by Peter Hedges
“It’s what he wanted. Isn’t that right, Arnie?”
“Burger Barn is the best.”
I explain, in the clearest way I can, that Burger Barn is not the best. “It’s an insult to your uniqueness, Arnie, your individuality. There’s only one Arnie Grape, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, there are hundreds of Burger Barns and they are…”
“The best!”
Amy looks at me like I won’t win this one. She’s right, I won’t.
In the kitchen, among the dishes that have fossilized and the trash that has crystallized, I ask Amy why she let Ellen go to this Born Again thing.
“Ellen needs to get out.”
“And I don’t? And you don’t?”
“That new girl has changed her.” Even Amy has heard of Becky, Becky who I do not miss. “She’s not the beauty queen anymore….”
“Sure, she is. That new girl is nothing, believe me.”
“The phone doesn’t ring for her like it used to.”
“Thank God.”
“Yes, it’s great for you and me. But for a girl whose worth is determined by the number of calls she gets…”
“You sound like Janice.”
“Well, Janice and I talked.”
I beg Amy to consider that Janice understands absolutely nothing about any of us or this house, that sending her to college was our biggest collective mistake. I resent how she’ll fly in when it’s convenient, provide her less than perceptive opinions, and then always leave us with the work.
“Janice is your sister.”
“No fault of mine.”
“You must love her.”
“No.”
“I love her.”
“The bitch kissed Muffy. How can you…?”
Amy’s left hand flies across my face. The slap sound doesn’t wake my mother, and I hold my cheek, my tongue rummaging to see if any teeth are now loose.
“Thanks,” is all I can say.
After a considered silence, she says, “I love her so much that I pity her.” She has yet to get over Muffy.
“That hurt,” I say, my head dizzy.
“Good.”
Amy does the dishes while I sack up the endless bags of trash. I carry them out to the garage and a gang of flies attacks me. Later, I get our biggest swatter, turn on the garage light and chase down fly after fly, trapping them against the walls, in the corner where the lawn mower and rakes are, and proceed to annihilate them.
Back in the house, Amy fills the largest bowl she can find with a mountain of Neapolitan ice cream. “Good night,” she says. Her solace is an entire half gallon and memories of happier times.
I run Arnie’s bath water, get the bubbles big and plentiful, and dump in all his toys. Arnie is happy in the water and when the phone rings, I leave him splashing.
34
“Hi, Tucker.”
“Bobby’s on the phone, too. Think of this as a conference call.”
“Hi, Bobby.”
Talking fast, Tucker says, “We’re on our way over….”
“Arnie’s in the bath. I’m going to sleep. We’re going to sleep here.”
“Yeah, but…”
Bobby interrupts. “Gilbert, we just need to bounce some ideas off you.”
***
So while Arnie swims in the tub and Momma sleeps with her TV and Amy makes love to her ice cream, I stand waiting at the edge of our driveway. The headlights that appear at the top of the street are from the McBurney Funeral Home hearse.
“Get in. Get in,” Tucker yells.
I climb in back and kneel where the coffins usually ride.
“I brought some dandy beer,” Tucker says.
Bobby launches into a speech about how it’s not so easy for Tucker and him to get girls. They have turned to me, hoping for some support, some ideas, seeing as I’m thought to be something of a sexual god. “We’re at a point of desperation.”
I hear their schemes, each more tasteless, more stupid than the previous one. All of their ideas are unrepeatable.
Somehow we end up at Tucker’s place, sitting around with a six-pack of obscure Australian beer. They’re still talking over each other, on top of each other, and so much of what they say defies belief. They finish with a flourish and then say, in unison, “We welcome your input.”
“Guys,” I say. “Guys.”
“Admit it, Gilbert. We have killer ideas.”
“Guys.”
“What? What what what?” barks Bobby.
“I’m… uhm… floored.”
They take my statement as a compliment. Gilbert is speechless, Gilbert is in awe. But over time they begin to get the picture of my true feelings.
