by KT Sparks
Not the thunderous applause Martin remembered from the audience at Jimmy Sneedle’s. Or the cheers and shouts from the patrons of The Silver Dollar. Not the tidal wave of sexual release, the touch of a woman’s tongue, the slap of a man’s palm. Not the smell of sweet sweat or spilled beer or horse manure or soft leather. Not this time. This time, his mom’s smile, weak, through medicine-stained teeth. His dad’s quiet attention, the stilling of his crazed and addled brain. Lattner’s thumbs up. Mrs. Trinkle’s twittering laugh. Julie’s fluttering nails. Even Frank’s reluctant presence. For Martin. For cowboy poetry. Not what Martin had planned. Not what he’d ever wanted. But a merry Christmas, a happy new year. And cowboy poetry. This time, it was enough.
Page torn from My Scarsdale Diet Log, found inserted in a used paperback copy of The Thornbirds donated to the Pierre Salvation Army Thrift Shoppe by Julie Newport on May 18, 1988
DAY: 3DATE: 3/6/86
Breakfast:
1/2 grapefruit
One slice of protein bread toasted
Coffee or tea (no sugar, cream or milk, no honey)
Notes: No protein bread, Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tart instead, scraped off frosting.
Lunch:
Tuna fish or salmon salad (oil drained off) with lemon and vinegar dressing
Grapefruit, or melon, or fruit in season
Coffee/tea/diet soda/water
Notes: Tuna Fish with packet of French dressing, ½ banana, Diet Rite.
Dinner:
Sliced roast lamb*, all visible fat removed
Salad of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, celery
Coffee/tea/diet soda/water
* Can be substituted with fish, seafood, chicken or turkey
Notes: No lamb (yuck), bbq chicken breast instead, 1 only, Skim milk with dinner, 3 brandies after (no ice cream!!), but no salad, some rice.
E
xercise:
Jane Fonda’s workout VCR tape, 30 minutes beginners level.
Quote of the Day:
When you lose weight, your heart gets closer to the surface, and everyone can see you, beautiful you, for who you really are!!
—Maria Tosi, third Mafia girl, Season 2, Miami Vice
9
By nine a.m. on the morning of Boxing Day, Carroll had abandoned his obsession with Christmas and locked himself in his den. Martin could hear him yelling on the phone at various Oliphant Holdings, Inc. employees, ordering them home from the extended vacations he had ordered them on two weeks before. At one point, he slammed the phone down so hard, the handset cracked. They had to wait until after New Year’s for AT&T to replace it.
Martin spent most of those final December days at the Leader Telegram offices, helping Lattner and Mrs. Trinkle put together several year-in-review pieces. Julie continued to read to Dottie from Songs of the Cowboys, and she ghostwrote some last-minute college applications for Frank. Many, Martin included, who would one day struggle to fathom the bond between Julie and Frank, would have done well to pay attention to that collaboration. Though it would be years before either could acknowledge it, they fell in a sort of love hunched together over a manual typewriter, Julie tapping out an apologia for Frank’s academic record to date and a declaration that it would improve were he to be welcomed into the storied ivory towers of (in order of preference): Stanford, University of Michigan, Michigan State, Western Michigan State, South Bend College, and Olivet City College.
And Colorado State. Julie insisted on this. Several of her more water-logged former teammates from PPHS had matriculated at this school, known for its wild parties and applicant-friendly admissions process: a one-page form that asked only that the future collegian be able to type his name and address on, or close to, the printed line indicated. That and the twenty-five-dollar application fee.
Shoulder to shoulder at the kitchen table, Julie forgoing her first evening brandy for a Diet Rite, Frank’s eyes scrunched in concentration, they fell into conversations far deeper than Julie had had thus far with Martin and far deeper than Martin would ever have with Frank. Julie later explained that, in pushing Frank to use Dottie’s cancer in his “greatest challenge” essays, she came to understand, underneath Frank’s teen angst, he, like she, was mourning a lost parent. And Frank later explained that, in discussing the feats to include in his “greatest accomplishments” essays, he came to understand, underneath Julie’s excess adipocyte cells, she, like he, was a passionate athlete.
