by Jim Kokoris
THE NEXT DAY was Saturday and I decided that I wasn’t sick anymore. Since I hadn’t eaten anything the day before, I got up early and ate the steady stream of pancakes that Aunt Bess made, pouring liberal amounts of syrup on each one until they were soggy and lush with sweetness.
“Your appetite seems to have returned,” my father said. He looked at me from over the top of the newspaper. Outwardly, he did not appear to have recently had sex. I was hoping that Benjamin was drawing the same conclusion about his mother down the block.
I eyed him suspiciously. I had noticed that he had eaten a large number of pancakes himself and feared his appetite was somehow connected to physical exertion.
“Teddy, is there something wrong?” my father asked.
“What? No,” I said. I went back to my pancakes. I had been staring at my father, trying to picture him having intercourse. I had trouble accepting the fact that this gray formless body sitting across the table from me was capable of performing such a complicated act.
“What’s wrong?” Aunt Bess said. “Is something wrong with the pancakes?”
“No, everything’s fine,” my father said. “The pancakes were very good. Where’s Tommy?”
“He’s still sleeping.” She poured a large cup of coffee. “He’s like his uncle, they both sleep late. I have to go wake Frankie though. He said he had some important phone calls to make and I have to get him up.” She added a drop of skim milk into the cup and stirred it with a spoon. “I think he’s developing a sleeping disorder,” she said. “He sleeps too much.”
“Who?” My father curled back a page of his newspaper and looked over at Aunt Bess. “Tommy?”
“No, Frankie.”
“Oh.” My father went back to his paper. “I don’t think that’s a disorder,” he said. “Sleeping too much.”
“Well, something’s wrong with him,” she said. “Do you hear how he snores? My God, the house shakes.” With that, she opened the basement door in the far corner of the kitchen and disappeared down into the black hole where Uncle Frank lived.
As I was finishing my breakfast, I soon became aware of my father’s eyes peering at me from over the top of his newspaper. I cut into my last pancake, pressing down hard on my plate and causing the small table to tip in my direction. I felt a sudden rush of nervousness and apprehension; my father seldom looked at me for more than a few seconds.
“Sorry,” I said as I picked up my knife, which had slipped to the floor.
My father continued to watch me. Then he cleared his throat. “Teddy,” he said in a more formal voice than usual. “I have been meaning to have a talk with you. I wanted to ask you if you would like to play a sport of some kind. Soccer, for example. Gloria says it is very popular with boys your age. I thought maybe you, well, would enjoy it. She thought that possible.”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. I had no interest in or talent for soccer or any sports for that matter. I was always the last person picked on teams at recess and generally avoided all physical activities rather than risk the embarrassment my uncoordinated body consistently brought me.
“Well, you should consider it. Exercise is important for a growing boy.”
“Did you play sports? When you were my age?”
My father’s eyebrows arched in thought. “Not really. No, actually. Your uncle was more involved in athletics. I never participated in any extracurricular activities. Any sporting activities, that is. I was quite involved in the school newspaper. I was the editor. But I now wish I had been involved in athletics. I would have benefited, I think on many levels. It would have been healthy. Yes, I definitely think so.”
I had a hard time swallowing my last bite of pancake.
“Gloria also thought you might enjoy spending time with her son Benjamin. He’s only a year ahead of you in class. She thought that maybe you could do homework and play sports together. She thought the companionship might be good for you. You really should have more friends other than just, well, other than just Charlie. Though he is a nice boy.”
“Benjamin Wilcott was suspended once from school,” I said. I tried not to look at my father when I said this.
“Suspended? For what?”
“He beat up some boy from the public school.”
I heard my father cough. “Was this recently?”
“Last year,” I said. I looked up at him and thought I detected worry in his eyes. I was hoping he might somehow conclude that Benjamin had threatened me and for my safety alone he should stop having sex with Mrs. Wilcott.