“Okay, maybe these are not the best ideas. But do you see what we’re trying to do? We’re trying…”
“I get what you’re trying to do. It is very clear what you’re trying to do.”
Tucker snaps, “But you won’t help? You won’t advise?”
I look at them both. I say, “You guys think I’m something I’m not.”
“Right. Who in town got the girl? Who in town is going out and presumably fucking the best girl ever? Who?”
I try to explain that they’ve got it all wrong. “I wouldn’t even touch that creature….”
Tucker covers his ears. “Please, Gilbert. We’re not stupid.” He uncovers them and continues. “You don’t want to help us and that hurts. It hurts me.”
Bobby adds, “It doesn’t hurt me, really. It disappoints.”
I dig deep and start talking. I explain how each of them is enough. “That if a girl can’t see you for what you are, then that girl doesn’t deserve you. She isn’t worthy of your time or your dick.”
The boys laugh when I say the word “dick.” I chose that word because I knew it would lighten the air. They’ve been deprived for so long, I say to myself, that their bodies have begun to eat their brains.
I end with a simple plea. “Before you guys do anything. Consult me. Check with me. I need to put some thought into your ideas and let’s see how we can best move forward.” I sound like a politician, a bad one, but my speech works.
Bobby nods and Tucker says, “It’s a deal.”
We all shake hands and Tucker says, “I knew Gilbert would be helpful. I knew we could count on you, buddy.”
“Listen, guys, I got to get home.”
They drive me home and I almost laugh and cry at the same time.
“Night, guys.” I shut the hearse door, and my two sorry friends drive off in the McBurney hearse. Ellen’s light is on in her room, she’s home. The others are fast asleep.
***
In the house the blue light from the television flickers its changing light on Momma. The shadows highlight her thick, fleshy brow and drooping jowls. Her gray hair is wild, wirelike. She ends up not looking like my mother at all, but rather some kind of monster or extraterrestrial.
Tonight, for reasons unknown to me, I wander through the living room and move close to my mother, her smell ancient and distinct, her body settled like clay. Momma is listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the TV. She has turned up the volume.
“And the rockets’ red glare,
the bombs bursting in air
gave proof through the night…”
In the dim, flickering light, I see that Momma has put one of her bloated hands over her heart. I know better than to speak during our national anthem. On the TV an American flag blows in the wind, and marines or soldiers or whatever stand in salute. An announcer says that Channel 5 is going off the air and the sound turns to static. Momma turns the TV to mute but leaves the blank, snowy picture on.
“Gilbert.”
“Yes, Momma?”
“Sure was nice of Lance Dodge.”
I don’t say anything.
She reaches below the table, lifts up a bag of potato chips that must have been resting against her feet, and gently tears open the top. She sets the bag down and for the next
several minutes, while I sit on a stool in the corner, she eats the chips, handful after handful. The chips vanish fast, Momma crumples the bag and smacks her lips. I don’t look at her, my eyes stay fixed on the TV static.
“The next president of the United States?” she says. “He has got to be out of his mind.” Momma laughs, clearly so proud of Arnie, so grateful that Lance could be so kind. “Just want to see that boy turn eighteen, that’s all I ask.”
I nod like I know what she means. I sit there saying nothing while she unwraps a box of Hostess cupcakes.
Working at the store, I think to myself, I bring the food home, I do the shopping and get whatever Amy asks for, I beg for credit from Mr. Lamson and each time Momma eats, I know that I’m an accomplice to the crime.
She grunts. I turn to her and see that she’s pinched off a part of one of the black-and-white cakes and is extending it my way. I shake my head like “No, thanks.” She opens her mouth, almost happy that I refused, and inhales the fingerful with a sound resembling our vacuum.
Five cupcakes later and Momma’s still going strong. What keeps me here, I decide, is the odd hope that if I sit here long enough, breathing her smell and looking at her enormous head, maybe I can learn to love her.
She goes for the final cupcake in the box and I stand up, wiping my mouth while wanting to wipe hers. This sitting in silence and listening to her noisy mouth has been a virtual bust.
