Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  The owners defend the practice by suggesting that it gets children to think responsibly about the sea and by reminding customers that if they don’t want to participate, they can avoid the performance. Besides, they insist, it’s all in good fun. Everything about Maritime Merrytime is all in good fun, even the miscalculations. The lobster trap is friendly enough looking, done up in bright colors (anything but the beaten-down hues of the briny deep!), and filled with pillows and Merrytime comic books and good things to eat. At the end of the day, the caught kid and his family are treated to a free dinner and T-shirts and set loose in the park for an hour after it closes, but there is no changing what it is.

  It falls to Larry and a half-dozen Helper Crabs to do the trapping. Wood can usually tell, when the Catch of the Day song starts to play on the loudspeakers and he begins to circle the park with his giant net, which kids would make good candidates for Merrytime’s all-in-good-fun brand of cruel and unusual punishment. The chickenshits usually run for the safety of their parents’ legs or hide behind the trashcans, while the ones who are into it tend to chase after Larry with their hands in the air, yelling, “Pick me! Catch me, Larry! I want to be caught!”

  If he can, Wood looks for a kid somewhere in-between, someone too cool to hide, but nicely terrified of the prospect. Today, though, as on most winter days, he must catch what he can. He sifts through the slim pickings and lands on a six- or eight- or ten-year-old kid (he can never tell) with a Marcus Camby/UMass jersey worn proudly over the outside of his down jacket. The jersey reaches to the kid’s knees like a skirt, and it gets in the way of his fleeing at the site of Larry Lobster and the Helper Crabs. The kid’s clearly not game for this particular game, but he runs awkwardly in his heavy winter coat and the stretched-over and loose-hanging jersey. Wood doesn’t move that easily in his costume either (the suit weighs another twenty pounds on top of the additional twenty he’s been carrying), but he doesn’t have it in him to redirect himself. It’s his job to catch this kid, but it is also his nature.

  A-peopling, he wonders if he ever chased after Norman in something like this way, if he ever mistook his laughter for fear, if he was more inclined to respond to his own kid’s signals than he is to these kids’ in the park. He works to remember what it was like to be a father to a small boy, to matter—hell, not just to matter, but to matter like nothing else in the world has ever mattered, to have whatever it is the kid is going through to matter right back. He connects with these kids, but he can’t connect with his own, can’t for the new life of him reach back across the great divide he’s dynamited into their worlds and set right the pendulum.

  For a moment, Wood loses himself in thinking how he might make repairs with Norman, to reconnect without doing any further damage—Jesus, it’s been three months, and he still hasn’t told him!—but he’s gone for that one moment, just. Introspection and him, they also don’t get along. Besides, he’s got a show to do.

  The Helper Crabs lift the poor Marcus Camby fan carefully into the net, which Larry Lobster and his crustacean pals have balanced on their shoulders like pallbearers, impervious to the near screams and mild flailings of today’s Catch. Kid’s parents are no help, either. Dad’s got the video camera out and Mom’s pushing two kid siblings into the frame, and everyone else is milling uncomfortably around the fountain, waiting for what will happen next to just come on and happen so they can get back to their own dysfunctions.

  The little boy is resisting, big time, but Wood and the crabs struggle to get him into the trap. Kid’s not screaming or fighting back, but he dead weights himself to where anyone paying attention can see he’s being moved against his will. The boy’s mother, who apparently is, crosses the square to her netted son. When Wood catches sight of her, late, his first thought is she’s going to make this even more difficult. This happens, sometimes. Once, in late fall, some burly looking goon in an “I’m with Dickhead” T-shirt with an arrow pointing to his crotch, stepped purposefully to Wood and kicked him in the groin—or, at least, in the place where he thought he might find groin on a lobster. The only things that saved Wood were the goon’s evident misunderstanding of marine biology and the costume designer’s evident inattention to detail. Also, Wood’s relative lack of peripheral vision inside the Larry suit likely prevented him from retreating in fear in the moment before the attack and likely saved him from a more-than-necessary embarrassment.

  “Just don’t give him any ice cream,” the woman whispers into what may or may not be Larry’s ear, as if this had been Wood’s secret plan.

