by Annie DeWitt
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the one.”
I met his eyes without blinking. His little girl was a stranger to him for the first time. I could tell it pained him.
The following day, the phone rang. Mother answered it and called Father to the kitchen. I saw the receiver where she placed it on the telephone book under the phone and Father’s big hand a few seconds later as he reached for it, held it to his ear and then returned it to its cradle. Afterward, someone started pranking us in the night, calling and hanging up. I blamed it on the brothers.
“Heavy breathing,” Father said. “All they do is call up and pant.”
“A bunch of itinerants,” Granny Olga said. “What do you expect?”
For a while Fender hung out some mornings on the road in front of our house where I used to meet him. Mother said he was mocking her authority. She went out in the yard and threatened him with the police. “It’s a free country,” Fender said. “You don’t own this road.”
Birdie and I were only allowed out in the backyard. No one ever said why. No one ever said anything about Mother’s absence either, or Callie or K, or no one having been at our watch all that time.
I assumed Fender stopped trying to visit about the time the phone calls stopped coming. I knew he’d broken free of me. Father had taken a ride up to their house and seen to it. “Enough is enough,” he’d said during dinner one evening after getting up for the third time during our meal. “I can’t live in a house where the phone is constantly off its cradle.” I watched his Bronco disappear up the trailhead to the Steelheads’ house. When Father came back he smoked a cigar in the living room. Mother usually didn’t allow this. Father was always burning holes in his shirts. I sat on the bottom stair outside the living room and listened.
“I got up there,” Father said. “And I thought I was hallucinating.
I took one look at that kid and I was back at Blue Creek with my old friend Chuck Dool. The one who offed himself after the war. The kid had the same face on him. Those same wide open eyes.”
“I never said he was a bad seed,” Mother said. “She’s just too young for all that.”
“You should know,” Father said.
“Should I?” she said.
“Sure,” Father said. “You were young once too.”
Mother laughed. I could hear her as she got up off the sofa and walked over to where Father was rocking in the chair. There was a silence as she moved into his arms. Then the sounds of his hands patting her thighs as the rocker squeaked under their weight.
“You know what else,” Father said. “I get up there and find the three of them cooking dinner and watching the news.”
“They had you fooled,” Mother said.
“Spitting image,” Father said. “How’s a man to stare down his childhood friend who offed himself after the war?”
“What’s the chances,” Mother said.
“It’s a shame too,” Father said. “I never was a man to advise another man’s boys.”
18.
Perhaps Otto Hauser was not so oblivious to the sound of the keys or the quality of the light that day as Mother and I crowded around his kitchen and Birdie picked at his fish. At the sound of the keys in the front door, Mother looked across the table at Otto for some recognition in his face. His fingers fumbled absently with his tiepin, which he kept attached to his shirt pocket. “Mother of pearl,” I could hear Mother thinking. “A bit feminine for a man his age.”
“I’m home,” Callie called into the kitchen.
It’s hard to say, whether or not Otto had planned Callie’s interruption. Maybe Callie had a sixth sense about conflict. Mother said she’d known women like her who had.
“You’re just in time,” Otto said. “Get in here and join us for a sandwich.”
“Too late,” Callie said. “I just fixed dinner. The boys were out hunting early this morning. They came home hungry for bacon and eggs.”
Callie had a chest full of groceries, a bag in one arm and a bridle over the other. As she walked into the living room, she stooped over the pullout, unloading her goods on the floor and taking His Helene’s face in her hands.
“You look good, Mama,” Callie said kissing the old woman on the cheek. “You’ve still got some summer in your face.”
If Callie was surprised to see us, she didn’t let on. She adjusted her breast in her bra where it had fallen out of its cup as she came into the room.
“Callie,” she said to Mother shaking her hand.
“Sure,” Mother said. “Jean’s mentioned you some.”
“Has she?” Callie said smiling faintly in my direction and shaking the hair out of her face.
She sat in the chair next to Otto. Her bangs scattered across her forehead where the wind had taken them and stuck to her temples where the sweat had gathered under her helmet. The sun was out and the ride was short. She’d ridden over on her husband’s ’cycle.
Looking at Callie unmoored a buzzing in the back of my throat. She wore all the places she’d been on her body. Bracelets of amber and turquoise. The holes where her ears had been pierced. The way she smelled of bing-cherry and almond. As she draped her jacket over the back of Otto’s chair revealing her shoulders and her small tan frame, I was reminded of the evergreen Father carried out of the house after Christmas. If you shook the trunk too hard in the house, Father said, you’d forever be finding a needle underfoot come spring.
For his part, Otto seemed less timid in front of Mother with Callie in the room.
“That’s a lovely bridal,” Mother said, motioning toward the straps of leather which hung over the back of Callie’s chair.
“Thanks, darlin’,” Callie said, fingering the free end of one of the straps. “It’s my old show bridal.”