“Momma, you should get some sleep.”
“What?”
“Get some sleep. Close your eyes and sleep.”
“Huh?”
“Sleep. Rest. You deserve to rest.”
“Gilbert. You ever seen a robber here? Has a killer ever gotten in here? To the best of your knowledge?”
“No, Momma.”
“Why do you think that might be?”
The light from the television keeps on flickering.
“I don’t know, Momma.”
“Don’t shake your head like that. Makes you look like your father.”
“You were saying?”
“Yes, I was. I was saying that nobody has broken in here because I stand watch. They will have to get by me before they can get to you. I dare someone to try and get by me.”
She’s right. No way is any criminal or killer even going to think about coming into our house as long as she sits in her chair. Momma is our sentinel.
“There are entire families where an intruder, a night stalker, just wanders by. Picks out a house. Stakes it out. Enters with rope and guns, proceeds to tie down all the family members and shoots each and every one. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let some mystery person enter my house and in a single night kill all that I’ve created.”
She takes the last cigarette from her current pack and lights it.
“One day you might understand what it means to create. To know the feeling of looking in a person’s eyes and know that you are the reason for those eyes.” Momma thinks for a second. “I’m going to say something I know I’m not supposed to say. I see you and I know that I’m a god. Or a goddess. Godlike! And this house is my kingdom. Yes, Gilbert. This chair is my throne. And you, Gilbert, are my knight in shimmering armor.”
“Shining, I think, Momma, is what you mean.”
“No, I know what I mean. You don’t shine, Gilbert. You shimmer. You hear? You shimmer! Now good night.”
“What?”
“Good night.” She blows smoke my way, it clouds around my face and I’m able to fight coughing until I make it to my room. Up there, alone, I cough until my stomach hurts and my throat feels torn.
35
I wake up early because I need to pee. I’m about to flush when I hear some sloshing come from the bathtub. Through the glass shower door, I see the shape of a person. Sliding it open, I see him there. Arnie. His boats and plastic fish are floating—the bubble bath has long since disappeared—his eyes are bulging out and he can’t move. The retard fell asleep and spent the night in the tub. His fingers and his feet have all shriveled up, raisinlike, and he’ll undoubtedly think it’s permanent. Being in the water is hard enough, but the thought of being in it all night just must destroy him. I help the poor guy out of the water. I take his dinosaur towel and begin to dry him off.
“It’s okay, Arnie. It’s okay.”
He’s quivering and shaking. He doesn’t utter a sound. And as I’m drying the water out of his ears, a different kind of water fills his eyes.
“It’s okay.”
At breakfast he ignores his toast. I shake on even more cinnamon sugar, but still he won’t eat. Amy, who is scrambling eggs, looks at me, concerned. I shrug. Then I make what I think to be an incredibly insightful analogy about how food is like gas and that “if you, Arnie, were a car you would be stalled in the driveway. Arnie needs gas.” This has no impact. He sits with his face scrunched and his back rounded like a rock, staring at the waves in his fingers. “Arnie, they’ll go away.” He shakes his head. “They will. I promise that your wrinkly fingers will go away.”
Amy says, “Gilbert knows about these things. You can trust Gilbert.”
There is nothing more depressing than toast that no one eats. So, in a last-ditch attempt, I say, “Arnie, think how the toast must feel. I mean, if you were this toast, how would it feel to be unwanted, unloved?” He usually has sympathy for such things. But not today.
So I reach to throw the toast in the trash, when his arms and hands extend like springs and grab both slices. He scrunches each slice into a little ball and throws one at Amy, one at me, yelling, “I coulda drownded! I coulda drownded!” Then he runs out of the kitchen, out of the house.
Amy looks at me, I look at her. Usually one of us checks on him in bed and, for whatever reasons, we both forgot. But it was me who left him in the tub.
Ellen strolls into the kitchen and Amy says, “Could you go get Arnie?”
“Be glad to. And then what? What comes after that? What will be next?”
“Get Arnie, please.”