Julie and Martin spent New Year’s Eve taking down the Christmas tree and packing up the boxes upon boxes of trimmings that Martin’s dad had nailed, taped, and hot glued to most of the house’s surfaces. Julie picked some tinsel off an inflatable gingerbread man and said, “I can’t go back, you know. And I can’t stay here.”
Martin had wondered how long it would take her to bring up her family, due soon to repatriate to Pierre. He nodded.
“Because?” asked Martin.
“I’ll get a job,” Julie said.
“Okay,” said Martin. And that was it for a while.
Julie didn’t get a job, or even try, but it didn’t matter. They didn’t need the money. Carroll continued to focus what was left of his diminishing mental resources on the pure pursuit of cash. He no longer even took interest in what happened to the Oliphant Holdings, Inc. profits, simply amassed them and deposited them into a household account. Dr. Broad again attributed the behavior to the stroke, but Martin wasn’t so sure. The lust for pure plunder seemed to be closer to his dad’s existential rule than it was to an exception. Not like his newest tic, blurting out crude demands when in the presence of any female. “Show me your pussy,” he’d bark at Julie as she passed him the salad bowl. “You’re welcome,” she would answer, perhaps unwilling to upset the founder of her substantial daily feast.
Besides, Julie had a job of sorts, caring for Dottie as she approached death. “Any day now,” Dr. Broad would say on his weekly visits. “Any day.”
It could have been the opiates or the cancer, perhaps having crawled to her brain by then, but in her lucid moments that late winter, Dottie hardly ever presented as herself anymore. Sometimes she was Bitsy Newport’s imaginary twin sister and would chat to an invisible Gra Gra Newport, who had taken to haunting the left corner of the bed. Other times, Dottie became present-day Bitsy herself, fussing about the quality of the chocolate at the club’s Valentine’s Day dinner-dance or the scheduling of the bubble’s mixed doubles league. Martin suspected that Julie herded his mom’s delusions onto this particular trail. More than once, he had come in on the two of them holding hands, and Julie explaining earnestly her side of what sounded like long ago mother-daughter disputes. “Of course, you should get to decide what to wear,” Dottie would mumble. Or, “I always thought you were the smart one.” But most often, what Martin heard Dottie say was, “Oh no, dear, oh no. You are so beautiful.”
Martin couldn’t understand why all of a sudden his mom had chosen to become the mom she had never showed any interest in being in the past. A mom who saw the internal beauty of her fat offspring. Martin had been fat, and with ample internal beauty, long before Julie started packing on the pounds. Who knew what he could have become if some of that support and charity and love had been focused on him, back when he needed it, before he learned to live without it. Not that he cared anymore, now that he had the promise of cowboy poetry, again simmering like a tin coffee pot on the back of the campfire, waiting for him to heed its final rattle and blast of bitter steam, waiting for him to fulfill his destiny, somewhere out West, somehow with Beaufort and his like, with Ginger and her, well, with Ginger. He would not settle for less. Cowboy poetry, as soon as he could shake off this last, but weakening, stranglehold of Pierre and its close horizons and gray skies and watery sunsets and steel instead of sand and inland seas instead of trout streams and old boys instead of men.
Given all this, he should have been more understandi
ng of the fervor with which Dottie took to the Songs of the Cowboys. Sometimes, he would read her “Top Hand” or his favorite, “Educated Feller,” and would see how she leaned into the words, her eyes grabbing at his lips, as if the verses were the rope tethering her to this earth. He knew how cowboy poetry could cinch you in like a well-thrown lariat, hogtie you to purpose and life again. But he could not help but feel that the gift had been given to him, and now his mom, who would not live to see another year, was using it up.
March is the most dismal of the months in Pierre. Elementary school teachers paste up construction paper tulips on classroom windows, but even the youngest know this is a lie; adults nurse the colds they’ve had since before Christmas, and their skin scales from radiator heat; old women break their hips on slick walks; family dogs lose their feet to frostbite; and emphysemic World War II vets down fifths of rye and shoot themselves with their service weapons in the dim of their paneled basement bars.