“I’m sure there are two sides to the story,” my father said.
“He’s always beating people up. No one likes him,” I said, even though Benjamin was actually one of the more popular boys in school.
“Well, he seemed well behaved at dinner the other night.”
“That’s because Mrs. Wilcott said she’d send him to a basketball camp if he was good. I have to go to the bathroom.”
I went upstairs and stayed in the bathroom for a while, washing, then rewashing my face and hands, scrubbing them clean with Uncle Frank’s special antibacterial soap he had recently bought. I felt ashamed over what I said, but not very. I suddenly understood what Uncle Frank was talking about. In regards to Mrs. Wilcott, I had decided to take matters into my own hands.
SOON AFTER. I BEGAN a campaign to undermine Mrs. Wilcott’s influence on my father. I felt justified, believing I was acting both out of concern for my father and self-preservation. If I answered the phone when she called, I would hang up or fail to relay her messages. Twice in one week, she stopped by unannounced, once with a plate of cookies and once with a basket of freshly baked apple turnovers that looked flaky and brown. I intercepted her both times, telling her my father was in his study and couldn’t be disturbed. The second time, when she asked me to tell my father she was there, I went so far as to pretend that I had, then returned to the front door and told her that my father was on the phone with Mrs. Elkin, another divorcee who lived on nearby Chestnut Street. Mrs. Wilcott just smiled and handed over the turnovers, her breasts aimed at me like heat-seeking missiles.
My aggressive actions were inspired by Benjamin’s increasingly hostile attitude toward me. He had begun staring at me on the playground and giving me the finger at every opportunity, which was often. I knew that it was just a matter of time before my head was wedged in a crack on the sidewalk, so I made my campaign against Mrs. Wilcott a priority.
“Hey, how come Wilcott is always looking at you?” Johnny Cezzaro asked one day as we waited in line for the school doors to open. It was a cool, damp day in early October and the thick clouds hung close and low.
“He’s not looking at me,” I said. I did not look in Benjamin’s direction.
“Hey, he just gave you the finger!”
“No, he didn’t,” I said. “He gave you the finger.”
Johnny was confused. “Did he?”
“Yes, he hates you,” I said. “Everyone knows that. I would tell your brother.” I didn’t specify which brother. Johnny had six older vocational school-bound brothers, any one of whom could do serious harm to Benjamin.
“I’m gonna tell Big Tony,” Johnny said.
“Yes, he’s big. Tell Big Tony,” I said. I was staring at the front doors. I thought that if I looked at them long and hard enough, they would miraculously open.
“Yeah, Big Tony will kick his ass.”
“Yes,” I said as the doors finally opened. “That would be good.”
While I was at my locker, Mrs. Plank and Miss Polk walked over to me. Mrs. Plank patted me on the head. “So, are we going to see your father at Parents’ Night?” she asked.
I took off my jacket and hung it on the hook. “No, he has to travel. He has to go to Atlanta for the university,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about Parents’ Night.
“Well, that’s a shame,” she said. “We’ll miss him.”
“We wanted his autograph,” Miss Polk said. Her long, dangling earrings bounc
ed and jiggled as she chewed her gum. I thought she was referring in some way to my father’s dismal performance on Access Wilton, which was constantly being rerun on Channel 87, but instead, she showed me a copy of People magazine. Inside, there was a photograph of my father, Tommy, and me under the headline, MILLIONS CAN’T EASE HIS PAIN. In smaller letters I read, HE PLAYED HIS DEAD WIFE’S LOTTERY NUMBERS. There was also a small photo of my mother in her bathing suit at the Wilton Park Pool and another one of my Uncle Frank, smiling in front of our house, his jaw pointing downward.
“I didn’t know your uncle was a big Hollywood producer,” Miss Polk said.
I didn’t say anything. I just looked at the photo of my mother in her bathing suit. She was smiling and standing by the water slide, the slide I was always too afraid to go down. The picture was taken just a few weeks before the accident.