  Wood holds up his claws so that they frame his costumed face in sharp parentheses: a lobster’s shrug.

  “He’s lactose intolerant,” the woman explains.

  Wood nods, as if to give his word that he will do no such thing, and turns back to the boy. As Larry Lobster, he is unable to speak—it’s one of the basic rules of employment, that the actors inhabiting the Merrytime characters not make a sound—and so the only assurances he can offer his unwilling participant must be delivered through foam-rubbered gesticulation. He pats at the air with his claws to suggest to the boy that he calm down; he holds a pincer to his lobster lips, to suggest quiet; he rubs the boy gently on the back to make nice; he borrows the camcorder from the neck of the boy’s father and motions the Dad into a shot with his son. He acts like he has never acted before, and the rare and wonderful thing about it, for Terence Wood, is that the boy plays off of him as if it all were real, as if Larry Lobster and the Helper Crabs were truly holding him against his will.

  When the kid is finally trapped and hushed, and his family no longer fascinated by the photo opportunities, and the few other tourists diverted by the few other attractions, and Wood is momentarily full of himself and his ability to improvise with a crowd of oblivious tourists, it occurs to the great actor to break for lunch. His twenty new pounds have come mostly from the all-he-can-eat lobster rolls, and he’s learned to get them while he can. He retreats to the employee entrance at the main Lobster Pound by the Dancing Waters fountain, where he is handed a brown paper bag with Larry’s face on it, which he, in turn, carries awkwardly between the pressed-together heels of his claws to the fenced-in employee picnic area out back. Another basic rule is never to be seen eating or drinking or ducking into the bathroom or engaging in otherwise human behavior. The ducking into the bathroom part is never a problem for Wood because it’s such a bitch to get in and out of the lobster costume that it’s not worth his trouble. He goes without fluids so that he might go without peeing, although he wonders what it will be like inside the Larry suit in the heat of summer. The thing about his wondering is that he lets himself go out that far. Here it is, late January, and he’s already out to June in his head. Last time he was this settled was basically never.

  Grace, from outside his limited vision: “That you in there?” She taps at his lobster head.

  “Grace of my heart!” he says, surprised to see her. They are the first words he’s spoken all morning, and his voice comes out scratched, as if from sleep. He sounds far away underneath his thick Larry head.

  “Thought I’d bring you something to eat,” she announces, fumbling under his lobster chin for the tucked-away buttons and zipper so that she might unfasten his lobster head and tilt it back like a hood. It is not a chore Wood can perform for himself, not without undoing the intricate lacing on the costume gloves (although this last is not something he can do for himself, either), and Grace doesn’t like the thought of someone else performing such an intimacy on her Harlan. She takes the bag from his claws and sets it aside. “They put so much mayo in that stuff I’m surprised you can taste the lobster,” she says. “I’m surprised your cholesterol isn’t off the chart.”

  “What’s instead?”

  “Instead is tuna, like you like it.”

  Like she thinks he likes it is with Miracle Whip, which Grace insists is better for his cholesterol than mayonnaise, and chopped-up celery on whole wheat. The chopped-up celery pieces are like hidde
n enemies when he finds them in his mouth, and, with his claws, he won’t be able to pick at the gristle they leave behind in his teeth. But this is the way they do tuna down at Two Stools, and he doesn’t have it in him to carp. “You spoil me,” he says, not insincerely, getting his voice back, wiping at his brow with the synthetic fur of his costumed sleeve. “You’re not careful, I’ll never leave.”

  “Then I won’t be too careful.” She takes over on the brow-wiping with one of the coarse napkin squares from the dispensers down at the coffee shop, but it feels to Wood like she’s leaving behind scratch marks. Then she licks her thumb and slicks down his graying eyebrows, which she’s told him tend to go all wild and absent-minded professorish when he’s been inside the suit a couple hours. “You want your hands?” she says, taking his lobster mitts in her own meaty paws.

  “No,” he says, “don’t have time. They want me back there to check on that kid.”

  “I can feed you,” Grace offers, “if you want.”

  “I want,” he says. “I want, I want, I want.” He opens his mouth like a small child.

