by Jim Grimsley
She is wearing a style of shoe made famous on Sex and the City, and her hair is rippled and highlighted and styled like Sarah Jessica Parker’s; she appears to be posing, now, perched on the toilet with the seat top lowered and her jeansclad legs splayed on the rug. She has a crease in the jeans, which are always dry-cleaned and pressed, and the bottoms are rolled partway up her calves. “So Papa, why come you never abused your daughter. You think I’m ugly?”
“Why did I what? What kind of question is that?” I take a good pull from the vodka.
“So many dads abuse their daughters. Look at Law & Order. There was an episode last night with a dad who constantly had sex with his daughter.” She’s chewing some kind of gum, studying her nails, occasionally sitting upright to study herself in the mirror. She glares at me with the defiant pout of a teenybopper. She’s in one of her I-want-to-shock-you moods. “Why come you never tried with me?”
“You’re asking me this while I’m naked in the bathtub with my hand over my privates.”
“You think I’m ugly, don’t you?”
She is sitting there with boobs I paid for and a nose I paid for and liposuction that I paid for and she wants to know what I think of the bargain I got.
“You’re a beautiful girl,” I say, smacking my lips. I wish for a touch of grapefruit juice in my cocktail. I’m so mellow the room is starting to swim, the little fishes on the wallpaper wriggling and wavering.
“Were you ever tempted? I mean, it would have been creepy if you ever tried anything but it would be okay if you had dirty thoughts about me. And, you know, like, you fought them off.”
“Please, Ann, young lady. No. I never entertained any thoughts of that kind about you. Of the abusive father kind, I mean.”
She has begun to pout. This might be a genuine emotional response or an attempt to change her reflection in the mirror. When she sits up straight to check herself out again, and primps her hair a bit, I figure it’s another pose. “Maybe you’re gay,” she says.
“You’ve been talking to your mother.”
“Did you ever have any thoughts about Frank?”
Frank is her brother, a no-good banker who lives never mind where but pretty close and never bothers to come to visit his parents. Since I lost my job you’d think I was poison to my own son. God forbid I should spoil his perfect life with what’s her name Ramona with the hair processed nineteen different ways. “You have a sick imagination,” I say.
“Why would Mom make up that you’re gay, Pa?”
“I should know why your mother would do anything?”
She rolls her eyes and cocks her head. She’s being careful to keep her eyes away from the bathtub and the fading suds. “Point,” she says. “So, you going to give me some money?”
“What do you need money for?”
“I have to get my nails done this afternoon and I can’t pay.”
“Why can’t you pay? You have a job.”
“I don’t have a shift tonight and I spent my cash.” She’s an actress who never works, which means she waits tables and lives on her tips and on handouts from me. She pouts again, attempting to look even younger and more childish. On the face of a twenty-eight-year-old this is unattractive. The pout squashes her features toward the center and makes her face look more like a moon pie. I miss her old nose, which was long enough to give the face some character. She had the boobs done for high school and the nose after college, so I remember the old nose better than the old boobs. “Papa. Please. I just need fifty dollars.”
“A nail job costs fifty dollars?”
“I need to buy some makeup, too.”
My hands are twitching in the water like my wallet is at the bottom of the tub and I’m going to reach down to find it full of waterlogged hundred dollar bills. Ann’s little girl routine is as tired as my scalp. For a last moment I am the father who always managed to find a few dollars for his daughter; then it’s a moment later and I realize there’s nothing in my wallet, or in the bank, or anywhere.
“Get out of the bathroom so I can finish my bath, Ann.” Even to me my voice sounds different. There’s a timbre, a depth, that comes out of my deepest gut; just a note, a sounding, but I hear it. Someplace deep down in myself, I hear the change. I feel tired, close my eyes.
She swings her legs and kicks at the stainless steel trash basket. She is feeling my discomfort and, in a shocking display of sensitivity, is teetering on the verge of becoming concerned for me.
From rooms away comes the drone of a television set, the peculiar rhythm and sound effects of the evening news. My heart is pounding. “Who’s that?” I ask.
