The Risk Pool

until evening. She was about the last person in the world I wanted to talk to.
    Portraying yourself as triumphant is no easy task when you’re in a tailspin. It requires energy, for one thing, imagination for another. And if you had sufficient amounts of those, chances are you wouldn’t be
in
a tailspin. Telling my mother the truth, unfortunately, was not an option. Ever since her nervous breakdown, she had an impossibly low truth threshold, as I had occasion to learnand relearn during those interminable years of high school when only lies contained the power to soothe. She was prone to upset. Doubts, minor failures, inconveniences, disappointments, quirks of fate—all flung her first into a tizzy, then into the bathroom for a librium to calm her nerves. She had left the hospital addicted, of course, though I hadn’t realized it at the time. But for the pills, she would not have returned at all. She took four a day, as a rule, but if I managed to upset her she’d take a couple extra. As many as it took. Then she’d smile at me, puppy-faced.
    Mostly, though, our days had fit nicely, end to end, and I was satisfied. The two years I’d spent with my father weighed upon me, more heavily than they had in the living. That first night in my mother’s new flat, when I slid between the crisp, cold sheets in my fresh pajamas, it occurred to me that I was lucky to be alive. Wussy had been right all those years ago when he’d warned me to keep a safe distance from the rockhead—he was a dangerous man. Living under Sam Hall’s roof, I had become a thief and a liar. I’d made dangerous friends and knew too damn much of the world for my own good. All of this was directly attributable to my father’s influence, it seemed to me, and I was thankful to have escaped it. In our new flat, there was wallpaper on the walls and rugs on the floors and a real kitchen and we ate dinner in the dining room. When I opened my closet, there were clean clothes hanging inside, and I bathed daily to be worthy of them, instead of waiting until I offended myself. I had a haircut every other week by a barber whose morals my mother approved of.
    If I missed my father, I did not miss his world. It felt good to know that I would not have to suffer another meal in Eileen Littler’s tiny kitchen. I didn’t have to see Drew Littler any more, or serve as reluctant witness to his violent lunacy. I considered myself well rid of the lot of them—Drew, Eileen, Skinny Donovan, Tree, even Harry and Wussy, both of whom I had actually imagined I liked, back when I was under my father’s dubious spell. I now lumped them all together as somehow responsible for my own degeneracy. But mostly I blamed my father, and blamed him most for not looking after me, for not seeing how low I was sinking or for not caring, for not seeing that I deserved better—that I was, if not a wonder, as my old friend Father Michaels had thought, at least a good boy.
    So I put him behind me. The only vestige of my father’s worldthat I allowed myself during those endless high school years in my mother’s cheerful flat was the pool table. My passion for the game took a long time to dissipate. For the first year I played just about every day, even in the cold of winter. Sometimes, down there in the garage, I would catch a glimpse of her white face framed by the small kitchen window upstairs, where she would watch and worry, as if she imagined he was down there with me, just out of sight along the blind wall, giving me quiet instructions.
    If I was seldom truthful with my mother, it must be said that she was seldom truthful with me either, though back then our most blatant lies took the shape of silences. It had not taken us long to intuit the rules of our new relationship. She would tell me nothing about what it had been like in the hospital or the nursing home, or that private inner place she lived for so long where no one could reach her. And in return, I would refrain from any reference to my life with my father—our routines, our habits, our activities. Those two years, she often suggested, were simply lost. Tragically lost. It had been a dark time for both of us, and now it was best forgotten. There was certainly no need to invoke it.
    She was all for pretending the chronological gap did not exist. Often, at night, when we were about ready to turn in and my mother had taken her final pill, she’d smile and take my hand. “It’s like we were never apart,” she’d say.