American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  “I’m just afraid people will be weirded out by corn cake,” she says. She hands me a little confection the size of a hockey puck. There are six or seven samples to try, all with a brownish frosting that reminds me of our wedding cake.

  “Butter cream?” I ask. Then I take bite.

  She nods. “Heavenly.”

  “That can be risky,” my wife says. One bite obliterates her.

  The cake sample is good. They’re all good. They’re all fruity, cakey things. We take turns taking bites and learn that the active ingredient, the animating principle, is Nutella. Somewhere, sometime, a genius had the idea of bringing together chocolate and hazelnut. The combination was more than inspired food engineering. It was art. It was a good marriage.

  I ask for another bite and realize I should probably have a glass of postmodern milk.

  23

  Fly

  It’s four days since the rented Penske truck pulled out of the driveway. The second and final load. We now have space in the attic. We have one fewer mattress in the basement. Some great books will be permanently checked out of our library. Most of those budget Italian ceramics my wife has been buying at Home Goods, for pasta or fruit or flowers, for anything wanting some easy elegance, are packed up and gone. In the first few weeks after my kids learned to drive, as they pulled away, I stood in the driveway with my heart pounding in my chest, praying they would come home in one piece. Then I got used to it.

  “See ya later,” they’d say.

  And I’d say, “Yeah.”

  This is like that. The first time the Penske truck leaves, I feel the pounding sensation. The second time I’m sort of used to it. But this time is also different. To get to where my daughter and her husband are going takes nine hours. “See ya soon,” she says.

  Four days later, early one Thursday morning, I’m lugging trash out to the road. This one bag I pick up and drop, there’s something in it that goes pop! When I hoist the bag, liquid dribbles from a bottom corner. It’s been hot, in the nineties for a few weeks. Garbage will deliquesce. I walk down to the road with the bag, dreading the cleanup ahead of me.

  By the time I’m back, the smell of peppermint pervades the garage. What broke, I’m guessing, is a bottle of mouthwash. Who throws away mouthwash? I daub at the spilled liquid with a wet paper towel, which amounts to massaging the liquid into the floor. I toss a bucket of water across the cement and rough up the sticky spots with a broom. The garage now smells like a candy shop. So does the mudroom just inside in the house.

  It’s almost August. This outbreak of sweetness worries me.

  Some time ago, two years in a row we got an influx of flies in the garage, both times in early August. We’ve had influxes—chipmunks in the attic, finches on a window ledge, starlings in the apple tree. One time I came home to find a grackle in the house. These invasions come and go. But flies—creatures of manure and death, pests that make a person shrivel—flies come to stay. They move in and are shitty company. You can’t murder them fast enough.

  The idea that we can create an impermeable barrier between human space and the natural world, when you examine it, seems like the highest order of folly. We do a pretty good job of keeping the rain out, the cold and hot out, but every so often there are reminders of our limits. I move a dish in the sink, and an earwig goes looking for cover. I open a cupboard door and see an ant going about his business. The other day I was working on the back porch, screened in to keep the bugs out. I looked up from my work to see a hornet buzzing around, like a drone waiting for attack coordinates to be radioed from central command.

  Around ten years ago we noticed a couple of fleas in an upstairs bathroom, and then we noticed more; in a couple of days there were clouds of them. An exterminator came. He guessed there was a dead animal in the wall, probably one of those chipmunks. We were invited to leave the house for five or six hours. When we came home, along the floor and the edges of the window frame was a white powdery substance, which we were instructed to leave for a few days. The stuff worked. No more fleas. No flea carcasses. No dead-flea-eating fleas. Our sacrosanct space, now slightly poisonous, was restored.