“Hilda, my friend.”
“The skinny one.”
“She’s anorexic, Papa. You’re not supposed to mention she’s skinny.” An expression of relief crowds out the concern that Ann was starting to feel; easier to scold me than to worry about me. “Honestly. It’s not like she can help being thin.”
“Sure she could. She could eat a cookie.”
“Keep your voice down. I’m trying to help her with that.”
“What’s so hard? You eat a sandwich and you don’t stick your finger down your throat.”
“Shut up. Gross. I didn’t say she was bulimic.” She is relaxed again, more like her old self. At the corner of her eyes the merest beginnings of a crease. She has her mother’s skin, fine and prone to wrinkles. She picks up one of her mother’s scented soaps and slips it into her blouse pocket.
She looks at me hard when she gets up. An uncharacteristic wrinkle of concern down the center of her brow. I am trying to shrink into the water and cover myself with my hands again. “I’m sorry I barged in on you.”
“No problem. As long as I don’t get out of the water I won’t scar you for life, right?”
She laughs, but only in a half-hearted way. “You all right, Pa?”
“Me?” I do a partly underwater shrug. “I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll make it.”
She twists from side to side, the way she did when she was twelve and wanted twenty dollars for makeup. “Mom’s serious about the divorce,” she says. “She means it this time.”
“I know she does, sweetie. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Do you need any money?” Ann asks, then blushes. “I mean, how are things for you?”
I stare at my toes at the far end of the water. “We’ll get by. I got a couple of interviews next week.”
She brightens, backing toward the door; a towel with a melon motif is hanging there, and she opens the door by pulling on the towel. “That’s good. You haven’t had any interviews for a while.” But she doesn’t ask what jobs I’m interviewing for, what companies, any of the questions that immediately spring to mind. She’s staring obstinately at the tile of the bathroom floor.
“Maybe my luck’s turning,” I say.
“Sure, Papa. I hope so.”
“Now, why don’t you go outside and wait for me to get out of the tub, sweetheart.”
“I need to run,” she says. “I’ll let myself out. See you.”
“Take the skinny girl with you, get her something to eat.”
When she’s gone the room is curiously empty, the slight splashes of the water amplified by the fact that my ears are just above the surface. Why did I lie to her?
She was embarrassed to have asked for money, but because I had none to give, not because at her age she should be too proud to beg for my spare change. I’ve been out of a job for two years and this is the first time it occurs to my daughter that I might be having money problems. This is the person my daughter has become, this child-woman with her dry-cleaned designer blue jeans and her constant need for fifty bucks to pay for a manicure. Fool that I am, I would have given it to her if I had that much cash in my pocket.
I stand up in the tub, steadying myself on one of the fixtures. Water drains off me like music, dripping. In the mirror opposite I can see myself, pale and flabby, nipples sagging on
a chest that looks more like breasts than ever. The angle of sag of my man-boobs is about equal to the angle of my belly as it droops downward. My genitals look tiny and forlorn, clenched tightly against my pubic hairs as if they would like to re-ascend into my abdomen. My legs and arms are thin. I look like a potato man, with stick arms and stick legs. I’m the color of chalk with hints of blue where veins shine through the skin. My grizzled body hair lies plastered against the skin. Only my face reminds me of me, but, since I’ve stopped shaving every day and have a kind of waddle under my chin, I’m not getting much encouragement from studying my expression. I look old and tired and habitually sad.
I flex my arms, watching the stringy biceps attempt to gather and swell. I’ve been thinking about killing Carmine with an ax. Do I even have the strength to swing one?
I dress and drive to Home Depot to shop for a hatchet. For this purchase I stop for money at an ATM on the way. To my shock the machine won’t give me five hundred dollars; according to the running balance on the bottom of the transaction record, I only have about a hundred dollars left in the account. I’m stunned, and suddenly afraid. But I withdraw this last bit of cash and look at it, till the person behind me, waiting for the ATM, clears her throat conspicuously. I walk away, sliding the bills into my pocket. There’s no more money after this. Since I’ve always handled the finances, I’m the only one who knows, though Carmine will find out the next time she tries to get money out of the ATM herself. She’ll think it’s just another screw-up, that all I’ll need to do is move more money out of our savings; it will be news to her that our savings are gone, our retirement is gone, our mortgage is in arrears. We’re a quarter of an inch from the wall and barreling toward it at top speed. I pocket my cash and head for the hardware store.