As that March came in like a depressed and bilious lion, Frank began to receive rejections from college admissions offices. First Stanford, a mimeographed paragraph askew on the page without salutation and without mention of Frank’s tennis prowess and performance at camp the summer before. Then University of Michigan, more carefully typed but equally cold, then Michigan State, and the lesser regional colleges, just Olivet City College taking any time to sound even the slightest bit sorry. By mid-month, only the application to Colorado State remained extant. Frank reacted with typical bad grace, criticizing Dottie’s refusal to heal, mimicking Carroll’s obscene outbursts, ignoring Julie’s concern, retreating to Ron’s.
Julie’s mood also turned sour. Dottie was physically no worse than she had been three months earlier, which was days from death, but mentally she was all gone. It had been weeks since she had made an appearance as Dottie Oliphant. Even the preferred alter ego, as far as Julie was concerned, the remade and motherly Bitsy Newport, showed up only for rare cameos. Her new character—one that, from the grumbling Martin heard over dinner or brandy, he assumed was not much to Julie’s liking—was the Song of the Cowboys’ “young Patty Moorehead, the Pecos River Queen.”
She can rope and tie and brand it as quick as any man,
She’s voted by all cowboys an A 1 top cow hand.
Dottie slept through early March’s dusky days, waking about the time Martin got home. Though it was Julie who had so faithfully read Songs of the Cowboys—the source, it seemed, for almost all Dottie’s knowledge of the West—it was Martin with whom his mom wanted to reminisce about her fictional life on the range as Patty Moorehead. She lamented never taking a husband, lamented testing her lover’s heart one day by riding “across the Comstock Railroad bridge, the highest in the West.”
For he told her would gladly risk all dangers for her sake,
But the puncher wouldn’t follow so she’s still without a mate.
But in the end, the conversation always came back to “my little Chopo.” She would grab Martin’s hand and say, “What I would give to see my little Chopo one more time.”
“Chopo,” Julie would snort. “The poem isn’t even any good.”
It’s unclear whether it was because Julie had no interest in Patty Moorehead or because Patty Moorehead had no interest in Julie, but she again started talking about moving back home. Martin thought it unlikely. Her family had returned from Aspen in early January but had done so without a word to her, not phoned in or in person, not to ask how she was faring, not to wish her a happy New Year, not to see whether she still wanted her Elton John albums. The only communications were from her mother and through the mail, the occasional article clipped from the Leader Telegram or Tennis Magazine on weight loss or exercise regimes. Julie clearly wasn’t wanted there, and besides, Martin needed her to hang in here, with him, until his mother died, until he could get himself packed up and head west to find Beaufort and Ginger. He didn’t think that he could do it alone. And it wasn’t like Julie was getting nothing out of the deal. Free room, free board, a lot of board, free remodeled mother figure to burnish up the badly bruised self-esteem.
On the ides of March, a week before Martin’s twenty-second birthday, he spent a Saturday afternoon trying to calm his mom by reading from Songs of the Cowboys. She had been restless all day, cranking through her mattress’s comfort positions and moaning for more morphine. He recited “Speckles” that night, another of the horses featured in Jack Thorpe’s little book. He’d been cuing it up on the play list for a while now, hoping he might divert his mom’s affections from her little Chopo. Julie was right. It was a crappy poem. And having read it perhaps two million times, he would do almost anything to escape from its limping rhythms and stilted syntax. Chopo my pony Chopo my pride Chopo my amigo, Chopo I will ride. Chopo Chopo Chopo.
“Oh, Chopo,” mumbled Dottie, and Martin upped the volume on “Speckles.”
But for single and double cussedness ’en double fired sin,
The horse never come out ’o Texas that was halfway knee high to him.
The doorbell rang and Julie and Frank yelled, “Got it” from upstairs at the same time, but it was Frank’s size ten Adidas Martin heard jumping down and into the hall.
“I want Chopo,” groaned Dottie.
“Julie,” Frank yelled. “Your mom’s here.”