  The housefly (Musca domestica) is a sleazy little beast. It’s hairy. It has awful “compound eyes” that, through no fault of its own, are huge, red, and, for want of a better term, buggy. That thing protruding downward from its head—a complex apparatus consisting of maxillary palps, labium, labellum, pseudotracheae, and (ugh) tip—is used to import shit, rot, putrescence, and other delectables into its body. Thirty-six hours after emerging from its pupa (a word I do not like and hope never to write again), it is ready for sex. A fly will live two weeks to a month in the wild. Do the math. They are prodigiously randy, just babies when they start having sex, each female loaded with five hundred eggs. Humans evolved some two hundred thousand years ago and have been full-blown Homo sapiens for around fifty thousand years. Flies have been around for some sixty-five million years. Where they buzz, they buzz with a kind of confidence we can only imagine.

  Pulling into my garage one day in August some years ago, I noticed a buzz. On closer inspection, I saw them, a few dozen flies looking out the garage windows. They seemed unworthy of much concern. A few days later, the buzz was louder, more varied, a pestilent philharmonic. There were enough flies on the window I could swat at them with the New York Times and dispatch half a dozen at a time. The others, listless, probably postcoitally lethargic, didn’t fly away. In five minutes, the floor was dotted with dead flies, which I swept up and tossed out in the yard.

  The next day they were back. I used the sports section for fly slaughter.

  The day after that the flies were all over the windows and dotted the door from the garage into the house.

  “Bleach,” my wife said. That’s her solution to everything.

  The next morning I sprayed the windows with bleach and wiped them down, hopeful if not satisfied that I’d outsmarted the flies. I put the garbage cans outside.

  Next day, on windows, on the door: flies. And, to my horror, on the window just inside the house: flies.

  I looked for home remedies online. They were quaint.

  Basil plants by the door will rid u of the flies.

  Good to know, thanks.

  I always use apple cidar vinager [sic]. Put some in a bowl with a drop of dawn dishsoap and place it where the flies are. They love it and it also helps with bad odors.

  Great, I’ll get right on that. (Great for fruit flies, not for the big brutes.)

  Fill sandwich baggie half full of water, hang over any door which leads from outside to inside (hang bag over outside of door). The fly sees its reflection in the water, is scared off. Know it sounds crazy, but it works. Try it!!

  So flies gross themselves out too. I would need a sandwich baggie the size of an Olympic pool.

  I’m sure these people meant well. I’m also sure they did not know that visitations of flies can far exceed the scope of their solutions. Within a few days, we had flies in the garage, in the mud room, in the house. Our situation was starting to feel biblical.

  Those nights, I lay in bed listening. They were still too fat, too sluggish to fly upstairs. That gave me hope. We would at least have a haven. For a while. I thought about friends who had gone into their attic and found a colony of bats hanging from the rafters. (The actual collective noun is “cloud,” as in “cloud of bats.” Whatever the term, it is horrible to picture.) I imagined, in a week’s time, above our heads, the hum of a zillion flies in the attic. I knew it was foolish. Flies are not attic creatures. But at night, in the dark, unable to sleep, your mind wanders and comes to rest on the most elemental fears.

  Bees have queens. I wondered if there was a king fly, a boss, a diabolical leader directing the invasion of our house.

  At the hardware store I bought those strips of tape you unroll and hang to attract flies. I bought a couple of miles of the stuff and found it sticky and difficult to work with, subject to breezes, and simply revolting to look
at. When my wife pulled in the garage, home from work, she took one look at those hanging fly strips, like unfurled rolls of film, dotted with only a few flies, and said, simply and definitively, “No.”

  Back at the hardware store, when the guy saw me coming, he straightened his apron and pointed me toward the hard stuff.

  “Eggs,” he said. “Flies lay eggs. You probably have eggs all over those garage windows.”

  So I hosed the windows down with poison. I would have gladly tossed buckets of the stuff. It took two or three applications and a week before we felt fly free again.

  The smell of peppermint is still fresh in my nose, probably on my flip-flops, when I drive up to Midland to see my mother. She’s been slipping into dementia for years now, retreating from the present into early memory. Lately the slip has become a lurch. The last time I saw her, my dad asked her if she knew who I was.

  “Sure,” she said. “This is Walter.”

