Big City Eyes

by Delia Ephron

  He cracked the door a few more inches. His shirt was open and he began buttoning it. “What happened to you?” he asked.

  “I was bitten by a dog.”

  “You look different.”

  “I do? Different how?”

  That stumped him. Recognizing a change in his mom had been a leap; defining it took more observation that he usually committed to. “Are you wearing makeup?”

  “I always wear makeup.”

  “You’re brighter.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m exactly the same. Is someone here with you?”

  He stepped aside and I saw a boy sitting on the bed.

  “This is my mom,” muttered Sam, as if he’d been dragged by his hair spout into revealing me.

  “Nuqneh,” said the boy. His arms and legs rearranged themselves like a set of pick-up sticks, as he stood up. He was very, very skinny, and almost as tall as Sam.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nuqneh,” the boy repeated in a low, gravelly voice.

  “Deidre speaks Klingon,” said Sam.

  I didn’t know where to begin with all this information. If this boy was Deidre, then either Deidre was a boy’s name and I didn’t know it, or this boy was a girl. As for the language—I’d heard of it, but couldn’t place it.

  I dealt with the easier problem. “What is Klingon?”

  “Klingon is the official language of the Klingon Empire. Like English is the language of here.”

  “Oh, right, Star Trek. I didn’t realize the Klingons have their own language.”

  “Yeah. She’s teaching it to me.”

  She. That settled it. I examined her more closely.

  Deidre’s face was a collection of planes and sharp edges: a square chin, cheekbones like cliffs, blue eyes set so deep they seemed to peer from inside the crevice of a rock. Her skin looked baked, but at a very low heat for a very long time, so it had a flat tone, copper minus the metallic flickers of light, caramel without the mellow richness. Her hair, the eerie white blond of an albino, hung limp—one hank over the forehead, the rest tucked behind the ears with a straight lifeless fringe visible below the lobes. I could not discern the body inside the large man’s workshirt with the tails out. I stared at the pockets under which breasts should be. None were visible.

  “Wejpuh,” said Deidre.

  Sam laughed, and so did the girl/boy, revealing a thin straight-lipped smile.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Charming,” said Sam.

  “Thank you,” I said, feeling I had learned for the first time what being polite was. Sam’s worst class was French. After two years he barely knew Comment allez-vous, and now he was planning to master Klingon?

  “He hangs out with Deidre,” McKee had said. I had envisioned some long-haired adorable teenager, who said, “Cool,” or “It’s a slam.” Not—I could hardly bring myself to admit it—a freak. Deidre was a freak. That meant Sam probably was, too. I had to invent a new category to accommodate this twosome: not even vaguely in the normal range (NEVNR) or not in the normal range by a mile (NNRBM). No wonder McKee knew who they were. Freaks were always famous in small towns. Did Deidre speak Klingon everywhere, or just when she wasn’t in school? Did she speak pidgin Klingon or fluent Klingon? Maybe she’s a genius. That thought actually surfaced, although I quashed it instantly, scorning my own pathetic spunky optimism, the hope-springs-eternal that there could be a saving grace. And … I didn’t want to consider this … but had Sam been necking with this person? His cheeks did have a pinkish hue. If so, psychologically speaking, was he making out with a girl or a boy? Perhaps he was necking with an alien, a creature from his own tribe?

  “Do you mind?” Sam asked.

  “What?”

  “Leaving. We’re busy.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said as he shut the door.

  The Sakonnet Times, October 8

  * * *

  Big City Eyes

  BY LILY DAVIS

  LAST WEEK I stopped at Jake’s Farm Stand. While browsing, I overheard that Charlotte, the niece of the woman buying eggplants, was taking ampicillin for an earache. Perhaps the niece’s name wasn’t Charlotte. It could have been Charlene and maybe she had strep throat. I purchased a Boston lettuce and plum tomatoes. Then, awed by the beauty and variety of harvest vegetables, I bought three acorn squash, two turban, a butternut, and even a large bluish shapeless hubbard. I like to eat squash occasionally, maybe twice a year.