“It’s a good thing I’m here, isn’t it? Good thing that someone does the dirty work around here. What would you people do without me?”
I say, “Be happier.”
She doesn’t hear this because she dramatically hits the kitchen closet door, lets out a sigh that sounds like a winter wind, stops off at the bathroom for a makeup check, and finally after all that, stomps outside. She screams “Arnie! ARNIE!”
***
In a minute she’s back, saying, “Our Arnie has disappeared and no mortal can save him and maybe if we raised him differently, if we taught him to…”
Amy takes the eggs she has been scrambling and dumps them in the trash. She uses a paper towel to wipe her mouth and she leaves the kitchen.
Ellen says, “What about my eggs?” as Amy opens the back door. Amy says nothing as the screen door crinks shut. She goes out to the backyard and sits at our once red, now very weathered, picnic table.
Ellen whispers, “This family,” as if she deserves better. She looks on the shelf where we keep cereals and there are three boxes of Momma’s cereal. “Oh, great, only Cheerios. What a day this is shaping up to be. I shouldn’t have even woken up.”
I want to say maybe you shouldn’t have even been born, Ellen. But I know that living is no one person’s fault. There are those who say that we choose to be born, that we make out some request and it is granted, that we’re put on this planet because we want to be alive. I think not. It’s the luck of the draw. Some people have to live while others get to sit this living thing out.
“Gilbert?”
Some days I hate all those who know my name.
“Gilbert?” Ellen says again and again, speaking it nine times before getting to the point. Nine is nothing, fourteen is her record.
“Get to the point, Ellen,” I say.
“Look at me.”
“I know what you look like,” I say, looking out the back window where Amy still sits at the picnic table.
“Gilbert? Look
at me. Gilbert?” There she goes again, saying my name in that way.
I snap and turn. “WHAT DO YOU WANT!”
Ellen half smiles, she is startled by my tone but happy for the eye contact. She flutters her eyes and whispers, “Jesus and I both love you.”
This I did not expect. Before I can think of what to say back, she takes a large bowl and pours it full of Cheerios and along with a big salad spoon and a half gallon of milk, she carries it to Momma in the dining room.
“Ellen, how nice of you. You love your mother, don’t you, Ellen?”
“Yes, Momma, I do. And so does Jesus.”
I hear a spoon hit the wall. Momma has thrown it at Ellen. Momma has missed.
I look out the window and see from the shape of Amy’s back that she’s in about the same condition as our lawn furniture. You can tell the idyllic nature of a family by the upkeep of its picnic table. Ours is its own indictment. We are splintered and peeling. We rot.
Out the back door and across our yard, I’m standing a good five feet from her. “I’ll go find the kid, okay?” Amy doesn’t say anything, but I can tell that my doing this has shifted her feelings. For her, the saddest times are those when she feels that she’s fighting the war alone. I walk around the house to my truck, not explaining that Ellen might be born again. She’ll find that out soon enough.
As I start up my truck, I wonder if Amy tries to forget about Muffy as often as I try to forget Becky.
***
The retard is nowhere to be found, so when I get to work, I call home to tell Amy.
“Did you check the water tower?”
“He wasn’t there. But don’t worry—he’ll show up.”
“Darn it,” Amy says. “We’re going to have to go through this water thing again.”
“No, he’s bigger now, he’ll be fine. He’ll take a bath tonight or I’ll take him swimming. It’ll be fine, Amy.”
“I can’t go through the water thing again.”
I hang up when we finish our talk. As I struggle with my apron—it won’t stay tied in back—Mr. Lamson calls out, “Is everything all right?”
“Everything is great,” I say. He walks back into his office cubicle and I mutter to myself. “Everything is peachy. I’ve got a mother who would eat her arm if she had enough barbecue sauce, a dork-ass older brother and a wicked sister who got out of this town, a little bitch of a sister who very likely made love to Jesus last night, an ever-fattening older sister who deserves a decent man, and a retard brother who, we have reason to believe, has gone into hiding and is once again terrified of water.”
