simon and Frederika decided to marry, but Simon wanted to wait until he finished college. He was overruled by the Machine pol, who virtually bribed him into marrying beforehand. So they did, at Holy Rosary, a small turn-of-the-century Catholic place of worship near the ruins of the bakery.

Simon graduated from Annapolis in 1962. I was born a year after that. Mom and Dad went back to the old neighborhood to baptize me. Uncle Alex was my G.o.dfather. His second wife was my G.o.dmother. I don't even remember her name, and I'm not sure Uncle Alex does, either. I saw very little of my dad in my early childhood, since he was a young officer with the Pacific fleet. Mom refused to accept life on some drab military base from day one, so I did most of my growing up in a large Roseland bungalow "loaned" to us by the now-retired Congressman Kasza. Mom enrolled in and struggled to finish nursing school at night while she worked at the local bank during the day. Dad got around to resigning his Navy commission in 1970, came back and moved in with us, and went into law school at Northwestern a few months later.

I swear, my parents were closer when Dad was in Asia, writing letters back and forth almost every day, than when he finally came home.

Both of them came from families broken apart by some tragedy or another. They raised themselves while others worked or became distant memories. Their ultimate tragedy was that they became the kind of invisible parents to their only child that fate had cruelly given to them in their youth.

Dad was a smashing success as a brave officer and then as a lawyer, a right corporate torpedo with a six-figure income, a beautiful wife, a beautiful little boy, and a beautiful house in the suburbs, an upper-cla.s.s burg where a lot of the exiles from Roseland ended up after the neighborhood changed a few years ago. And now he had our beautiful life ruin, sitting alongside him at Thanksgiving dinner, to add to his list of accomplishments.

Mom's natural tenacity and ruthlessness found a home in her nursing career. She wasn't content to check pulses and stick needles in the a.s.ses of sick children. No. In less than a year, she was not only a.s.signed to, but running, the night shift at a large inner city Chicago hospital's emergency room like she was a Kriegsmarine admiral. I guess you need someone like that dealing with gunshot wounds and diseases of the poor. I just didn't like the cold, driven, Cybernaut mom she became (to spite my absentee Dad, I often believed).

They were in the trenches, and had been there once Dad's stud lawyer career was matched by Mom's stud nursing career. They were always driven to bigger and better things, sort of the "American dream" gone berserk - work, d.a.m.n you, work! Make more money! Be better than everyone else, and you can have a piece of this rotten pie, this confection of moneyed culture and cultured money! (And I say 'culture' like a virus culture, from a lab that should have been blown to smithereens a long time ago).

I know they saw themselves in my cherubic features, my light sand eyes and small ears and full lips and long fingers, my test scores, my home runs, and my growing, terrible loneliness. I was twice the athlete and the intellect my parents ever dreamed of being, but half the child. My parents may have been alive, I was having dinner with them, but they sure didn't feel that way, to me. When I was little, I had every toy and gadget on the market bought for me at Christmas, which was cool, I guess, and I won't lie that all the birthday parties at Comiskey Park with my baseball buddies were the best days any kid like me could ever want, but I had this lawyer who I had to call up for an appointment to see as my Dad, and this Emergency Room chieftain who could handle twenty traumas, an overworked staff and green interns with a shrug, come home and be a crack suburbanite social b.u.t.terfly while she ignored my silences and closed doors and late baseball nights off with the aplomb of a true, upwardly-mobile busy-body. I'd have given every single one of my things for either of them to show up one night when I played ball with the local guys, and maybe even thrown in a few of my Opening Day visits for a joint parental appearance, since the White Sox usually lost their home opener, anyway. You know, just to prove to everyone I had some parents, too.

On the rare, latter-day occasions they had put in an appearance together, it was only by accident. Like a car accident. It wasn't at any of my games, that's for sure. Maybe that's why I had stopped playing so much, that junior year. You always knew when they were within striking distance of each other, because you could cut the tension in the room with a b.u.t.ter knife. The only saving grace to the whole meal was my Mom's homemade bread, a recipe given to her by one of the bakery ladies. It certainly wasn't my feeble attempt to pretend either of them felt like parents anymore.

"One of my teachers gave me this really cool alb.u.m yesterday. Would you like to hear it?"

"You mean I won't hear it tonight, when I'm trying to sleep?" Dad even looked at me when he spoke. Wow. I stared back into his eyes. They used to be clear and sharp. Now they were just haggard and angry.

"Maybe later, baby. Let's finish eating first." Why? You don't look like you want to, either, Mom.

"I'm finished now." My voice slipped. It was harsh and abrupt. I looked downward at my lap. All I could hear was a fork hitting a plate and the football game far in the distance of the family room.

"So am I, with that sullen att.i.tude of yours."

"Let it go, Simon. We're all tired right now."

"Tired of what, Rika? You said you were tired of waiting for me to get home. Well, I'm home, honey. Can't I be tired of something, too?"

"No, Simon. Just let the whole G.o.dforsaken thing go. You're not in front of a jury that's impressed by you, so ease up on the dramatics and my china."

I pushed my chair backwards and went to leave the room. My Dad's tight hand grabbed my shirt sleeve and pulled me back down. I kept looking at my lap. He wouldn't let go.

"I'll tell you what I'm tired of, Rika. I'm tired of my son always walking away and closing some d.a.m.ned door behind him. I'm tired of getting home just in time for him to go out. And I'm really dead f.u.c.king tired of coming home and feeling like I went through some vortex and ended up back at work!"

I pulled my arm out of his grip and stared at him with wide eyes. I felt empty inside, even though I was stuffed with homemade bread and milk. Mom glared at Dad like he was suddenly some alien life form. My bottom lip began to quaver. I had heard them do battle at night, the yelling and swearing, the occasional broken knick-knack, and the silent meals the next day. I heard it coming. I felt it coming, but, when it finally came, the night we all stared at each other in despair, hurt, and anger, that barren Thanksgiving night, I felt afraid and alone with the two people who used to cuddle me to sleep between them in bed.

Mom's eyes began to fill with tears of sorrow. Was that her only response? "I'm tired, too, Dad. I'm tired of both of you."

His hand slapped hard across my face. It sounded like a rifle shot. The corner of my lip split on my front teeth. I let out a single, soft cry as I landed on the thick s.h.a.g carpet at the base of the dinner table. He never used to touch me when I was little, never, no matter how much of a brat I was. But since my teenaged voice changed and Mom and Dad became East and West Berlin, evidently my remarks and responses stopped being cute and started cutting closer to the bone, and getting me slapped a lot. I guess I had become used to it.

With as much dignity as I could muster, I stood up and walked out of the room, ignoring the verbal explosions erupting behind me.