  She grew up in Missaukee County, in the sticks. They had no screens, she once told me, so they hung cheesecloth in the windows during summer to let some breeze in and keep the flies out. It didn’t work. Sometimes when wind agitated the cloth, she said, a curtain of flies would rise. Whenever she told me this, she gagged. Just thinking of flies made her gag.

  She’s sitting on the davenport with my dad when I get to the assisted living facility. They hold hands and try to talk a little.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “I’m fane,” she says. “Just fane.”

  My dad smiles. Odd word. But her tone is right. It’s her.

  These are their last days. They are sweet together. We try to chat, about August, about the kids moving away and the open spaces their moves create, about the nine-hour drive. My mother nods. She’s far away. I suspect she’s back on the farm, enjoying the fresh air. Not a fly in sight. I can only hope.

  24

  The Honey Room

  “I’m taking a yogurt break,” I tell my daughter. She’s come downstairs dressed for a friend’s wedding. Six months pregnant, she’s becoming abundant. Her husband is at his parents’ house a few miles away. When they fly into town, out of old habit, they still go to their rooms. The yellow dress she’s wearing is long, diaphanous, and, I won’t tell her this, probably a mistake.

  “What do you think?”

  “Nice,” I say.

  It looks like she’s dressed for a prom except for that volleyball—my eventual grandson—underneath the dress. Boy or girl, her mother and I waited to find out, game for surprise. Our daughter is a planner.

  I dump walnuts in the bowl. “Your mother won’t eat this,” I say. “She’s impervious to yogurt.”

  “I’ve got another dress upstairs. Should I try it?”

  She decides for herself, rushing pregnantly up the stairs, leaving me to my snack. Yesterday my wife came home with a quart of local honey. In our mudroom we have a cupboard full of old honey, crystalized souvenir honeys she brings home from trips—clover honey, walnut honey, truffle honey. I break into the new stuff, still liquid enough to stir into my yogurt.

  A bedroom door clunks shut upstairs. For twenty-five years there was a construction-paper heart taped to that door, my daughter’s name written in the middle in red and blue crayon. I don’t remember taking it down, but I know it’s gone.

  “A delicious treat,” I say to no one.

  My mouth is full of sweetness when they both yell up there. Yesterday I found a hairy, millepedey bug an inch long. I hope it’s not one of those.

  “Can you help us?” my wife yells.

  She doesn’t even eat honey. Come flu season, she’ll put some in her tea. Otherwise, it’s strictly ornamental, over there in the honey room.

  The problem upstairs is zipping the dress shut. It’s black and, if we can get it closed, better than the lemon parachute. The dress looks serious, formal. It takes two to make a daughter; now she’s pregnant, two to get her dressed.

  “Pull here.”

  “I am.”

  “Not there, here. Pull it together.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “It’s too high. Let me pull it down.”

  “I can get it.”

  “Does it hurt? Is it too tight?”

  “I’m huge.”

  “You’re all right.”

  I admire her shoulder blades. When she was little, I told her that’s where wings would grow.

  “Now try.”

  “Hold it together.”

  “I am.”

  “Farther down.”

  “Ugh.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “There it goes.”

  “Stretchy.”

  “Got it.”

  A few minutes later she’s in the car, going to pick up the husband. My wife and I stand at the window, watching her back down the driveway.

  “She shouldn’t back up,” my wife says. “She should turn the car around first. One thing your father said I agree with: never back up when you can go forward.” She thinks a minute and then says: “What’s that smell?”

  “Yogurt,” I say.

  “Is she sleeping here tonight?”

  “A delicious treat,” I say, “with our new honey.” Too good to save.

  25

  Bridge Failure, Heart Attack, Fava Beans

  Kacey tells me to lie down. The hospital sheets and pillowcase are blindingly white. They’re not covered with paper. This is a not a cot. It’s a bed with a thin mattress. My wife has trained me never to sit on a bed. Every time I did, early in our marriage, she shouted, “Street clothes!” and scared the crap out of me. After three or four times (probably ten or twenty), in order to make her stop, I stopped. When I tell Kacey this, she smiles and says, “Go ahead.”

