Boarded Windows

by Dylan Hicks

  The sculpture was about nine feet tall, an Amazonian or Lachaisian woman with a stump for a head and skin made of plastic tiles—Shrinky Dink plastic, I realized as I got closer. On each of the die-face-sized tiles Maryanne had drawn some portion of the figure’s oddly shaped body in colored pencil: part of a toenail or ankle, part of a navel or areola, or just a square of peach-flesh skin. When I kneeled down, I saw that the figure’s dark pubic hair was suggested by tile-sized drawings or tracings of Freud’s head (“the Shrinky Shrink,” Maryanne later explained). The imbricated tiles tinkled from the breeze of my waving hand, since they weren’t stuck like skin to a hidden skeleton as I’d imagined on first glance, but were finely punctured and hung by fishing line from a framework of white cardboard and silver wire, resulting in an impressive if not unquestionably beautiful mosaic sculpture. I was still studying the thing when Maryanne returned to the room. “This is fantastic,” I said. She thanked me and described in unintelligible detail her ingenious method for making the sculpture. I complimented her again. “It’s too lumpy, though,” she said, “and I can’t figure out how to make her head.”

  She walked over to her dresser, on top of which there were maybe a dozen tapes and CDs, a boom box, and a school portrait of Rowan, manifesting the genre’s ironies, I hoped, in that the most contortedly counterfeit school-photo smiles are forced by the purest of heart. She put on a Tricky CD and sat down on the edge of her queen-sized bed, dressed with a quilt made of brick-sized patches of small-town suits. I sat down next to her. “So did you go to art school?” I said.

  She laughed. “I can’t afford art school. I just wing it. I’m almost a folk artist. When they interview me, I’m gonna act super bumpkiny.”

  “You think they’ll buy that? I mean, you’re in Chicago and all.”

  “I don’t really think there’ll be interviews.”

  “There might be.”

  “I still need to make the head.”

  “I like how swirly this music sounds,” I said, and lay down with my legs still hanging over the bed, my boots grazing the floor. I turned my head to look at the trophies on Rowan’s dresser. The quilt smelled like the corner of a storage closet that was itself in the corner of a thrift store’s back room. The trophies were topped with chess knights and kings, bowling balls and bowlers, tennis rackets and players, curling stones and brooms. “Rowan must be really smart and athletic,” I said.

  “Kind of,” Maryanne said. “But those trophies are rejects and extras from the shop. My boss lets me take them home for him. But he is smart, and kind of athletic.”

  “What grade is he in, then, third?”

  “First.”

  “He’s tall.”

  “Yeah, so far,” she said.

  “What sort of stuff is he into?”

  “Well, you know, regular stuff. Uno, Legos, trains, bowling. He probably could win a bowling trophy fair and square.”

  “That must be hard for a kid, bowling,” I said.

  “Except they have bumpers now, so the ball never goes in the gutter. Well, sometimes it sneaks into the gutter at the very end.”

  “Does he push it or roll it?”

  “He drops it.”

  “Oh.”

  “WHAMP!” Maryanne yelled, startling me. “That’s how it sounds.” I laughed and she yelled the sound again.

  “Is most of what they say about parenthood true?” I said.

  “What do they say again?”

  “That it’s the greatest and hardest thing you’ll ever do. That sort of thing.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s true.” Pause. “There are harder things.”

  “Sure.”

  “Not things I’ve done, but they’re out there.”

  “Hunger and war …” I said.

  “I love Rowan. Beyond words, you know. But it’s dull sometimes, lonely. We’re having more interesting conversations now, but he’s still just a kid, so they aren’t real conversations. I mean, they are, they are. Now I feel bad for saying that. But sometimes they aren’t, so it can be isolating.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m supposed to make friends with the other parents, the other moms and stuff.”

  “Who says?”

  “It’s just something I hear,” she said.

  “But you’re not really interested in making friends with the other moms?”

  “Not like I’m a misanthrope. But it’s not much to have in common.”

  “Do some of them want to talk about home improvements? A friend of mine’s married and he says that’s what they talk about, kitchen remodels and stuff like that.”

  “No, I haven’t heard much about kitchens—it’s not an affluent school, the one Rowan’s in. Although once at the park this Mexican lady in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt tried to talk to me about stainless-steel appliances, how they’re really fancy but show fingerprints.”