  I opened my refrigerator and noticed these squash, all eighteen meals’ worth, last Monday morning just after a mouse had run across my feet and just before several possibly tick-ridden deer breakfasted on my tulip bulbs. These facts don’t justify or mitigate my later behavior, but I did leave home in an agitated state to cover Claire Ramsay’s 911 call. Her daschund, Baby, had his head stuck in a pitcher.

  How this event came to pass is still a mystery. After the incident, Mrs. Ramsay refused to speak to this reporter except to say that the pitcher is 1920s English pewter and sells for $95 at her store, Claire’s Collectibles, on Barton Road. According to sources at the Comfort Café, where Mrs. Ramsay buys black coffee to go before work every day, she may sue the police for confiscating Baby and keeping him overnight at the SPCA in Riverhead. According to sources at the Muffin Shop, where Mrs. Ramsay has never been, her baby, whose name they did not know, almost suffocated but is fine now.

  Why would a dog poke his head in a pitcher? Was there a treat inside, a trace of spirit or crumb, or was it a whim—one of those moments when an animal does something stupid?

  Sergeant Tom McKee of the Sakonnet Bay Police Department ordered me to keep my distance. His exact words were “Stay back, out of our way.” I would like to point out that I did exactly that. The sergeant then carried Baby from Claire’s Collectibles around the corner to LePater’s Grocery. He was accompanied by two other officers, Carl Scott and Denise Woodworth.

  Shortly before this incident, Gavin Sturges of East Sakonnet had decided to use his new cell phone, a present from his girlfriend. He grazed a telephone pole, trying to locate the Send button, and ended up in a ditch. I’m sure it was not a whim that caused the police department to dispatch three of its four on-duty cops to rescue a dog but only one to save a human being.

  Was it sound police judgment that caused Sergeant McKee to place the dog on the checkout counter at LePater’s and grease his neck with Wesson oil? As everyone knows, since word in Sakonnet Bay travels faster than a response to a 911 call, a hyped-up Baby emerged from the pitcher. He went berserk. Wiggling out of the policeman’s grasp, he jumped off the counter and bit this reporter’s ankle.

  I lost it.

  Many versions of what I said have been circulating. About this: I would set the record straight, but I don’t want to deprive people of the pleasure of repeating and further mangling the mangled tale they’ve already been told. Gossip is as essential to life here as harvest vegetables. This must be why generation after generation hasn’t moved. It’s not for love of their beautiful village, or the joy and security of having relatives in shouting distance. It couldn’t possibly reflect a failure of imagination, or lack of curiosity or adventure. People in Sakonnet Bay can’t bear to lose their places on the grapevine.

  Sergeant McKee kindly drove me to the emergency medical center. During this exciting ride, he took the opportunity to criticize my previous column, insisting that deer do not cross the road looking for love, only for acorns and popcorn. These remarks might have provided additional justification for my outburst. Unfortunately, they occurred after.

  All I can say about my behavior is that I’m sorry and have no excuse, except perhaps the squash, the mouse, and the deer. It was one of those moments when a person does something stupid.

  CHAPTER 3

  AT THE Monday-morning editorial meeting a week and a half after publication, Art Lindsay announced that my column had riled many readers and he was thrilled. It was provocative in the perfect way: it upset
subscribers but not advertisers. He had received twenty-five letters over the past ten days and at least as many phone calls. Responses were still arriving.

  “I’m astonished,” I said, which was a bit of a lie. Art broke up laughing. That was a shock. Until now, I’d witnessed only faint chuckles. But his laugh was hearty; the smooth cheeks in his solemn moon-shaped face folded into deep pleats, indicating that sometime in the past (possibly before his marriage, although that assumption may reflect only my prejudice) joy had played a role. “Lily is astonished,” he told the staff, and they all laughed with him.

  “I didn’t exactly expect—”

  He waved me off like a pesky fly, and then shambled to the cooler, as he did many times a day, to down a miniature paper cup of bottled spring water.

  The column had poured out of me. My only hesitation was whether to include the word “exciting” in describing our trip to the emergency medical center. I deleted and inserted it several times before letting it remain. A reminder of our detour. But innocuous. Harmless. Like a secret message in a Beatles song. A kind of “Hello, remember me?” I couldn’t explain the dig, however—that McKee hadn’t used good judgment when he greased up Baby. Or the popcorn business. McKee had actually said that deer like acorns and pumpkins, not acorns and popcorn.