“Well, the Pappas family certainly has its share of famous people,” Mrs. Plank said, closing the magazine. Then she patted the top of my head again and they both walked away.
After school, I kept an eye out for Benjamin while walking home with Charlie and Johnny Cezzaro. As we walked, Johnny provided details on how we were going to kick Benjamin’s ass. Somehow he had assumed that I was going to be part of this effort.
“We’ll wait for him after football practice, then we’ll jump him. We’ll wait until he’s unlocking his bike at the bike rack. You’ll grab him around his knees and I’ll push him down, then we’ll kick him in the balls. My father says that’s the first place you gotta hit someone, in the balls. That wrecks their defense mechanism.”
“I thought Big Tony was going to fight him,” I said.
“We don’t need Big Tony,” Johnny said. “I can handle him alone, if you won’t help.”
Johnny was the runt of the Cezzaro litter and I had no confidence in his ability to fight. “I don’t know,” I said. “Big Tony is pretty big.”
We stopped off at Uncle Pete’s Place, a small store with a stale, sweet odor and a checkered tile floor that could make you dizzy if you stared at it too long. I paid for the Twizzlers and Cokes for Johnny and me, something Johnny obviously expected me to do since he had told me before entering that he had no money. Charlie didn’t want anything.
“Hey, there’s the rich boy,” the old lady behind the counter said. She bent down and picked up a copy of People magazine.
“Tell your father to cheer up,” she said.
He seems pretty happy right now, I thought, thinking of Mrs. Wilcott. I didn’t say anything though, I just nodded. When we got outside, I saw the red pickup truck parked across the street. I chewed my Twizzler and stared at the man with long hair. He waved at me, but I didn’t wave back.
“Hey, there’s that guy again,” Johnny said, but I just started walking.
AFTER THE STORY appeared in the magazine, we started getting phone calls again, mostly from people asking for money. Some of them were already crying on the phone when I answered, their voices muffled and choked, their words wet. Others would speak softly and apologetically, saying they were too sick to talk any louder. One man said he had an advanced case of narcolepsy, the sleeping disease. While he was talking to me, he kept falling asleep and dropping the phone. Another man said that if my father could just give him seed money, he could begin his research proving that dogs were really aliens sent to observe us. “You don’t have a dog, do you? No? Ah, smart boy, smart boy,” he said.
The television stations and newspapers started calling again as well, overwhelming my father with demands for interviews. On a number of occasions, reporters would show up unannounced at our front door, their faces sheens of excitement, bright and alert. One television reporter, a pretty woman with short dark hair and big lips whose face I recognized from billboards along the expressway, came three times asking for an exclusive. My father politely refused all requests.
In addition to the reporters’ calls, my father started getting photos and letters from women offering to marry him. I came to recognize the blue and pink envelopes with the sweet smell that lingered on the surface. I would retrieve them from the garbage after my father had thrown them out and read them. Most promised that they would be a good wife and mother. One included a picture of her and her three daughters who seemed about my mother’s age. “Take your pick,” the woman wrote. I saved that letter because the women in the photo were naked except for their tattoos.
As expected, my father was extremely upset by all the renewed attention. “I had hoped we had gotten past this point,” I heard him tell Aunt Bess one day at breakfast after a phone call from a man requesting funding to support his proposed subway system that would circumvent the earth.
It was conference time though, so my father was too busy preparing his papers on footwear to focus on the situation. I would hear him working on his old Royal typewriter late at night or talking on the phone to other historians, confirming, then reconfirming information. The tension showed on his face and body, which seemed to be caving in from the pressure.
“I don’t understand why you’re still working,” Aunt Bess said at dinner one night. “You’ve won all this money and you’re working harder than ever.”
My father carefully put down his coffee cup, finding the exact center of his saucer. “The university has been very good to me, very loyal to me,” he said softly. “I feel their loyalty should be honored. They don’t ask me to do much, so I feel that I should do the best I can when I am called on to represent them.”
