Monsters

by Karen Brennan

  Who knows who among us will die first, he reasons, stepping on the gas. “Let someone else drive, you seem tired.” But sadly, he would begin to undergo a series of bruising experiences. “I’m starvino.”

  The grateful boy, a grotesque assemblage of braces and gums. Losing count of the vanilla Oreos she has shoved into her mouth. “You better start singing or you’ll sink like a stone.” If only they were already there or already on the way home.

  One dreams up a questionnaire for the others. Unwraps another peanut butter cracker snack pack. If only he could see more cows or even just one more cow. A specific game involving letters of the alphabet.

  “I ate an apple.” “I blew a bubble.” “I called a cat.” “I drummed a let’s see dromedary?”

  “I eased an eel.” “What is that supposed to mean?” “I fucked a fool.” “I gunned a gin—and for the record I enjoyed it.”

  “You could have said I glazed a grape.” “I held a hat.” “I inked an infantry.” “I jiggled a jowl.”

  “I knew a Korean.” “I loved a laundress.” “I married a monster.” “A monstrous man or a monstrous model?”

  “I naysayed a Nigerian.” “Or a newt.” “Or a Norseman.” “I ogled an orange.”

  “That’s because you’re always so hungry.” “Is this game fun yet?” “I ploughed a plumber.” “You could always placate a pussy.”.

  “I quieted a quack.” “I raised a ribbon.” “I slapped a slug.” “I tidied a tent.”

  “I understood an ultimatum.” “I vetted a veteran.” “I wangled a wrangler.” “I xed out a xenophobe.”

  “I yanked a yacht.” “I zoomed a zipper.” “Or a zither.” Says the last, “Shhhhhh.”

  The day is diminished over the rills, observes one. A blue streak as if dust, thinks another, When despair turns phototropically to hope. And all sounds, after a while, are one sound, thinks the third, her blond hair falling, falling in her eyes. An ending which is never, thinks the one who is about to die but doesn’t quite yet die.

  IN HIS WILDEST DREAMS

  Although I haven’t thought of him for years, I woke up thinking about him. I found myself wondering how his life was going, whether he ever married, had children, ever mended his relationship with his father, stopped drinking and/or smoking pot, still rode a motorcycle. I wondered if he ever thought of her, if in his wildest dreams he could imagine what she had come to, if he could picture her in her wheelchair, her head at that awful angle resting on her shoulder so that she has to maneuver her food awkwardly into her mouth, if he could imagine her slobbering on her shirt so that her shirts always hold traces of her last meal. Could he envision the weight she gained as a result of her medications? Had he guessed that she would become incontinent, unable to stand up on her own, and resides in a facility where they often have to restrain her because of her outbursts?

  Most likely, she will have become a dim and unpleasant memory. He will be out playing in the yard with his children, his wife at the window looking fondly on and he will be throwing a ball or pushing a swing and the thought of her will never cross his mind. Or if it does, it will be like a dark cloud out of nowhere barreling across the sky. Now you see it, now you don’t.

  HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

  Mary Beth

  Strictly speaking, as a licensed practical nurse (LPN), it is not my job to manage the table décor, but I do it because I’m good at it. Each resident gets a rose they are welcome to pass on to their valentine-du-jour. Though that’s kind of a sick joke, when you think about it.

  Myself in a red sweater covered with pink and lavender hearts, myself in a red fascinator designed by moi, featuring life-sized and very realistic red hummingbird. Real enough to devour, said my husband, who is a smart a_____. (To Whom It May Concern in My Creative Writing Class: A “fascinator” is a kind of hat.)

  Someone suggested candies with sayings on them like “BE MINE” and “LOVE STUFF,” a sprinkling on each table like manna from the gods of love, but that person was vetoed. It is not a good thing to ply the residents with candy. Also, I can name one or two off the top of my head who have loose dentures. The dental insurance plans are not good. Once a month, the dentist arrives with his hygienist, a blond-haired girl with a wandering eye—frequently mistaken for a resident—who is perpetually chewing gum, setting a bad example for our clientele.