It’s arguable that in the case of buying an ax with which to murder my wife, I ought to consider shopping at a local, independent hardware dealer; it would be prudent to search out a store of the Mom-and-Pop variety, maybe even to drive to a small, rural town somewhere outside this not-to-be-named suburb in which I live. In a bucolic village hardware store I might purchase a hatchet and leave no computerized record of the transaction whatsoever.
But even as I consider this I see Lennie Briscoe from Law & Order showing my black and white Arthur Andersen corporate photo to Mom or Pop, standing behind the manual cash register. “You ever see this guy in here, maybe to buy a maul-type tool like an ax?”
“This guy? Oh yeah, I remember this guy. Drove one of them luxury SUVs from Japan. Seemed real nervous like.”
“He give you a name?”
“No, sir, detective. Paid cash. Really sweaty cash, too; I had to leave it out on the counter to dry for a while.”
“Can you describe him?”
“You just showed me a picture of him.”
“Describe him anyway.”
“Ugly fellow. Bald, not quite a comb-over but close. Fat. Never worked a day in his life. Pale, like he came from the city, no offense, sir. Not even one of them fake tans, which, we have a tanning parlor like that right here in Sioux City.”
“That must be great for the singles scene,” quips Lennie. Behind him is the vaguer outline of his partner, an actor of color, handsome, earnest, athletic in his moderately priced suit. Partner smiles at Lennie’s quip.
Cut to me, in the Japanese luxury SUV again, driving to the anonymity of a busy Home Depot on a weekend afternoon.
Home Depot always has a cheerful, high-ceilinged, anything-is-possible feel to it. As I enter the automatic doors, I find myself walking a bit straighter, sucking in my stomach, attempting to appear as though I might actually use some of these burly tools on the shelves. I wander around the windows section, looking at all the different kinds of windows a person can buy. People are buying hot dogs at the stand near the end of the check-out lanes; I am hungry for a hot dog but decide it’s better to speak to as few people as possible.
The axes and hatchets are harder to find than I expect and I wander into the garden section, scratching my head beside trays of spring flowers. A young woman wearing a Home Depot apron smiles at me. She has an oval face made arresting by eyes of the coldest blue I have ever seen; she’s about as tall as my daughter but has a better proportion, though still a rather generous figure. Her name tag reads “Lizzie.” She looks a lot like Elizabeth Montgomery, from Bewitched. For a moment she has a perfectly blank, almost frightening expression; then she smiles and a human light floods her features. “Are you looking for help with plants?”
“No, I’m here to shop for a hatchet.”
“Here? This is the garden section.”
“I wandered in here because of the crowd. I’m not as fond of crowds as I used to be.”
“It’s only like this on weekends.” Lizzie gives me a wide-eyed look that means she is probably wearing contact lenses, though I can’t see them. She appears to be watching me but I appear to be standing somewhere else, in her vision. “But I guess that makes sense. Working people can’t come here during the week.”
“I certainly can’t. I have to be at work pretty early in the morning.”
She is very curvaceous, coming up to about my shoulder, with a plump shape that has the appearance of solid, firm flesh, not the powdery, cellulitish corpulence of Carmine. Her perfume has an old-fashioned mellow tone, a hint of roses and jasmine. “What kind of work do you do?” she asks.
“Hospital consulting. I’m a billings consultant.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“I take it you’re a garden expert.”
“Part-time,” she says. However, pride in her finances induces her to explain further. “I only work here for something to do, really. I own some real estate and that’s how I make most of my money.”
“Real estate.”
“I don’t trust stocks,” she says. “I put my money in houses and land.” She has a wicked gleam in her eye when she is discussing her property.
