The Tender Bar Read Online Free PDF

babysitter—and saved constantly for what she called Our Next Great Escape. But every escape was foiled. Within six or nine months our savings would run out, our rent would go up, and we’d be back in the Shit House. By the time I was seven we’d moved out of Grandpa’s house three times, and back three times.

    Though I didn’t love the Shit House, I didn’t despise it the way my mother did. The sagging roof, the duct-taped furniture, the exploding cesspool and bicentennial sofa—all seemed a fair trade for being with my cousins, whom I adored. My mother understood, but Grandpa’s house sapped her energy to such an extent that she couldn’t take any pleasure in the compensations it held for me. She was so tired, she said. So terribly tired.

    More than returning to Grandpa’s house, more than moving our stuff yet again, what seemed to devastate my mother was the moment she realized that our next return was inevitable. I remember waking in yet another one-bedroom apartment, going out to the kitchen and finding my mother pecking at her calculator. I could tell she’d been pecking at it since dawn, and she looked as if the calculator had been pecking at her. I’d long suspected she had conversations with her calculator, as I did with the radio, and that morning I caught her red-handed. “Who are you talking to?” I asked. She looked up and gave me her blank face. Mom? Blank. Before my eyes she was reverting to that catatonic schoolgirl with her hand in the air.

    Each time we returned to Grandpa’s, my mother would insist that we take regular mental-health breaks. Sunday afternoons we’d climb into our rust-spackled 1963 T-Bird, which sounded like a Civil War cannon, and go for a drive. We’d start on Shore Drive, the finest street in Manhasset, where the white-columned houses were bigger than Town Hall, and several had Long Island Sound as their front lawns. “Imagine living in one of these showplaces,” my mother would say. She’d park in front of the grandest house, the one with the golden yellow shutters and the wraparound porch. “Imagine lying in bed on a summer morning,” she’d say, “with the windows open, and a warm breeze off the water blowing the curtains in and out.”

    It always seemed as if a misty rain was falling during our drives, so my mother and I couldn’t get out of the car for a closer look. We’d sit with the engine and heater running and the windshield wipers slinging back and forth. My mother would study the house and I would study my mother. She had lustrous auburn hair, which she wore to her shoulders, and green-brown eyes that turned a shade greener whenever she smiled. Her most common facial expression, however, was one of enormous self-command, like a young aristocrat posing for her coming-out portrait. It was the look of a woman who could be gentle, and fragile, but who would assuredly be fierce when protecting those she loved. I see in some photos of my mother that she was aware of her ability, in hard times, to set aside her delicate qualities, to fight like hell, and she took a certain pride in it. The camera captured her pride in a way my seven-year-old eye couldn’t. The only pride I noticed as a boy was the pleasure she took in her sense of style. Petite and slim, my mother knew what looked good on her. Even when we were broke she managed to look classic, which probably had more to do with her carriage than with her clothes.

    After we’d been sitting there for some time, the owners of the house would hear the T-Bird and peer through their windows at us. My mother would then jerk the T-Bird into drive and we’d rumble south on Plandome Road, through the commercial district that started at Dickens and ended at St. Mary’s Church. I liked the way Manhasset was bracketed by its two most sacred sites, each a house of furtive adult communion. At St. Mary’s we’d hang a left onto Northern Boulevard, then a quick right onto Shelter Rock Road, passing Shelter Rock