  Grace pinches bites of the tuna with celery on whole wheat and places them tenderly in Wood’s mouth. They make an uncertain picture, the two of them. To a Merrytime colleague looking on in the employee picnic area, with the way Wood’s fake Larry head is tilted back and his real Wood head angled also to receive the tiny sandwich bites, he must appear helpless, attached, and Grace like a mother bird returned to her nest to feed her babies. To Grace, she is simply caring for the man she loves in the only way she knows; it doesn’t occur to her how it looks. To Wood, eating, how it looks is everything, and how it looks to him is like that scene in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the one where a recalcitrant Malcolm McDowell opens wide to collect the succor that is his due. He doesn’t like this picture, but he can’t shake it, and every time he swallows a bite of tuna sandwich, he opens his mouth and waits for the next one, like he has it coming, like Malcolm McDowell; he can’t help himself.

  Grace doesn’t have it in her to notice. All she knows is she at last has a reason to duck out during the lunch rush at the coffee shop; that her two Lennys have the place basically under control; that this giant of a man in the red lobster suit has somehow found enough to like about her to stay put, even if he hasn’t come entirely clean; that without her here to feed him her Harlan would just melt away inside that suit; that he waits without asking for her to open the can of Arizona Iced Tea she’s brought with her from the coffe shop, diet peach, and twirl the angled straw to his lips.

  “You sure you don’t mind?” Pet asks for the third or fourth time, taking off her coat and absurd winter hat, shaking out her hair to set it right. “I’m not interrupting?” She moves as if it doesn’t matter whether or not she is.

  “No,” Pimletz says, his own mess of hair quickly fingered through to where it doesn’t look too bad. “I could use the distraction.”

  “Yeah, like there’s not enough for you to do without me dropping by.”

  “Technically, you called first,” Pimletz corrects, trying to put this stunning Petra Wood person at ease. He’s even taken by the absurd hat, figures it’s something the beautiful people are wearing these days. He gives her the benefit of every doubt, and a few more he hasn’t even considered. Petra Wood is, after all, a kind of client; he serves at her pleasure, hers and Anita Tollander Wood Veerhoven’s, on behalf of Wood’s kid. If they don’t like what he writes, he’ll never see that second twenty-five thousand. “That shouldn’t count as just dropping by,” he sucks up. “That should be for something, that calling.”

  “From the car phone,” Pet insists. “I called from the car phone. In the drive. Right outside. Any decade but this, that’s just dropping by.”

  Pimletz gets that it’s important to her that she just dropped by, and he lets it alone. The woman did live here, once. Probably, after the estate is all figured and he finishes the book and clears out, she’ll live here again. Her stuff is all around. She shouldn’t have to call first.

  Pet, after a beat, not about to miss another: “So, like, what page are you on?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  Pet laughs like he’s kidding. “Fine,” she says. “Don’t tell me. Keep me in the fucking dark. It’s not like I’m the wife or anything.” She moves about the place as if she’s reorienting.

  “Coffee?” Pimletz offers, not knowing how to act around this woman in her own home. “There’s instant.”

  “Fuck coffee,” Pet says. “There’s wine somewhere, if you haven’t polished it.” She leads Pimletz into the kitchen. “There,” she says, pointing. “Top of the fridge. Can you reach?”

  Pimletz reaches.

  “Great,” she says, taking the bottle, dusting it off. “Friend of his had a vineyard up in Napa somewhere. Gentleman farmer type deal. Guy was an asshole, and his wine was shit, but Wood was always begging for cases. They did a Riesling one year, wasn’t too bad.” She rubs her hands together in a gesture of warming. “Jesus, it’s cold in here,” she says, even though it’s not. She switches subjects like channels, Pimletz is getting. Like Hamlin. “This is how you keep it?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, presses her hands to her face. “They’re, like, ice cold,” she announces. “Feel.”

  She touches the backs of her hands, both, to the sides of Pimletz’s cheeks, also both, and he pulls back, thinking, this is not what’s supposed to happen. Terence Wood’s wife is not supposed to be touching me on the cheek, in a cabin, in the woods, no one around for miles. Her hands are cold, but they’re cold from outside, from the car, and against her cold, heavily ringed fingers, his face feels like the kind of brown paper towel that gets dispensed in public rest rooms.