“I wish I had done more of that,” I say.
“Were you messed up in the crash?”
I’m not sure which crash she means, but the conversation is beginning to strike a bit close to home. Time for another lie. “I lost a little, not very much. I bought a couple of houses right before stocks went in the tank. I guess I just had a feeling.” I scratch my head, giving her something of an earnest look, but a fake one, to match the look of fake friendliness she is giving me.
“Smart,” she says. “What does a man like you need with a hatchet?”
I only hesitate a moment. “I’m planning to kill somebody with it.”
She nods, hardly blinking. “You’ll want something with a wooden handle. Wood gives you a good grip, and you can break off the handle and put in it the fireplace afterwards.”
“I don’t have a fireplace.”
“In the old days you could wash off the hatchet and then cover it with ash to get rid of the blood evidence. These days there’s luminol. So I don’t know.”
“My,” I say, “you do seem to know what you’re talking about.”
“A hatchet would not be my choice any more.”
“What would you use?”
“I’d have to think about it,” she says, in a noncommittal way. “Poison, maybe.”
“Did you ever want to kill somebody?”
She favors me with the most demure little smile. “I don’t believe that’s a proper question for a gentleman to ask a lady.”
My nearness to her is giving me a bit of an erection. She looks so much like Elizabeth Montgomery that I almost ask her what happened to the first Darren; and I am aware of the fact that Montgomery did once play Lizzie Borden in a TV movie. But that doesn’t explain the sudden stiffening of my interest. Truth is, a bit of an erection is all I usually have these days, but right now it’s feeling fairly functional. Something about her voice, the way it makes the skin at the back of my neck shiver. I am pointing this out here as further proof that I am not gay. “My apologies,” I say.
She tur
ns back to her watering, letting fine spray drift over pots of impatiens. I go on standing there waiting for my woody to fade. I suppose she thinks I’m creepy. Just as I’m about to leave, however, she turns back to me for a moment. “You should get a good haircut and maybe lose ten pounds. Appearances are very important if you want to kill somebody and get acquitted.”
I look down at the expanse of my belly under the knit shirt I’m wearing. She’s being generous; ten pounds wouldn’t even make a dent. “I don’t have time for a diet but maybe I could get a haircut and a facial,” I say.
“In a hurry?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be. Be patient, wait for the perfect time. Some quiet morning when you catch her in the right room, and there’s nobody around. You’ll know when the moment is right.”
She turns away again. Those firm round buttocks are fighting against the fabric of her skirt. What a fine thing, to see the ripe shape of a woman’s body standing up to her clothing.
She’s right, of course. But I don’t have enough money left to buy myself the luxury of more time. When I think about the fact that I’ve got maybe a hundred dollars to my name, a tightness comes to my breathing and I feel as if I need to get outside, in the open, as quickly as I can. This would be a bad place for me to buy an ax, anyway; too many people have seen me talking to Lizzie Borden here. Someone is sure to remember.
I’ll use a butcher knife, I think. We already have a couple of those. We have a completely equipped kitchen, just in case anybody who visits us ever wants to cook in it.
Charley Stranger took a knife
and with it finished off his wife
when he saw what he had done
he killed his daughter and his son
“Knife” works just as well as “ax” when it comes to the rhyme scheme for a cute, memorable little ditty. But it’s not quite as edgy. I miss the “forty whacks.”
In Black and White
THE SITUATION COMEDY VERSION of my family life includes several series of episodes that are revealing about our character as a nuclear unit.
The early episodes are fairly ordinary, nothing America hasn’t seen before. In one of the stories, my daughter Ann frets about her looks, her ability to gain a boyfriend, and her possible future married life chattering with her best friend zany Rosie Garner from next door. Ann colors her hair and the end product is a disaster. Her mother and she try to hide it from me in a hideous, laughable wig. They’re in a panic before dinner because they’re sure I’ll never fall for the ruse. But I’m oblivious, lost in my ambition to land a big account at work, and I don’t even notice when the wig falls off Ann’s head and lands in my lap.