Martin reared back. The ladderback he had pulled in from the kitchen tilted and teetered. He tangled his legs in its legs. The chair clattered down. He caught his tailbone on the edge of the upended seat and boomeranged the back of his head off the living room carpet. Black, then stars, then a bathtub-shaped series of cracks in the ceiling he had not noticed before. He had to get up, shake off the almost certain concussion and spleen rupture, and somehow get to Julie before Bitsy did. And then do what? KO her? With one giant fist, send her bony cranium tumbling down the front walk? Say something, anything, to sum up all that Julie was that Bitsy didn’t see? And that would be? That would be?
“Chopo?” Dottie whined. Then, “Julie? Julie dear?”
Martin raised his head, dropped it back when his abdomen muscles would not engage sufficiently to bring him upright. He rolled to one side, winced as he cracked through the chair arm with his right hipbone, made it to his hands and knees.
“Oh my God, you are fatter than ever. Have you read even one word I sent you? Your father said not to bother, but I thought, I thought…”
Too late. Martin crawled over to his mom’s bed and hefted himself up, hand over hand, on the metal leg.
“I thought maybe you had a shred of self-respect. A shred of, I don’t know, class.”
“Mom,” Julie wailed.
“Chopo,” Dottie cried, mimicking Julie’s cadence.
Martin made it to the doorway of the hall. Julie stood two stairs up, rooted, one hand gripping the metal bannister. Bitsy shook off her black-and-white boucle wool jacket and untied the scarf covering her thin, sand-brown hair. She dumped her outerwear into Frank’s arms. He stared down at it as if she had just deposited a clubbed and bloody seal there.
Bitsy addressed Julie: “Well, I didn’t come to see you, in any case. I came see my friend. My best friend. I ran into Dr. Broad at the Spring Fling, and he said poor Dottie’s taken a turn for the worse.”
That was enough to jolt Julie out of her catatonia.
“You fucking bitch,” she screamed and leapt at her mother, arms spread, fingers splayed, as if the scrawny woman were a grenade and Julie was about to earn a posthumous Gold Star for jumping on it.
Martin got as far as a bleated “Julie” and one step into the front hall.
“Can it, Martin,” Julie screeched. “I’m going to kill her.”
Frank dropped Bitsy’s coat and ran into the den. “I’m going to Ron’s,” he yelled, and the door to the garage slammed.
Julie stood panting, not an inch away from her mother, who was staring into the intricate pattern knit aro
und the neck of Julie’s Shetland sweater. Martin hadn’t remembered Bitsy being so short, and perhaps she hadn’t been last time he saw her. Perhaps, having run out of girth to reduce, she had started taking pounds off the top.
“She’s been dying for ten months, your best friend,” Julie snarled. Spittle landed on Bitsy’s puffed-out do and winked in the light from the overhead brass chandelier.
“I didn’t know,” she said and sidestepped her daughter. “I assumed she was healthy, healthy enough to take on the burden of caring for you and your mental illness, it seems. I wish I had realized what a burden…” she paused and looked Julie up and down as she repeated “burden.” “I would have stopped in earlier. Hello, Martin. How are you?”
“Um, fine,” said Martin.
“Martin,” Julie yelped.
“Right,” said Martin, putting his hands on Bitsy’s shoulders. He knew what he needed to do. “I think you better go.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She looked up at Martin. “I’ve come to see Dottie, and I will see Dottie. Then I’m taking Julie home. I apologize for the inconvenience her emotional disarray and physical ruin has caused you and your family at this difficult time. I am sure Mr. Newport would be glad to discuss some sort of monetary compensation with your father.”
Julie sputtered and pawed the ground. “Get out of the way. I swear to God, Martin, I will kill you too. Prison is as good a career plan as any. Orange is the color of my parachute, bitch.” Julie feinted left, and Martin deflected her with his hip. They polkaed in place at each other for a few steps. Sweat trickled down the small of Martin’s back to the waistband of his Fruit of the Looms. He smelled the fried eggs he had had for breakfast; that, and the hall’s winter perfume of wet rubber and moldering wool turned his stomach, and his vision tilted twenty degrees to the left. He was almost sure he had suffered a concussion.