“You brought me home quite a few ribbons in that one, Kiddo,” Otto said, resting his hand on the bend of her knee after she was seated and giving it a shake.
“Everyone falls into their luck sometime,” Callie said.
“We surely do,” Mother said smiling at Birdie and I as though we too had won her something.
“From what I remember, luck had little to do with it,” Otto said.
“I heard Father say you were a champion once,” Birdie chimed in.
“Did you now,” Callie laughed. “Well, I suspect your father has an unusual memory then.”
There was a pause. Nobody spoke. Mother stirred her coffee.
“Maybe sometime,” she said to Callie. “You could give me a lesson.”
“Sure, baby,” Callie said.
“Anyways,” Mother said. “I don’t see how you can control an animal in that.”
“How do you mean?” Callie said leaning into the table and casting her gaze up at Mother. Her breasts hung on the place mat within her shirt. The two women met eyes. Otto covered the tuna.
Mother did a strange thing then. She took her arms up over her head as though she were applying the horse’s tack to her own face. She took her thumb and her forefinger and placed them at the corners of her mouth and pulled. Her teeth were sharp and yellow in the corners from tea.
“There’s no bit,” she said releasing her hands.
“It’s an old hackamore,” Callie said. “This colt’s mouth shy. The minute you put the bit between his teeth he loses his confidence. For a horse like him, it’s all about how you guide him with your weight. They say it lengthens his stride and increases his stamina.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” Otto said to Mother patting the length of Callie’s thigh. “Ain’t nothing wrong about that at all.”
Otto got up to clear, leaning on the back of Callie’s chair for balance as he reached for our plates.
“No,” Mother replied. “I don’t suspect there is.” She shifted as though the seat had grown harder beneath her.
“Come sit with your Mo
ther awhile,” she said to me. “Make some room in my lap why don’t you.”
Callie got up to do the dishes. I got up to help, feeling Mother’s bony parts where they cut into me.
“You don’t look at people like that,” Mother said quietly as I rose.
“Like what?” I said.
“The way,” Mother said. “You were looking at him. The old man. It’s not done at your age. It’s unsightly.”
Mother excused herself to the bathroom. Callie ran the water in the sink. Birdie clamored over to the counter next to her to rinse the fish off her hands. I scrubbed a little under Birdie’s nails with the pad.
“His Helene used to wash mine just the same,” Callie said nodding to where the water ran over Birdie’s fist.
“‘Don’t shine your light too hard in the backs of anyone’s eyes unless you want to see your own reflection,’ His Helene always said.”
“Mother’s just testing you is all,” I said.
“A woman doesn’t trust her own kind,” she said. “No matter how much I helped with the business, His Helene was always making sure I wasn’t leaving the barn with any of her bills. When you’re riding it’s different. Everyone falls away from themselves just watching. They look at the horse and wonder who leads who around. All the while, all you care about is going clean and staying the course.”
Otto came over with a pile of dishes. He stacked them on the drain board next to the sink pausing for a moment to lean over Callie’s shoulder, pressing himself into the curve of her where she was bent over the sink.
“I’ll take care of these,” he said.
Callie raised her head and looked out the window sliding the long rubber gloves down her arms and hanging them over the faucet. She turned towards Otto such that the side of her body was pressed against his chest.
“I’ll be out training,” she said.
“Alright then,” he said.
It was hard to say what they were to each other. It was even harder to say what they weren’t. The way their bodies locked and moved.
“Go easy on your old man,” Callie said to me from between the grip of Otto’s arms where he’d rested them on the counter.
She left through the back. Otto followed her into the breezeway. They paused in front of the door. He said something that made her chuckle. The way she tossed her hair off her shoulders, you could see the tension in her neck. You could see how sad she looked. Otto closed the door behind her and stood for a minute, watching her cross the lawn toward the barn.
Otto turned and looked at me across the kitchen. He seemed not to recognize me. The afternoon light was thick and golden. It cast a warmth through the window onto the backs of the flies such that, in the uproar of their exchange, they appeared nearly glowing.
I imagined Otto fingering Callie’s hairpin where it sat on his wife’s dresser, turning it over in his hand and inspecting it for evidence that it too had escaped a great plummeting to the earth. “You’ve gone wiggly,” he would tell himself.
By the time Mother came back to the table, there was swelling around her eyes. I could tell she’d cried a little in the bathroom. She often did that since her return.
“I just put on some coffee,” Otto said.
“We’d better not,” Mother said. “We’ve left Mother alone too long.”
When we got home the Bottom Feeder was quiet. The lamp in the living room was off. Shadows crept around the furniture where the light had grown thin and lazy.
“I’ll go down and check on her,” Mother said.
Granny Olga had a machine in her heart that made her breath keep pace. It beat for her. “It’s like leaning on something every now and again,” Mother explained. Father said Granny Olga had the heart of a mechanic. “It’ll fix itself even in the grave.” In practical terms, the machine in Granny Olga’s heart meant I couldn’t use the microwave when she was in the kitchen. I remember watching Father warm his dinner one night when he was late after work. Granny Olga stood in the doorway to the living room, waiting for the light in the box to go off and the carousel to stop spinning.
