The Whore's Child

my mother. “Lenny, you just
think
you won. All the other contestants finished long ago and went home.”
    â€œYour father lacks a sense of . . .” she explained to me now, as we rolled into the outskirts of Tucumcari, New Mexico. “Sense,” she finally said. “He lacks a sense of sense.”
    Explaining my father’s character deficiencies really cheered my mother up. By then it was early afternoon, and we’d planned to drive on through to Flagstaff, but Tucumcari seemed to be having a festival of some sort. A banner stretching across the highway announced “Cowboy Days,” and the streets were full of men in cowboy hats and boots and jeans and shirts with metal snaps instead of buttons. A country western band was set up under an awning nearby, and some people were dancing in the hot sun.
    â€œThis is more like it,” my mother said immediately, pulling into a motel that had a sparkling swimming pool and a sign out front in the form of a twenty-foot-tall cowboy boot. She pointed up at it as we pulled our suitcases out of the trunk. “That’s what your father doesn’t have the sense to pour piss out of.”
    I frowned. All this talk about my father had made me lonesome for him. I’d have given a lot to see him standing there, grinning at me, working his silly washer on the tip of his tongue.
    â€œThat’s western humor,” my mother explained. She’d been west once before, years earlier, after her parents had sold their house in Maine and moved to Phoenix, where they lived in a trailer park with a big swimming pool and lots of other retirees from cold climates. “Your father don’t have the sense to pour piss out of a boot. Try saying it.”
    I didn’t want to try it, and I said so.
    â€œSure you do,” she said, and it was clear to me that we were going to stand there holding our suitcases in the blazing sun until I played along.
    â€œDad doesn’t have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot,” I said.
    She contemplated my sentence. “Not ‘doesn’t have,’ ” she said. “We’re in the West now. There’s no such thing as grammar. It’s ‘He don’t have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot.’ Try again.”
    Once I’d said it to her satisfaction, we lugged our suitcases into the lobby, where she confronted a man in a cowboy hat at the desk. “I sure hope you ain’t full up,” she said. “We just come all the way from Missour-uh.”
    Walking down the hall to our room, she chortled. This was one of the best moods ever.
    We spent the afternoon poolside, my mother in a new bathing suit, the only two-piece I’d ever seen her wear. At first we had the deck area to ourselves, but by midafternoon we had company and by four-thirty every chair was occupied, even the ones that didn’t fold down. The pool had a diving board that pretty much guaranteed my happiness. I spent the afternoon showing off, doing flips, cannonballs, jackknives and what I termed crazy dives, which were mostly a matter of making grotesque faces before I hit the water. Still, at the edge of my exhilaration was a remnant of my loneliness, and this afternoon reminded me of another the summer before when we’d visited friends of my mother’s who lived in Virginia and had a swimming pool of their own. My father fancied himself a diver, but that was because he couldn’t see himself. The rest of us could, and he had my mother and her friends in stitches. The upper half of his body worked fine, but every time he entered the water, his legs formed a wide V. Informed that his feet were not together, as he imagined them to be, he kept trying, yet each time the V got even wider. He’d emerge, beaming, and say, “Better, right?” sending the rest of us into convulsions. “I could
feel
my ankles together that time,” he insisted.
    â€œThen how come we saw them flying apart?” my mother said, still laughing.
    He appealed to me, the only one of the party, he seemed to imply, that he could trust. “What do
you
say? Together or apart?”
    Now, in Tucumcari, I wished I’d lied. I could tell he hated the idea of looking ridiculous. But I’d told the truth, and so, despite my daredevil excitement here in New Mexico, I worried that I, too, was a ridiculous sight, and that perhaps I might grow up to be a man like my father.
    As the deck