Free TREYF by Elissa Altman Page B

my mother cold goblets of Soave Bolla and fed her warm, sugar-dusted lefse, whisper-thin slices of boiled Danish ham, Jarlsberg, and wedges of Gjetost Ski Queen, a chocolate brown goat cheese made from caramelized goats’ milk and solidified into a block of cloyingly sweet nuttiness. Tipsy and counting the slender hours of freedom before their husbands returned from work in the city, Inga served my mother on heavy brown earthenware plates; cigarette in one hand and wineglass in the other, my mother nibbled what was put in front of her—the warm bread, the cheese, the cool saltyboiled meat as forbidden as the Spam my father had cooked the day after he returned to us.
    Tor, who was four years older than Eddie and me, had better things to do than play Eric the Red: he spent his afternoons tossing rocks off a Grand Central Parkway overpass onto the windshields of oncoming cars, pulling the legs off spiders while they sizzled under a magnifying glass in the sun, and setting fires in empty lots around our neighborhood. One Sunday when I was twelve and Tor was sixteen—before his incarceration, his heroin addiction, his eventual suicide—and Eddie had gone out to ride his new Apollo 8 bicycle, Tor grabbed my wrist hard like a handcuff, pulled me into his bedroom, forced me down onto his tartan blanket, and attempted to relieve me of my virginity while my mother did her Peggy Lee imitation for Inga, George, and my father, just steps away in the Hoffmann living room. Tor was tall and narrow, always dressed in the same sky-blue, slightly dirty Levi’s bell-bottoms and tight plaid button-down shirt, a hormonal mass of ropy sinew and weeping acne, a fresh brown stubble sprouting like new grass along his pimpled jawline.
    It’ll . . . make you . . . Danish
, Tor growled in my ear, furiously humping me like a bronco rider on his narrow single bed beneath his shelf of tiny rubber Vikings, his face crimson, his blond hair glued with sweat to the sides of his head.
    Get off,
I said, trying to push him away, and he did.
    Fuuuck,
he groaned.
    Fuck—fuck. Christ. Fuck.
    And then, nothing.
    I pushed and shoved him off me and made a grab for the doorknob and we rolled out of his bedroom, tumbling like weeds into the hallway, my puffed-sleeve bandana shirt half unbuttoned, a dark indigo splotch blossoming on the front of his faded Levi’s.
    â€œEnough, both of you—be quiet—she’s singing,” George said from the couch, pointing over to my mother, who stood in front of his maple spinet piano and snapped her fingers, her arm straight in front of her, palm down. She knit her brow in a tight furrow above her heavily lined, unblinking brown eyes just like Peggy and whispered,
Fever all through the day.
I stood frozen in place and watched her performance with my father, Inga, and George, while Tor popped open a can of Fresca in the kitchen. My heart banged against the inside of my chest as she sang to us while a heavy brown platter of glistening ham and aging Gjetost sat on the modern teak end table, sweating in the heat of the apartment.
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    B uck Berkowitz, my father’s best friend, lived a few flights below us with his perpetually scowling Catholic wife, Velma, who wore her chocolate brown 1950s updo Aqua Netted to a standstill. Possessed of a screeching voice like nails on a chalkboard, tortoiseshell cat-eye glasses, and pearl gray twinsets, their arms stuffed to the elbows with used Kleenex, Velma kept her husband at an arm’s length; when he went to hug her, she pushed him away. When he went to kiss her, she gave him a cheek. A man with the muscular shoulders of an all-American Ivy League tackle, Buck was an eight-by-ten glossy, my mother used to say, with hair so black it was almost blue, and a Brylcreemedspit curl that sat glued to the middle of his forehead, like a comma. Obsessed with Chihuahuas and his perfectly square white