  “Why does it matter that she was Mexican?” I said.

  “Why does it matter that she was wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt?” she said.

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “My grandma was Mexican.”

  “Oh.”

  “But then the woman at the park turned out to be the nanny, or the nanny-maid or whatever. So it wasn’t even her stove. Doesn’t that seem worse to you, talking about a fucking stove and it’s not even your stove?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there was, you know, a critical subtext, like: These norteamericanos are so dumb, they’ll buy a stainless-steel stove and not even consider in advance the fingerprints.”

  “Maybe. I think she was just an idiot.”

  “Well, you’d have a better sense.”

  “Of idiocy?”

  “What? No, no. Not at all! I mean, you were there at the park, you talked to the woman, so you’d have a better sense.”

  “Oh. ’Cause I was thinking, Fuck you.”

  “Sure. That would’ve been a reasonable response.”

  “But now I know what you meant. I’m not mad.”

  “Are you still in touch with Wanda?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we talk on the phone, email sometimes. You still see her?”

  “No. Well, once in a while. I work with this theater troupe, so I’ll see her if she comes to review one of our shows. Or just around.”

  “What are you doing with a theater troupe?”

  “Like, why am I doing it?” I said.

  “No, I mean, are you doing lights? Are you acting?”

  “Acting? I can’t act. I do publicity mostly, send out postcards, hang fliers. I make tapes to play before the show.”

  “Does Wanda give you guys good reviews?”

  “Sometimes, not always. She panned one of the shows, too forcefully if you ask me.”

  “Yeah, I just did.”

  “What?”

  “I just did ask you.”

  “Oh right. The show she panned wasn’t one of our better ones,” I said. “She’s usually pretty discerning.”

  “She’s so smart. She should be performing again,” Maryanne said.

  “Do you still have that red leather jacket?”

  “Huh?”

  “That red leather jacket you used to have. It had a belt.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I still have that. I don’t really wear it anymore. Why?”

  “I just liked it.”

  “Do you want me to put it on?”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  “I will.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you ever hear from Wade?” she said. She was on her hands and knees, fetching a big plastic bin from under her bed.

  “No. We’re not …”—I was distracted—“Before he left, he told me some strange things. I haven’t sorted it all out.”

  “Yeah, I heard about some of that.”

  “You did?”

  “Here it is. There’s only one button left.”

  “I remember how the third one from the top was missing.”

  “Oh.” She put it o
n.

  “It looks really good.”

  “It’s kind of tight on me.”

  “It’s great.”

  “You want me to take off my shirt and then put the jacket back on?”

  “Yeah.”

  She did that, but with her back turned, not like a striptease. I prefer to wear jockey shorts with jeans, but that day I improvidently wore blue, shark-themed boxers with several tiny rips and an exhausted elastic band. Our lovemaking wasn’t depressingly hasty but it wasn’t slow either. I suppose we didn’t want to take advantage of Luke’s generosity. After we’d fucked in a few positions on the bed, I asked Maryanne to stand up and put her loafers back on, led her out of the byroom and over to the nearest upright piano, which was in the middle of the L’s horizontal line, still quite a ways from the control room but exposed enough to give me an exhibitionistic thrill. She bent over, gripped the moving handles on the back of the piano, handles like those of a very large rolling pin. We started fucking again, slowly at first. When I spanked her the piano inched forward a bit, and just then I let slip a pornographic phrase, met, to the extent that I could judge from behind, with neither hostility nor indulgence. She ignored it, would be a simple way to put it. The phrase immediately embarrassed me, but also spurred me to come too soon, not with—all these qualifiers are tiring even me—humiliating or ridiculously inconsiderate prematurity, but too soon all the same. I tried to pull out and stanch myself but with only partial success, resulting in a staggered, tentative orgasm, inferior in itself to the tremulous one I accomplished later in front of a guest sink belonging to my aunt and uncle, who were out, shopping or golfing I guessed, when I got to their unlocked house.

  I wanted to watch their giant TV, but somehow that seemed too invasive, so I just sat on the floral sofa in their fussy but comfortable living room. On the coffee table there were three books on how to simplify one’s life and a copy of Time. I reached for the magazine, but decided to rest instead. The sofa’s fabric felt cool and silky on my impoverished cheek; a day later I’d need to hit up my uncle for gas money.