  Today’s Valentine festivities, however, do not include the dentist or his hygienist, thank the lord. Instead some families have come. Missy’s mother has seen fit to join us, for example, for which we also thank the lord. Missy is prone to fits, not seizures, but spates of uncontrollable anger wherein she swears and tries to ram people with her wheelchair. Some, not all, of these meltdowns have to do with whether her mother shows up or not. Her mother: one of those senior women who tries to look younger than she is. I am not fooled, though some may be. Tonight her nails are painted black and her dyed red hair is cut in bangs across her forehead the better to hide her wrinkles. She sits next to Missy and they are hugging and kissing. Now Missy has got her mother in a headlock and is pulling her to her chest. The mother looks awkward in this arrangement, not least because her disturbing cleavage is suddenly visible, on display for all to see, I say out loud, only because it’s true. Who wants to see that?

  I see she has brought Missy a bag of gifts, one of which is the straw fedora not quite fitting Missy’s big head. Missy was the victim of a brain injury and is the youngest resident. She herself claims she is the youngest by “a good seventy-five years”—quote-unquote, meaning to amuse us. Missy has no short term memory, but she is considered witty.

  As a writer, I have many stories to tell about this place, not the least of which is the story of Missy and her mother. Not really a story, per se, but characters who could be in a story, when I compose the story. Our teacher reminds us (and I am remembering!) that stories have to be about something; they have to have tension. So be it. I pick up my pen.

  Daniel

  To steady my nerves, I nip into the Safeway, procure a pint of Jack, guzzle-up, stash in glove compartment, have second thoughts, re-stash in gig bag. Then I betake myself across the way where “one man in his time plays many parts.”

  Although I am the official pianist for the Immaculate Heart of Mary Elementary School, I am not a gigger. In a little while (twenty-two-and-a-half minutes) it will be just me in the spotlight, all eyes trained my way, the ring of applause, perhaps some nostalgic weeping on the part of the oldsters, people in wheelchairs like Aunt Joan. And me, singing and playing like Frank Sinatra, though Sinatra never played as far as I know.

  I owe it all to Aunt Joan, she who insisted they hire me since she is living back in the past century, way far back in her poor demented brain, and, along with the shears she remembers my mother trying to stab her with when they were teenagers, is also stuck there a certain event at the community center wherein I played a solo piano piece and sang a song with the middle school orchestra.

  I think a brain must be like a ginormous apartment complex you encounter in a dream where all the rooms are inside one another. To get from one room to the next are random corridors like wormholes and most of the time, knock wood, they lead you to the place you had in mind. But sometimes they don’t. I’m sure my aunt had not planned to be trapped wherever she is, in that era of, god knows, Dwight D. Eisenhower, but there she is nonetheless, having somehow taken a wrong turn, wound up in a place she was not meant to return to, and fallen asleep.

  Neurotransmitter. A word I like the sound of because it calls to mind an old-fashioned radio and the fatherly voice of an announcer back when life was pleasant.

  There are many like my Aunt Joan in this place, this home for the whoever they call themselves these days to be politically correct, and now as I sign my name and receive my visitor’s badge which I clip to my tie, I realize my hand is trembling. Nerves again. More guzzle-ups required. I am not, by nature, a performer, I am more someone who accompanies classroom after classroom o
f inattentive, despicable children. Who knows? this may be the beginning of a whole new me?

  Missy’s Mom

  Oh look, we are to have entertainment, says Missy’s mother to Missy. That small man with the moustache is setting his up his amplifier on the piano and look, now he’s plugging in a microphone. And now, you should really turn around, he’s scratching his butt, he doesn’t think anyone is watching. God help us, says Missy. Despite the fedora balanced perilously on her head, she is looking especially beautiful with her hair pulled back in a black plastic claw, and wearing wooden earrings shaped like leaves. I know, says her mother, do you suppose he’s mentally ill since he keeps scratching the butt? And now, he’s pacing in back of the piano and let’s face it there is not much room for pacing. Oh now he’s sitting down and blowing into the microphone, now he’s up again fiddling in that bag for something, maybe his crack pipe. Do you suppose that’s a fake moustache? He can’t seem to sit still—it’s all the crack. I guess they’ve hired a tiny mentally deficient dope fiend to play the piano tonight for everyone. I myself plan to cover my ears. Shall I turn you around yet?

