by Lorrie Moore
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about all the time you spend with him.”
“According to you, you never know what to think.”
“It just seems to me that if things are going to take they shouldn’t take so long. By the way, I’ve found out what that odor is.”
“Really?”
The smell, even with the warm weather ostensibly drying things out, was still in the walls. There was the occasional scurrying of squirrels in the attic. It was surprising Cat didn’t jump up and start barking.
“The rot of a bad conscience.”
“I really doubt that.”
“Well, let me show you.” He opened the hatch to the crawl space that constituted the attic. He pulled down the folding ladder and motioned for her to climb it. “Take this flashlight and move it around and you’ll see.”
She expected to find a couple of flying squirrels, dead in each other’s caped arms. But when she poked her head into the crawl space and flashed her light around, she at first saw nothing but dust and boxes. Then her eyes fell on it: a pile of furry flesh with the intertwined tails of rats. They were a single creature like a wreath and flies buzzed around them and excrement bound them at the center while their bodies were arrayed like spokes. Only one of them still had a head that moved and it opened its mouth noiselessly.
“It’s a rat king,” said Dench. “They were born like that, with their tails attached, and could never get away.”
She scrambled down the ladder and shoved it back up. “That is the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen.”
“They’re supposed to be bad luck.”
“Put the hatch door back down.”
“A surprise for Ian. I did phone the pest removal place, but they charge a thousand dollars. I said, ‘Where are you taking them to, Europe?’ We may just have to burn the house down. It’s completely haunted.”
“Really.”
“We could work up plausible deniability: What kerosene can? Or, Many people are known to go shopping while cooking pot-au-feu.”
She studied Dench’s face as if—once again—she had no idea who he was. Now having found the rat king, he seemed to be the star of a horror film. He was trying to be funny all the time and she no longer liked it, as if he were auditioning for something. Soon he might start telling Milt’s jokes: I keep thinking of the hereafter: I walk into a room and say, What am I here after? She only liked Dench’s Jesus jokes, since in them Jesus was kind of an asshole, which she thought was perhaps a strong possibility in real life, and so the jokes seemed true and didn’t have to be funny and so she didn’t have to laugh. “Don’t ever show me anything like that again,” she said.
Cat came up and started to hump Dench’s leg. “Sheesh,” said Dench, as KC turned to leave. “He’s had his balls cut off and he still wants to date.”
Summer warmed all the houses though most of them did not have air conditioners, Ian’s and Milt’s included. She took Milt one evening to a nearby café and they had to dine outside, at a wobbly metal table near the parking lot, since the air within was too slicing and cold. “I think I would have liked that cold air when I was about seventeen,” he said. “Now I feel heat is good for old bones.”
They ate slowly, and although the food clung to his teeth, KC did not alert him. What would be the point? At some point, good God, just let an old guy have food in his teeth! They ate squash soup with caramel corn on top—molar-wrecking.
“You know,” he said, chewing and looking around. “People get fired from the barbershop, a restaurant closes, this is a slow town and still things change too fast for me. It’s like those big-screen TVs: all the bars have them now. I can’t watch football on those—it feels like they’re running right at me.”
KC smiled but said nothing. At one point he said loudly of his custard, “The banana flavor doesn’t taste like real banana but more like what burped banana tastes like.”
She glanced over at the next table. “I kind of know what you mean,” she said quietly.
“Of course old people are the stupidest. It’s the thing that keeps me from wanting to live in a whole facility full of them. Just listen to them talk: listen to me talk. It’s like: I’ve been walking around with the dumb thought for forty years and I’m still thinking it, so now I might as well say it over and over.” He then again sang the praises of his wife, her generosity and social commitment, and then turned his attention to KC. “You are not unlike her, in a way,” he said. Behind him the sun set in the striped hues of a rutabaga.
“I can’t imagine,” she said. Instead her mind was filled with wondering what the neighbors must think.
“Your faces are similar in a way. Especially when you smile!” He smiled at her when he said this and she returned it with a wan one of her own, her lips in a tight line.
When she walked him back to his house, the crickets had started in with their beautiful sawing. “Tinnitus!” Milt exclaimed.
But this time she didn’t laugh, and so he did what he often did when he was irritated: he walked with his most deaf ear toward her so that he could stew in peace. She noticed him weaving and knew that his balance was off. At one point he began to tilt and she quickly caught him. “An old guy like me should wear a helmet all the time,” he said. “Just get up in the morning and put it on.”
He then turned and peered through the dusk at her. “Sometimes at home I think the ringing in my ears might be the phone and I pick it up, hoping it might be you.”
She helped him into his house—he took the front stairs with greater difficulty than he used to. She turned on the lights. But he switched them off again and, grabbing her hand, sat in a chair. “Come here and sit on my lap,” he said, tugging her firmly. She fell awkwardly across his thin thighs, and when she tried to find her footing to stand again, he braced and embraced her with his arms and began to nuzzle her neck, the u and r of Decatur. His eyes were closed, and he offered his face up to her, his lips pursed but moving a little to find hers.