  When my mother Marleen died, she was cash poor but debt free: no credit cards, no car loan, no mortgage on her parents’ ranch house. I would have inherited the ranch house to live in or sell had I not refused it, after an English eccentric I’d read about who’d renounced a much vaster fortune. I tried to explain my refusal in meandering, philosophical terms a few times, to Wanda for instance during one of our pathetic breakup dialogues. To my aunt I simply said, “I have my reasons.” I did ask for three thousand dollars, which she and my uncle sent me after they sold the house without a realtor’s help. My aunt had written something on the memo line, but then crossed it out; this still bothers me.

  After a pleasant if dull afternoon and a similar dinner, my aunt took me to the garage, the stopover for the last of my mother’s unclaimed things: the easy chair and the contents of two white cardboard boxes. “Why don’t you bring the boxes in the house where it’s nicer?” she said, but I was already rummaging them so she left me alone. The keepsakes weren’t much. I’d hoped for diaries, letters, maybe a letter from Wade, or another photo of Martha Dickson to accompany the two Wade had given me. There was none of that. There were a few undated, unrevealing, distantly Blakean watercolors, possibly done in the dorm room Marleen and Martha briefly shared; a not thoroughly cleaned ashtray; a couple of Christmas photos of me as a toddler; and thirty-eight notebooks filled (half-filled in one case) with Marleen’s sentence diagrams. From her midtwenties till her death at age forty-four, Marleen spent a half hour or so of most evenings parsing and diagramming sentences copied from books, newspapers, magazines, flour bags, circulars. The white boxes apparently held her corpus in that field. I sat on a twenty-four-pack of soda, opened one of the notebooks at random, and planted my index finger on a sentence: “In this, it is unlike such other popular sports as golf, track and field, swimming, diving, ice skating, archery, and marksmanship.” The sentence was transcribed (conventionally and without analysis) at the top of the page in blue pen, then diagrammed below in pencil, correctly and with no erasure marks. Its unstated subject (“What’s this it?” Wade would have said) was almost certainly tennis. Marleen was a good player with a powerful left-handed serve. I remembered us resting on a courtside bench after two midday sets during the summer of ’87’s heat wave. It had been a close match, but she’d won all her service games and had broken me twice. She was heavy by then and her slowness around the court was my main advantage. My drop shot wasn’t so masterly, but it sufficed, and by the end of the first set she didn’t bother coming in for it. “Now that I’m so fat,” she said on the bench, “I hate sweating and eating in public.” “You’re not fat,” I said. “What does fat mean if I’m not fat?” she said. Some sweat dripped off my forehead and stung my eye. Our water bottles were pretty much empty, so she poured and shook out the last drops on our heads, first on mine, then on hers, and I enjoyed the drops’ slow descent from my crown to my neck and down the back of my T-shirt. The court was badly cracked—a few points had been decided by odd bounces—and littered with tree droppings, but it was well shaded and attractively situated next to a creek, wherein two kids had been wading and fighting during much of our match, a few of their screams engendering unforced errors.

  I picked up another notebook but decided it would be cheating to open randomly to a different page, so I kept browsing but in a more linear fashion. The notebooks weren’t dated, except indirectly with the odd topical sentence, but eventually I found an incomplete notebook, presumably her last, the one found on her deathbedside table between a Chicago Tribune and a shaky-handed note that read, “I’m having my period.” It took everyone awhile to recognize the amateur grammarian’s parting joke.

  As far as I know, my mother didn’t have a favorite easy chair, as my aunt put it, but the chair in the garage was the one I’d anticipated, a round-backed chair with broken springs, upholstered in a shiny fabric of wide pink-and-sky-blue stripes, with a fringed, sky-blue skirt. At one time it must have been a comfortable chair, but that time preceded mine, and I have no clear memories of my mother sitting in it. I have clearer memories of setting laundry baskets on it when I went down to use the washer and dryer in our Minneapolis basement. Nevertheless I’ve become sentimental about the chair, and have moved it to four different houses and apartments. When I got home to Minneapolis in that fall of ’98, I found under its cushion two cassettes—a blank Realistic and Bolling Greene’s Renegade Ticker—along with a quarter, a green lighter, and a knife-sharpened pencil, all of which items I now keep on a thin metal shelf above my boyishly narrow bed.