  I sit on the edge of the bed, kick off my flip-flops, and lie down, looking for water spots in the acoustic tile ceiling, bathed in milky white institutional light pouring from above. She swishes around in her hospital blues, attaches electrodes to each of my feet, to my arms just above the elbow.

  “Lift your shirt, please.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Four years.” She attaches a couple of electrodes to my chest. “I used to be an accountant. Then I switched careers.”

  “Big switch.”

  “I have a child with a heart condition,” she says.

  On the way to the hospital I heard a story on NPR about a bridge in Delaware, on the I-495 bypass. It carries ninety thousand cars a day. Its support structures are tilting. Tilting. The bridge can support itself, but too much weight, engineers say, like a long traffic jam, “might cause the bridge to fail.” Traffic is being rerouted through downtown Wilmington, which one driver describes as “a nightmare from hell.” Way worse than a nightmare from heaven. Word of the tilting bridge is traveling from Maine to Florida. Seek alternate route.

  Kacey and I chat about hours and benefits, which she says are pretty good. Plus there’s something new every day. New people every day. She’s a people person. Once I’m hooked up, I’m expecting to be recorded for a while. I sort of want to be recorded for a while. An adult heart beats one hundred thousand times a day. Sometimes on the treadmill it occurs to me I could just fall over dead. I don’t know anything about my heart. I imagine I’m improving myself through exercise, but I also picture myself crumpling mid-run, the treadmill flinging my corpse out onto the floor, where people are walking and running. Seek alternate route.

  Male, sixty-one, dies thinking he’s prolonging life.

  There would be no such headline, I know. Mine would be an anonymous, perfunctory death. I also know there would be no quotation from my wife, because she would never talk to the media. But if there were a quotation, she would probably say I seemed healthy enough. “We thought his heart was fine.” After all, I had survived her scaring the living crap out of me ten or twenty times.

  Kacey touches a button, and it’s done. Just like that.

  “That’s all?”

  She sta
rts peeling off electrodes. “That’s it.”

  “How’s it look?”

  She glances at the display. So do I.

  “I’m a tech,” she says. “I’m supposed to wait for a cardiologist.” She points at waves, lines, and blips. There are numbers. She should be good with numbers. “Looks excellent,” she says.

  Later that day I drive to a local market looking for fava beans. They’re in season, though these days, it could be argued, given modern infrastructure, everything is in season all the time. You live in Michigan and want a Bartlett pear in January? No problem. Mango, kiwi, kumquat, rambutan, whatever you want, they got it, or at least a durable, tasteless facsimile of it. This modern achievement falls into the nightmare from heaven category. For some reason, fava only come in early summer and last only a few weeks. I’ve made a commitment to them.

  Half a mile before I reach the store, I see a runner on the sidewalk. She’s wearing a white top and navy blue shorts. It is within her powers, I’m sure, to slow traffic approaching her from behind. A minute later, getting out of my car, I see her again, running through the store parking lot, which seems odd. Maybe there’s sidewalk repair going on; she’s taken an alternate route. I pause as she runs by and then pause a few seconds more.

  The fava beans are in. They’re packaged on brown Styrofoam trays, sealed in plastic wrap, which means I can’t touch them, can’t gauge their freshness. A sign says “organic.” Subtext: better for you. Sub-subtext: double the price. There’s another market near my next stop that might have them for less money, piles of them in a basket so you can palpate the pods, counting the beans within, testing their firmness the way I imagine a physician feels for tumors.

  On the way to the next store I see the runner in the blue shorts ahead. I pull alongside her and stop at an intersection as she too slows and stops. She bends, stretching, touching her toes, then uprights herself. She does a few lateral stretches, turning left and right on her axis, then begins running slowly in place. Her perfection is a reminder: things may be gradually falling apart, but new is also a permanent condition. It’s a sunny day. For the time being my heart is doing its job.