  At the time I was typing, I had been distracted by Deidre, who was becoming a permanent fixture. She walked home with Sam after school and stayed until dinner. On the weekend, she remained through the evening. Only once had Sam gone to her house, three blocks away. “Too crowded,” he said. I could not adjust to seeing her and recoiled every time I had a sighting.

  She reminded me of a character in the Oz books whose arms and legs were sticks tied together at the joints and who, at least as captured in the illustrations, was always in the middle of an awkward, uncoordinated stride. Deidre usually grunted some Klingon at me before escaping to Sam’s room.

  Always up for a mental leap into disaster, I imagined myself the grandmother of Sam and Deidre’s child, born sixty-six inches long, gender unknown, but irresistible nonetheless because heartbreak was guaranteed. Until now, however, I had observed only one instance of physical contact between them. Late on Saturday night, craving some chocolate bits, I’d encountered them side by side in the kitchen, inspecting the open refrigerator. Sam had his head cocked, resting it precariously on the bony shelf that was Deidre’s shoulder. He looked peaceful.

  When I was writing my column, in the glassed-in porch I’d appropriated as an office, I could see them through the doorway, lounging on the living room couch. Deidre’s stilt legs stretched across the coffee table, her gigantic boots hanging over the far side, floating free. They were watching Xena, the Warrior Princess, a long-haired buxom type who did forward flips in a leather gladiator outfit. Deidre’s laugh sounded somewhere between a machine gun and a stuttering motor. I looked up from the computer to see them roaring, while they slapped great handfuls of popcorn into their mouths. So I typed “popcorn” instead of “pumpkins” by mistake. And left it.

  It crossed my mind that McKee might call to correct me, although it turned out deer did eat popcorn. I had mail to prove it.

  Art brought the letters in personally every day. “Dogs, deer, police, you hit all the winners,” he said as he dropped a few more on my desk.

  The police chief, Ben Blocker, had composed a formal protest, which the newspaper printed. “On behalf of the entire Sakonnet Bay Police Department, I object to the contents and implications in the article, Big City Eyes, October 8th, by Lily Davis.” He listed three points.

  1. Sergeant McKee took all necessary precautions in rescuing Baby.

  2. Any resulting injuries were unfortunate but the consequence of Mrs. Davis’s standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  3. The police responded swiftly and appropriately to the minor accident involving Gavin Sturges. At no time does the police department value animal life over human life.

  The chief also registered a less civilized complaint to Art by phone, threatening to bar me from the police log. Art beckoned me into his office so I could observe his end of the conversation. He arched his eyebrows dramatically as he listened, shook his head feigning dismay, made a few disapproving sounds, then reminded the chief that I was from New York City.

  Having been the picture of the week, standing in front of Claire’s Collectibles with my foot up on a bench, unobtrusively revealing my butterfly bandage, I was now a minor local celebrity. Occasionally people poked each other when I walked by. While I was buying toothpaste at Bright’s Pharmacy, the saleswoman told me that she loved my column, it was really fun. When I was stopped at a light, a man knocked on my car window. I lowered the glass and he said, “Are you a left-winger?”

  “What?” I responded, floored not only by the question but by the term, which seemed archaic.

  “For your information,” he said, butting his face very close to my own, “Tom McKee saved my wife’s life when she had a heart attack.”

  For the next few blocks, I drove without knowing where I was going, right past my destination, The Sakonnet Times. I had not expected to be thought of as anti-McKee.

  Coral Williams, owner of the Comfort Café and president of Bambi’s Friends, a group dedicated to protecting white-tailed deer, refused to accept payment for my morning coffee. She told me that she often fed deer microwave popcorn and had named every doe that visited her lawn.

  I received several protests from the anti-deer people, reiterating that deer did not fall in love and that my insistence on anthropomorphizing them was contributing to the community’s inability to deal with the serious deer overpopulation problem.