  Clouds

  GROWING UP, I TOLD FRIENDS, A FEW FRIENDS, THE story of my late, drug-ruined mother Martha, and perhaps as a result some cachet and sympathy fell my way. I told Wanda the story on what must have been our fourth or fifth date. We were sitting in an uninviting nook of a large nightclub on a slow, eighteen-plus dance night. The nook was furnished with a carpeted, built-in bench splotched with blackened chewing gum, and a round, industrial table, whose bottom, my fingers discovered, was a whole textured ceiling of chewing gum. It wasn’t so loud in the club that I had to shout, but I did have to speak up and was soon hoarse. Wanda listened attentively and sympathetically, but didn’t go through the stock nurturing motions I may have been seeking. I came to admire her for that. Matter-of-factly she said, “If you ever want to meet your relatives, or try to, I’ll help you, drive to North Dakota with you, whatever.”

  After hearing Wade’s clouding, enriching version of my origins and adoption, I started to exploit the story, telling it with untoward frequency, first to all my friends in an increasingly exhausting, decreasingly helpful flurry of narration, then over time to new friends, who, in keeping with the normal pattern, emerged more often during my nascent adulthood than they do now, when they are wished for only abstractly. I told the story to various bandmates, in basements while waiting for the headliner to finish, in vans when the rest of
the group was asleep; I told it to coworkers over drinks. I was especially eager to tell the story to girlfriends or potential girlfriends (I trust I needn’t elucidate the psychology probably at work there), but nevertheless didn’t rush to tell them the story. On the first mention of family, I’d usually reveal my orphanhood and hint at something beyond the death of a single mother, but surrender no specifics. If the friendship or romance proceeded, I’d tell the whole story a few weeks later, or several months later, depending on the level of intimacy attained or desired. I always tried to unwrap the story with a suggestion of inadvertence.

  Well, sometimes genuine inadvertence factored into the unwrapping; it was a story I wanted to tell, and more than once I launched into it at the wrong time. I’ve been giving the impression that this was all very cynical and calculated, but I don’t think I fully recognized the cynicism and calculation till later. Unrecognized calculation may still be calculation, but not of the shrewdest type. Perhaps that’s not true, though, and anyway I’m giving myself too credit: certainly I knew I was trying to use the story, and the steely candor with which I told it, seductively, spilling it over long dinners, over coffees, once on a last-legs swan boat. Sometimes the telling was postcoital, a kind of reinforcement, my narrative pace slower than usual, my voice raspy and mellow, resonating in my chest as I lay in the dark. Once, while describing Marleen’s drive from Palatine to Enswell, I was interrupted by a gentle snore.

  For some audiences, I’d emphasize mystery and ambiguity, comparing Marleen’s and Wade’s conflicting accounts and speculating on the tellers’ motivations. For others, I’d tell the story more confidently, conflating Marleen’s and Wade’s versions but largely accepting his and not really citing my sources, or at least not letting the sources encroach on the telling. I didn’t always narrate with the dry calm I was after—I wanted to hover impartially over the story as I’d hovered over the players and the little pantyhose-colored foam ball on my boyhood’s vibrating football field—but I didn’t force emotion either. Sometimes I’d tell the story in group settings. Not at loud parties or on open-mike nights, but at small gatherings, for example on a friend’s lyrically lit porch postcookout, lounging with four or five people, most of them near-strangers to me. In these settings, my recitals aimed for stoical yet subtly vulnerable comedy. The story usually went over well, most notably with an actor and professional storyteller named Corey Gustafson. Gustafson was a guest on that dim porch, listening, I later recalled, with almost disconcerting concentration. He phoned me a few seasons later, in the spring of ’96. He was working up a one-man show made up of four dramatic monologues about mothers, he said, and wondered if he could turn a mutatis mutandis version of my story into the second act. I laughed nervously. His silence proved his seriousness, and I gave him the go-ahead. Possessiveness about the story would be unbecoming, I figured, and I was flattered, though my pride and excitement quickly gave way to embarrassment and regret. The story, I knew by then, was already overexposed in my circle and possibly in some overlapping ones.