KC at first let him kiss her, letting their lips meet slightly—she had to be obliging, she had to work against herself and find a way—and then his rough and pointed tongue flicked quickly in and out and she jolted, flung herself away, stood, switched the lights back on, and turned to face him. “That’s it! You’ve gone off the deep end now!”
“What?” he asked. His eyes were barely open and his tongue only now stopped its animal darting. She swept her hair from her face. The room seemed to whirl. Life got you ready for dying. She had once caught a mouse in a mousetrap—she had heard the snap and when she looked it seemed merely to be a tea bag, a brown mushroomy thing with a tail, then it began flopping and flipping and she’d had to pick it up with a glove and put it in the freezer, trap and all, to die there.
It was time. “You’re completely crazy!” she said loudly. “And there’s nothing I can do at this point but call the hospice!” Words that had stayed in the wings now rushed into the crushed black box of her throat.
His face now bore the same blasted-apart look she’d seen when she first met him, except this time there was something mangled about the eyes, his mouth a gash, his body slumped in banishment. He began silently to cry. And then he spoke. “I looked him up on—what do you call it: Spacebook. His interests and his seekings.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Good luck,” he said. “Good luck to you and your young man—I wish you both the best.”
“It’s done.”
She sank against the door. She had waited all night for the hospice people to come and carry Milt off the next morning, and then she had signed some forms and promised to visit, promised to come help him with the crossword puzzle, and taking the keys of the house, she had locked it, then walked hurriedly home.
Dench was putting his cell phone away. He looked at her worriedly and she returned his gaze with a hard glare. He then stepped forward, perhaps to comfort her, but she shoved him off. “KC,” he said. And when he cocked his head a
s if puzzled and tried in forgiveness to step toward her again, she made a fist and struck him hard in the face.
Her life in the white-brick house was one of hostessing—and she poured into it all the milk of human kindness she possessed. There were five bedrooms and one suite turned entirely over to the families of children at the hospital whose new pediatric wing was now complete. She had painted the walls of every room either apricot or brown, and she kept the crown moldings white while she painted the ceilings a celestial blue. In summer she opened up the sleeping porches. Every morning she got up early and made breakfast, a ham-and-egg bake, which she served in a large casserole in the dining room, and although she made no other meals she made sure there were cookies in the front room and games for the siblings (who also played with the dog). She sometimes attempted music in the afternoons, sitting at the piano while people tried to smile at her. She wore high collars and long sleeves and necklaces of blue slag to hide her tattoos. She left magazines for people to read but not newspapers, which contained too much news. She maintained the book nook, stuffing it with mysteries. She watched the families as they went off in the morning, walking their way to the hospital to see their sick children. She never saw the sick children themselves—except at night, when they were ghosts in white nightgowns and would stand on the stairwell landings and recite their names and wave—as she roamed the house, thinking of them as “her children” and then not thinking of them at all, as she sleeplessly straightened up, but she would hear of their lives. “I missed the good parts,” the mothers would say, “and now there are no more good parts.” And she would give them more magazines for flipping through in the surgery lounge, in case they grew tired of watching a thriving aquarium of bright little fish.
Tears thickened her skin the way brine knitted and hardened the rind of a cheese. Her hair was still long but fuzzily linted with white, and she wore it up in a clip. There were times looking out the front windows, seeing the parents off on their dutiful, despairing visits, when she would think of Dench and again remember the day he had first auditioned raucously for their band, closing with some soft guitar, accompanied by his strong but inexpressive baritone, so the song had to carry the voice, like a river current moving a barge. She had forgotten now what song it was. But she remembered she had wondered whether it would be good to love him, and then she had gone broodingly to the window to look out at the street while he was singing and she had seen a very young woman waiting for him in his beat-up car. It had been winter with winter’s sparse afternoon stars, and the girl was wearing a fleece chin-strap cap that made her look like Dante and also like a baby bird. KC herself had been dressed like Hooker Barbie. Why had she put this memory out of her mind? The young woman had clearly driven him there—would she be tossed away? bequeathed? forgotten? given a new purpose by God, whose persistent mad humor was aimless as a gnat? She was waiting for him to come back with something they could use.
REFERENTIAL
Mania. For the third time in three years they talked in a frantic way about what would be a suitable birthday present for her deranged son. There was so little they were actually allowed to bring: almost everything could be transformed into a weapon and so most items had to be left at the front desk, and then, if requested, brought in later by a big blond aide, who would look the objects over beforehand for their wounding possibilities. Pete had bought a basket of jams, but they were in glass jars, and so not allowed. “I forgot about that,” he said. They were arranged in color from brightest marmalade to cloudberry to fig, as if they contained the urine tests of an increasingly ill person, and so she thought, Just as well they will be confiscated. They would find something else to bring.