“Can’t you hire someone else to do your job?” Uncle Frank asked. “I know a lot of writers. You can pay them and when they’re finished, you can slap your name on it. It’s done all the time.”
My father ignored Uncle Frank’s comments and asked me to pass the salt. Over the past few days I had detected an unmistakable and unusual charge of anger coming from my father, an anger I sensed was directed at Uncle Frank. I suspected it had something to do with the People magazine story. When Aunt Bess showed the article to my father, he gasped and said, “He has no shame,” and went to his study, where he stayed late into the night.
Uncle Frank, for his part, seemed sorry about something. He spoke softer and began leaving the house early in the morning for meetings in downtown Chicago. Twice he flew back and forth to Los Angeles in the same day. Like my father, he also began to look tired and deep, dark circles ringed his eyes, giving him a lost, hunted raccoon look.
“They’re wrapping my film,” Uncle Frank said, reaching for his glass of wine. “It’s almost done.”
“What’s this one about, Frank?” Aunt Bess asked.
Uncle Frank seriously considered his glass of wine and then picked it up and swirled it delicately. “A good vampire,” he said, still staring at the wine. “A vampire who doesn’t really mean any harm. He can’t help being a vampire though. He can’t help the way he is. He didn’t want to turn out the way he is, he just did. He does stupid things once in a while and he’s sorry for them.” He looked over at my father, who looked away.
Later that evening, Mrs. Wilcott came over unannounced, holding a large pie in front of her like a shield. I had not expected her. She usually came before dinner, with hopes, I thought, of being invited to eat. I interpreted this late visit as a surprise attack, a violation of the rules, and ignored her even after my father instructed me to say hello.
I found her sudden appearance that evening particularly annoying since we were preparing to play Stratego, a board game of military strategy. My father had surprised me by agreeing at dinner to play the game, despite his busy schedule. The object of the game was to capture your opponent’s flag and I had devised a somewhat basic, but I thought effective, strategy of hiding my flag behind a number of bombs and sergeants to thwart my father and Tommy, who was assisting him. I had overheard the family counselor at the hospital recommend the game to my father while he was recuperating from his bowel problems, saying that it would encourage father-son interaction. We had only played once before, a dull and uninspiring
affair during which my father had spent the majority of the time reading, then rereading, the instructions. I had hoped, with the rules now clear, the second game would prove more entertaining.
“I know you like apple-cinnamon,” Mrs. Wilcott said, handing me the pie. Tommy ran upstairs. “I made this for you, Teddy, when we were taping this week’s show.” When she smiled it looked like she had saved two apples and put one in each of her cheeks.
My father looked at me expectantly, his eyebrows raised. I had a difficult time looking at him. I resented the bumbling, animated way he acted around Mrs. Wilcott.
“Thank you,” I mumbled. I left the living room and brought the pie into the kitchen where Aunt Bess sat at the table with her chin in her hand, reading Luxury Living! a slick, thick magazine Uncle Frank had begun bringing home and, it seemed, memorizing. Stavros lay curled up at her feet silently emitting a variety of odors, all suggesting decomposition.
“Frank wants us to buy a heated toilet,” she said, pointing to the magazine. “In the winter, the toilet seat gets warm. They cost two thousand dollars.” Then she looked up at me and asked, “What are you doing with that pie?”
“Mrs. Wilcott gave it to me. To us.”
Aunt Bess’s eyes narrowed to a slit. “Did we get it in the mail?”
“No, she’s here. In the living room.”
“She’s here? In the living room?” Aunt Bess looked at me with such alarm and suspicion that I was suddenly afraid of the pie.
“What kind is it?”
“She said it’s apple-cinnamon.”
She nodded her head gravely at this news. “Apple-cinnamon,” she said. “What does she want us to do with it?”