  Missy thinks her mother is hilarious and so she laughs until her face gets very red and Missy’s mom loves when that happens so she keeps it up. I dare you to go up and offer him a candy, says Missy’s mom. Maybe he’ll ask you on a date. I’ll do it, how much will you give me, says Missy, laughing. A million billion dollars minus nine hundred ninty nine billion million.

  The mom has given Missy a card, a heart-shaped box containing five chocolates and some blue earrings, as well as the fedora. The hat and the earrings are re-giftings, culled from the mom’s store of possessions. The hat still had the tag and this worries the mom who thinks she may be heading into hoarderism. One of the signs of a hoarder is buying things and forgetting you bought them and/or leaving them in bags all over the house and/or not removing tags for years since never worn. Yikes. Unlikely as it is, she has a persistent fear that the hoarder TV people will one day show up with their crew and want to televise her glut of meaningless, forgotten, still tagged-and-bagged purchases.

  Missy is digging into the box of five truffles, variously shaped. Mom eats two, one of which is an orange cream. The hoarding and the compulsive eating are the same pathology, she muses, as the delicious chocolate-covered orange cream fills her mouth. She wishes she had purchased a bigger box. Maybe a stop on the way home is in order. What about the piano dude, should we offer him a sweetie? says the mom. I think not, says Missy, laughing at the word “sweetie.”

  Mary Beth

  Joan sits in her wheelchair and smiles so knowing and wise a smile that anyone would swear she were compos mentis. That she has not, for a long while, been compos mentis must be weird to those who knew her way back when, one of whom must be Daniel her nephew, who she does not recall, even though he just greeted her dutifully with a kiss on the cheek. To the kiss she gave no response except to swat peevishly at her own face, as if at a mosquito.

  There’s Daniel, I say, turning her chair so that she can see him setting his sheets of music on the piano. There he is! I say again, pointing. Joan looks away and down at her plate of cookies, one of which she has begun to devour methodically, nibbling around the edges like a mouse until there is nothing left but crumbs on her fingers. Not too many, dear, I say out of habit. She has snow white hair that she wears short and wavy which makes her look youthful, I always tell her. After all, she is not that old, only maybe 70. It’s hard to tell with some of these, partly because they have in a way stopped advancing and so are stunted somewhere back when they were advancing. That’s not a very nice way of putting it, “advancing,” said my husband when I shared this theory with him. Well, he is not a trained professional. Also he has not met Missy who is forty-something and looks seventeen. The truth hurts.

  Joan is giving Missy a thumbs up re the fedora. Missy nods, grateful for the compliment. They are not completely gone, this lot, thank the lord, they still have manners and some form of wherewithal, though the wherewithal part is diminished. Tragically. I think I will write about the fedora, since we are told that specifics always make a story come to life. I will call it the “jaunty fedora” and I will omit the part about it not fitting.

  Oh look, dear, I say to Joan, there is your Daniel getting ready to play something. Look he is sitting on the piano bench, oh no, he is up now and getting some books to sit on. Was he always so short?

  Daniel

  I suppose this is to be expected, this cluster of inmates—can one say inmates?—, not your usual person in the street, I can tell you that. The most normal ones are that pretty blond and her boyfriend or husband with the handlebar moustache and the checkered shirt, probably related to that morbidly obese woman in the wheelchair. That woman has a mouse-colored braid running down the back of her head like Fu Manchu and a stretched unpleasant face. Her friend or sister, the highly attractive blond, holds the rose on her lap, as if she were Miss America, and turns her chair so that she is facing me, The Entertainment. Her husband or boyfriend with the handlebar moustache also turns his chair, so now that whole table is facing me and waiting for me to start. It is not time yet, I want to tell them. Look at the clock. I have been hired to play at 5:30, People, not 5:20 or 5:25. My hands are sweating.