“It’s the only time when your Grandmother visits that I can be alone with my meal,” Father had said running the empty machine for another minute while he started in on his food.
Mother disappeared down the stairs to Granny Olga’s room. The basement carpet was a thick brown grosgrain. Utility grade. I knew it shamed Mother to store her mother in such a space. “Basement level,” Father had said. “There could be floods.”
I went to my room.
“Gram’s alright,” Mother said a few minutes later, peeking her head in. “She’s just had one of her spells. I wanted you to know. Let’s all have a lie down. I can see you look comfortable.”
“That’s fine,” I said. It seemed fine. We all seemed fine.
When I woke it was almost evening. There was a breeze coming through the screen in the window. The flies had laid off of their buzzing.
I went downstairs to check on dinner. Mother’s light was on in her room. The door was ajar. I could see the glow of the lamp on her table. One of the shades Ruth had made her.
I didn’t knock. It went against Mother’s rules about modesty. There was no such thing as nudity between women. There was just bodies and this or that mound of flesh.
Mother was sprawled out on top of the covers in her nightdress when I came in. The long thin expanse of her legs where they emerged from the sheets looked wild.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said.
I hesitated to enter. There was an energy in the air I couldn’t identify. Her body was prone and urgent, as though she’d been struggling with something.
“It’s OK,” she said. “I’m almost finished here.”
I sat on the edge of the bed furthest from her body.
“Why did you come back?” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “It was a confluence of things.”
Mother was always saying that. Everything was the fault of various hatreds.
“First off,” she said. “I met a man. I met exactly the kind of man I should have been attracted to but wasn’t.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wasn’t he lovely?”
“He was lovely,” she said. “He was quite fine. Went to Harvard or something in the seventies. Now he makes films.”
Mother had a strange attraction for Harvard men despite the fact that the only one she’d met was Floyd Cutler. Floyd Cutler and his young wife, Joy, had built a home two roads over on Merriam. A large single-story bungalow of Floyd’s design built into the side of a hill. It had a short pitch and three walls constructed entirely of glass. The toilets required small amounts of water and the roof was designed to grow seedlings. From the outside, the house looked like a life-sized terrarium.
Joy had invited Mother and Father to one of their parties. The Cutler’s had strung up a line of old bed linens on the side of the yard that faced the neighbors. Everyone had gone swimming naked in the pool that fed off the stream alongside their property.
“At first it was a bit of a shock,” Mother had said after the party. “And then it was fun and then it was a bit of a shock again seeing everyone wandering around in their bare feet by the edge of the pool. The feet on those people. I remember thinking how ugly they were. The pool was just stinking with them.”
“The whole thing was so damn depressing,” Father had said.
“The way those people got on about jazz.”
“I thought you and Floyd talked about movies?” Mother had said. “Joy said you two had a chat.”
“Silent films,” Father had said. “He wanted to make a silent film about a woman giving birth in his pool.”
“Poor thing too,” Mother had said. “His wife was barren.”
“I didn’t know,” Father had said.
“Joy told me herself,” Mother had said. “One after
noon she invited me for cocktails. It was my turn on the carpool. She suggested we sun ourselves on the patio. The boys were adopted, you know. She said they were used to her going topless in the house. After a few drinks, I asked her where she had adopted them. ‘They look so different from one another,’ I said. She agreed. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘They have different fathers.’ ‘Don’t we all,’ I said.”
“I think she’s lonely,” Father had said. “She must be lonely over there without any real neighbors. Most weekends Floyd’s away at a conference. She’s all alone in that house.”
“How do you know how often Floyd’s away or he isn’t?” Mother had said.
“He told me himself,” Father had said. “He pointed at the house and said, ‘It’s funny, Rick. I built this house but whenever I’m here I feel like I’m on vacation. And yet as soon as I leave, I want to come home again.”
“Poor thing,” Mother had said. “I always knew there was something a tad sick about that man. Handsome people too.”
“You know what they say about handsome types,” Father had said. “They all went to Harvard in the seventies.”
“Not everyone worth hating attended Harvard in the late seventies, Rick,” Mother had said.
“No,” Father had said. “Everyone worth hating leaves their wife alone in a house with a glass wall.”
“You think he means for people to watch her?” Mother had said.
“I don’t think he means anything,” Father had said. “It’s all just a bunch of hot air. That’s just it.”
I thought of this story now as I gazed at Mother in her bed. Her head propped up on a pillow. She scratched the inside of her thigh. When she caught me looking at her, she extended her legs and pointed her toes as though to stretch.
“Oh,” I said. “How did you meet this exactly perfect man?”
“I probably shouldn’t say,” she said.
“Probably not,” I said. “Father might not see any fun in it.”