  He needs to switch his own channels, move this encounter back to a show he’s seen before. Wine. He can’t find a corkscrew, makes an elaborate show of his looking. “Any ideas?” he finally says. “Swiss army knife?”

  “Here.” Pet reclaims her hands, sniffles as if she must, grabs the leather duffel she’s slung over the knobbed back of one of the kitchen chairs, and pulls from it a worn pocketknife with a dull corkscrew folded to its side. “Try this.” She hands the knife and the bottle to Pimletz, and, in the exchange, the cold of her hands shoots through his fingers and once again sets him to distraction.

  Focus, he tells himself. “That’s it?” he asks, meaning (he thinks) the pocketknife. Focus.

  “That’s it.”

  “Nothing more, you know, dedicated? That thing they bring to your table at the restaurants? What the hell do they call that?” He’s fishing here, Pimletz is, trying to seem on top of things.

  “This is it,” Pet sings. “We’re roughing it, we’re making do.” She does a twirl about the place, like a trade show model for a kitchen convention. “Place’s not exactly outfitted,” she says, meaning the kitchen. “Might have to drink it straight from the bottle.” She crosses to a stool by a kitchen counter, brings her fit legs with her to the small oval seat, hugs them to her chest, keeps talking: “Me and my dead husband’s ghostwriter, swapping spit, talking ’bout how it was.” She seems to Pimletz entirely too cheerful for an encounter such as this, although, in truth, he’s got no idea what the appropriate levels of cheer might be. He’s got no idea about the appropriate levels of anything.

  He sinks the rusted corkscrew into the cork and does what he can, but the bottle had been on its end and the cork gone dry and the stopper goes all crumbly when he tries to pull it out. There are tiny pieces of cork all over the up-high countertop in front of him—a whole litter!—and he considers these as his head fills with bad ideas on how to salvage the situation. “Cork’s gone bad,” he says, stalling, hoping his virtually unannounced guest will find some reason to reach for the bottle and brush her hands up against his, just one more time, pleasepleaseplease.

  “I’m guessing you were never a waiter,” Pet says, taking the bottle back from Pimletz (and grabbing only glass!) and pushing the cork down past the neck with a still fu
sed-together pair of take-out chopsticks. She finds these in a drawer by the sink, where Pimletz has let them accumulate.

  “What about the cork?” Pimletz wants to know.

  “It’s just cork,” she says, working the last of the stopper down the bottleneck. “Not like it’ll choke you or anything.” She brings the bottle to her mouth and takes a long pull, and the wet, left-behind glisten on her lips is enough to make Pimletz forget about her hands. He wonders if her lips are cold. Then she sets the bottle down on the counter, brings her hand to her mouth, and spits cork into her cupped fingers. She does this with a kind of artful poise that belies the act itself. “Pretend it’s pulp,” she says. “Okay? It’s just pulp. It’s fresh-squeezed orange juice and there’s just some pits and some pulp. That’s all. Strainer didn’t do a very good job.” She pushes the bottle across the counter to Pimletz. “Join me?” she says.

  He wasn’t expecting his mother.

  Last he spoke to her, she was running on about how busy they were at work, she and Nils, about how things were really taking off, and wouldn’t it be great if Norman could just scoot on up there for the weekend (just scoot on up there, that’s just how she said it), maybe help out a bit, go out on a couple calls. She talked about everything but what she meant to talk about. It’d be a good chance to get together, she said, get things back to normal. Norman was thinking, Yeah, like, this is pretty much the first thing on my list to do, to scoot on up to New Hampshire, to suck the dust and muck and apple pie from the rugs of Mr. and Mrs. Smalltown U.S.A. Yeah. If this is normal, he’ll be someplace else.

  Still, he’s glad to see her—here, now—landed in the not-quite vestibule area of his shitty little apartment late in the day, with an oversized package wrapped in plain brown paper and criss-crossed packing string, like on a cake box, under her arm. The thing is too big for her to carry comfortably, and so she’s got a couple fingers curled under the taut packing string, which serves as a kind of handle, except that it cuts off her circulation at the knuckles and tears at her skin. It’s not the best arrangement, but it’s how she managed up the few flights of stairs.