  At the editorial meeting, while he gloated about the mail, Art passed around a box of apple crumb muffins, his first complimentary breakfast offering since I’d worked for the paper. This weekly meeting, about as formal as it got there, was held in Art’s second-floor office in the small building, which had been someone’s house a century ago, and was the most rundown structure on Main and the only one that faced backward, into the parking lot. Whether from being hand-hewn or from enduring decades of damp, salty seaside weather, floors had slanted, walls had buckled. No architectural right angle could be found in the place. In the shabby downstairs foyer, Peg, the receptionist, answered the phone, doubled as a copy editor, and handled subscriptions with relaxed cheerfulness. “I’ve been here forever,” she’d say by way of introduction. Every day she wore the same cardigan sweater over her shoulders and the same bubble-gum-pink wedgies, with or without thin beige socks.

  Design and page layout occupied the former dining room, still wallpapered in faded pink roses, and advertising had the living room. The kitchen, unchanged from the forties, had an ancient round-shouldered refrigerator, where Art stored the bag lunch he brought from home. All day, staffers poured themselves coffee from the only modern appliance, an electric drip coffeemaker that sat on the chipped tile counter.

  For editorial meetings, the full-time reporting staff—Bernadette the intern, Rob (just out of college), and I—rolled our matching pedestal chairs out of our shared office and through the narrow hallway, bumping over thresholds and banging into walls, to Art’s slightly less musty space. We sat around him in a semicircle, notebooks on our laps, mugs of coffee on the floor next to our feet. This morning, we also had our muffins. We held them on little square napkins.

  “I want you to keep it up,” Art told me.

  “Keep what up?”

  “Just be irritating.”

  I didn’t argue with that description of myself, since being irritating was a trait I cultivated. Although I was always taken aback when someone remarked on it. As I took a sip of coffee, I noticed that Bernadette was wearing a pullover sweater in a color similar to the burnt orange satin fabric on the Nicholas bedroom couch.

  The event, now fourteen days past, had cast a lingering spell. By “the event,” I do not mean the dog bite, which had healed, but the brief encounter—the cop, the
naked woman, and me. My only comparable experience was fallout from passionate necking sessions with my first boyfriend. After a torrid night with Evan, I would go to high school in a near stupor, attending class after class in a state of obliviousness, reliving every kiss and grope. Twenty years later, here I was with similar daydreams.

  Even the chemistry between Sam and Deidre, the palpable connection of alien beings, much as it repulsed me, propelled me back to that moment when I saw the woman and almost simultaneously felt McKee close in behind me.

  Sam now greeted me every morning with “Nuqneh.” He explained that it meant “What do you want?” There was no word in Klingon for “good morning” or “hello.” What was in store for this eccentric child? Was he an accident waiting to happen? I used my sensual daydreams as a distraction to shield myself from worry.

  I was unable to formulate the simplest inquiries about Deidre. “Does she have brothers or sisters?” “What do her parents do?” “Tell me about her family.” I rehearsed the questions in my head, but as innocent as they sounded, they seemed to reveal their true motives: revulsion and morbid curiosity. I should stop at her house and introduce myself to her mother. Every day, I planned to and put it off. I was sure there was only one parent in Deidre’s life, because I believed that every depressed, loner, weirdness tendency in Sam was my fault. I traced the warping back to the day his father, at my request, had left. I couldn’t figure out how everything got all mixed up together: McKee and I in that bedroom, Sam and Deidre every day.

  One evening at the dinner table, I stared at Sam across a plate of pasta, dreaming about McKee. The grip of his arm on mine, the smell of his neck. At first I had recalled only his entrancing aftershave, but now I imagined an infusion of sweat and brutish masculinity.

  Later, behind my locked bedroom door, I’d imitated the naked woman. Although keeping semiclothed, in the extra-large T-shirt I slept in, I laid myself out, supple and willing. The leg arrangement—limbs slightly more than casually separated—felt especially erotic, as if I were extending an invitation. Yet, I couldn’t make sense of that right arm. Flung out to the side, it hit the edge of the bed at her elbow, but it couldn’t bend down, because she was on her back. This was awkward and uncomfortable. It made my forearm—hanging unsupported in the air—feel like a ten-pound weight. How could she have slept in that position?