By the time her son was twelve, and had begun his dazed and spellbound muttering, no longer brushing his teeth, Pete had been in their lives for four years, and now it was four years after that. The love they had for Pete was long and winding, not without hidden turns, but without any real halts. They thought of him as a kind of stepfather. Perhaps all three of them had gotten old together, although it showed mostly on her, the mother, with her black shirtdresses worn for slimming and her now graying hair undyed and often pinned up with strands hanging down like Spanish moss. Once her son had been stripped and gowned and placed in the facility, she, too, removed her necklaces, earrings, scarves—all her prosthetic devices, she said to Pete, trying to amuse—and put them in a latched accordion file under her bed. She was not allowed to wear them when visiting so she would no longer wear them at all, a kind of solidarity with her child, a kind of new widowhood on top of the widowhood she already possessed. Unlike other women her age (who tried too hard with lurid lingerie and flashing jewelry), she now felt that sort of effort was ludicrous, and she went out into the world like an Amish woman, or perhaps, even worse, as when the unforgiving light of spring hit her face, an Amish man. If she were going to be old, let her be a full-fledged citizen of the old country! “To me you always look so beautiful,” Pete no longer said.
Pete had lost his job in the new economic downturn. At one point he had been poised to live with her, but her child’s deepening troubles had caused him to pull back—he believed he loved her but could not find the large space he needed for himself in her life or in her house (and did not blame her son, or did he?). He eyed with somewhat visible covetousness and sour remarks the front room that her son, when home, lived in with large blankets and empty ice-cream pints, an Xbox, and DVDs.
She no longer knew where Pete went, sometimes for weeks at a time. She thought it an act of vigilance and attachment that she would not ask, would try not to care. She once grew so hungry for touch she went to the Stressed Tress salon around the corner just to have her hair washed. The few times she had flown to Buffalo to see her brother and his family, at airport security she had chosen the pat-downs and the wandings rather than the scanning machine.
“Where is Pete?” her son cried out at visits she made alone, his face scarlet with acne, swollen and wide with the effects of medications that had been changed then changed again, and she said Pete was busy today, but soon, soon, maybe next week. A maternal vertigo beset her, the room circled, and the cutting scars on her son’s arms sometimes seemed to spell out Pete’s name in the thin lines there, the loss of fathers etched primitively in an algebra of skin. In the carousel spin of the room, the white webbed lines resembled coarse campfire writing, as when young people used to stiffly carve the words PEACE and FUCK in park picnic tables and trees, the C three-quarters of a square. Mutilation was a language. And vice versa. The cutting endeared her boy to the girls, who were all cutters themselves and seldom saw a boy who was one as well, and so in the group sessions he became popular, which he seemed neither to mind nor perhaps really to notice. When no one was looking he cut the bottoms of his feet with crisp paper from crafts hour. He also pretended to read the girls’ soles like palms, announcing the arrival of strangers and the progress toward romance—“toemances!” he called them—and detours, sometimes glimpsing his own fate in the words they had cut there.
Now she and Pete went to see her son without the jams but with a soft deckle-edged book about Daniel Boone, which was allowed, even if her son would believe it contained messages for him, believe that although it was a story about a long-ago person it was also the story of his own sorrow and heroism in the face of every manner of wilderness and defeat and abduction and that his own life could be draped over the book, which was noble armature for the revelation of tales of him. There would be clues in the words on pages with numbers that added up to his age: 97, 88, 466. There were other veiled references to his existence. There always were.
They sat at the visitors’ table together and her son set the book aside and did try to smile at both of them. There was still sweetness in his eyes, the sweetness he was born with, even if fury could dart in a scattershot fashion across them. Someone had cut his tawny hair—or at least had tried. Perhaps the staff person did not want the scissors near him for a prolonged period and had
snipped quickly, then leaped away, then approached again, grabbed and snipped, then jumped back. At least that’s what it looked like. It was wavy hair and had to be cut carefully. Now it no longer cascaded down but was close to his head, springing out at angles that seemed to matter to no one but a mother.
“So where have you been?” her son asked Pete, giving him a hard stare.
“Good question,” said Pete, as if praising the thing would make it go away. How could people be mentally well in such a world?
“Do you miss us?” the boy asked.
Pete did not answer.
“Do you think of me when you look at the black capillaries of the trees at night?”
“I suppose I do.” Pete stared back at him, so as not to shift in his seat. “I am always hoping you are OK and that they treat you well here.”
“Do you think of my mom when staring up at the clouds and all they hold?”
Pete fell quiet again.
Her son continued, studying Pete. “Have you ever watched how sparrows can kill the offspring of others? Baby wrens, for instance? I’ve been watching out the windows. Did you know that sparrows can swoop into the wrens’ house and pluck out the fledglings from their nests and hurl them to the ground with a force you would not think possible for a sparrow? Even a homicidal sparrow?”
“Nature can be cruel,” said Pete.
“Nature can be one big horror movie! But murder is not something one would expect—from a sparrow. All things can be found in the world—but usually you have to look for them. You have to look! For instance, you have to look for us! We are sort of hidden but sort of not. We can be found. If you look in the obvious places, we can be found. We haven’t disappeared, even if you want us to, we are there to—”
“That’s enough,” she said to her son, who turned to her with a change of expression.
“There’s supposed to be cake this afternoon for someone’s birthday,” he said.