  At the next table sit two women, a very young one with a sweet face and freckles wearing a hat and a red-headed older woman who is half-naked and talking loudly as if her friend were deaf. Perhaps they are lesbians. All they do is laugh, kiss, and eat, these two, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that they will not be disruptive. Another guzzle-up of Jack would be just the thing to calm me down.

  Then there’s Joan and her caregiver of the evening, Mary Beth, who has the smallest eyes I’ve ever seen on a human and is wearing a truly hideous red sweater and some kind of coordinating headgear. Joan is eating cookies and Mary Beth is staring at me with those tiny bullet-hole eyes of hers. I’m not sure what to make of that. Perhaps she thinks I’m attractive.

  I am attractive. There are many women, past and present, who have thought so. I have large, soulful eyes, a dapper moustache and, despite my smallish stature, I possess a good-sized schlong. The schlong has been an asset on many occasions.

  Should I grow a handlebar? And purchase one of those belt buckles like the blond’s husband or boyfriend? That blond is a babe and she is looking at me. You can always tell when a woman is intrigued. But it is not 5:30. The obese, incarcerated relative of the blond is shoving cake into her mouth and the husband or boyfriend of the blond is standing up showing off that belt buckle which is embossed with a pickup truck I can see from here. He is not as handsome as I am, by a long shot. His schlong is likely medium-sized.

  Missy’s Mom

  Five foot two, eyes of blue, coochie-coochie-coochie coo, sings Missy’s mom to the music. She has turned Missy around and they hold hands while singing. Missy has not been blessed with a good singing voice, but she sings loudly anyway, and the mom who believes she has been blessed with an excellent voice also sings loudly. Between us, we are wreaking havoc, says the mom. It’s our favorite thing to do, agrees Missy.

  That piano player plays a one-two-three-four rhythm with each song. It’s annoying, says the mom. It’s as if he were playing for a group of kindergarteners. Which in fact he is, says Missy, with a sly grin. Missy doesn’t miss a beat either.

  Missy and her mother sing Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey and when they get to the part about the fine-toothed comb, Missy’s mom interjects: Do you suppose Bill Bailey had lice? Missy laughs.

  They are always laughing because Missy’s mom believes that the more they laugh they more they have a shot at staving off their sorrow, which is a deep well. A Deep Well of Sorrow is how Missy’s mom expresses it. During most days, she repeats this phrase compulsively, thinking that to name it A Deep Well of Sorrow will have the effect of making the well of sorrow less deep or less sorrowful. Missy who will not remember that her mother visited. Missy who can no longer writ
e her name.

  Mary Beth

  Daniel is in full swing, pounding out the oldies but goodies. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” at the moment. Joan smiling, Ray tapping the side of his nose with one finger, fat Pamela rocking in her chair. Missy and her mom screaming I don’t care if I ever come back and some of us would like to tell them to put a sock in it, if you know that expression. My husband says it sometimes: Put a sock in it! As if I have extra socks around to stuff into my own mouth. Ha ha.

  My husband: he is home at the moment parked in front of Law and Order, as is his wont. I hate that show. I hate that skinny girl and I hate her bald-headed partner and the fact that they all talk in the same gloomy voice. What’s so hot about real life? I want to say. But then I remember where I’m coming from, this place and its one-card-short-of-a-full-deck population. I can just hear him saying, That’s not a very kind way of putting it. Mr. Law and Order. But I am a writer. We have to be honest.

  Wake up, Joan, I say, because now her head has fallen forward and she’s closing her eyes. Say what you want, but in this world, in the world I mostly inhabit, which is here in this place because my shifts are long, people do more or less exactly what they feel like doing, which I admire. Wake up, dear, I say anyway, and I shake her shoulder.

  Daniel

  Blue Moon/ You saw me standing alone/ without a dream in my heart/without a love of my own. I am in splendid voice tonight, if I do say so. I aim my words at the blond woman who has begun to finger her rose, tearing at the outer petals. The only drawback is that my sheets of music are in keys for the children at Immaculate Heart of Mary and so a few times I am unable to hit a note. What do they want for $35?