Malagash

by Joey Comeau

  “It might give him more time,” my mother said, “but it will not save his life, Sunday.”

  “More time is more time.”

  “No, it isn’t.” She’s trying to be patient. “Not always.”

  “This is such bullshit.” I keep raising my voice. “How is this hard to understand? The longer he is alive, the more time we get to spend with him. Don’t you want more time with him?”

  “Of course I do,” my mother says. “But not everything is about me.”

  >_

  I’m sitting outside in the dark again, staring at the elephant. The screen door creaks behind me, and my mother joins me on the step. She has a plate of food on her lap. A glass of wine in her hand. She sits close, but not too close. Which is how she treats me when she knows I’m sulking.

  “You’re missing all the fun,” she says, looking out toward the broken-down house.

  “I respectfully disagree.” I slide to the left, my movement slow and fake, more like sign language than real movement, a clumsy pantomime to let her know she is sitting too close, that I am unhappy. It is an embarrassingly obvious act that I am horrified to watch myself perform.

  My mother doesn’t even try to hide her amusement.

  “Just sitting out here looking at a collapsed house in the dark, eh?” she says. “I could go get you a pen and paper if you want. You could write some poetry about how the house is a metaphor for your poor old heart, crushed under the inescapable weight of passing time? Or you could write down a name for each of the stars in the sky, and by naming them ensure that they might never be forgotten. So they might never be forgotten the way you are forgotten, out here, all alone in the cold?”

  I know that I’m not actually angry at my mother. I love my mother, and I love her the most when she’s like this, when she has that laugh hidden in her voice. But I don’t want to let go of my frustration yet, either. It’s comforting to be sitting out here, feeling this way. Like I’m finally feeling the right thing at the right time. She’s going to ruin that. She’s going to make me laugh.

  “I’d like to be alone,” I tell her.

  “Well, you could always go lie down in that field,” she says. “There’s lots of room!”

  “Maybe I will,” I say. And there’s an honest-to-god pout in my voice now. Horrifying. Like a little baby, the wailing god of petulance. Again I’m watching myself from outside. A little baby throwing a little tantrum that I am helpless to stop. My mother keeps smiling. Patient and amused. Which is infuriating. Which is meant to be infuriating.

  “Does this mean you don’t want any potato salad?” she says.

  >_

  We sit and watch the house that has stumbled in that field. The house isn’t doing anything, but the sky behind it is moving, slowly. The light is changing. Everything around the house is changing, while it sits there and does nothing.

  Behind us, in my grandmother’s kitchen, my uncle Frank does card tricks. His voice carries.

  “Is it the jack of spades?” he says. “No? Then what’s this under your wine glass?”

  A voice answers, too quiet to hear properly. My grandmother.

  “It’s a business card!” my uncle Frank says. “Interesting. Interesting. Well, maybe we should call the number on it?”

  My grandmother says something else, again too quiet.

  “No, I’m saying call it.” My uncle sounds frustrated now. “Here’s my cell phone. Look, I’ll call it for you,” and then we can hear a phone ringing, which nobody answers. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

  “This is too elaborate.”

  “It isn’t elaborate. You just have to answer the phone.”

  “It’s a very good trick, Frank,” my grandmother says. “May I have my wine back please?”

  Beside me, my mother offers the plate.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any of this?” she says. She takes a bite of the potato salad, making a satisfied, contented sound. “Mmm.” Not too obvious, but more than obvious enough. She would never say “Eat,” would never tell me what to do, is not the type of mother to nag. But this is just as obvious, in its way. Does she think I don’t know what she’s doing?

  When I was little, I saw someone use reverse psychology in a movie, or on some TV show. I was thrilled with the idea, thinking that this new secret knowledge was the edge I needed. Thinking I would finally get the upper hand, thinking for once that I might win.

  But when I tried it out against one of my mother’s threats to withhold dessert (“I don’t even like chocolate. Whatever.”), I found that, of course, it was just one more way for her to tease me. (“You don’t? Oh, that’s too bad. I bought these two chocolate bars and everything. I guess I’ll just eat both of them.”) Neither of us were willing to back down from the deception, so I sat and watched, furious, as my mother ate two whole chocolate bars.

  She takes another bite of the potato salad. Then offers it again. It does look good.

  >_

  “Come inside,” my mother says. “Come say hello to your grandmother. Talk to your uncles. Listen to their dumb jokes. One or two more glasses of wine and your grandmother might tell us about her spoon collection.”

  “Well, you got me,” I say, already regretting the bitterness in my tone. “My one weakness. Collectable spoons.”

  “Oh, I see. You’re too cool for spoons now. I understand.”

  “They’re spoons.”

  “Your grandmother has the most badass spoon collection you’ve ever seen,” my mom says. “She’s got a whole row of spoons from old mental hospitals. She has a spoon from the Amityville Horror house.”

  “What, like from the movie?” I can’t imagine my grandmother collecting movie props.

  “From the actual house. The real-life house. I have no idea what she paid for it. She says she bought it online. And those are just the spoons she has on display. Once, just once, she showed me a spoon that someone used as a murder weapon. She won’t say who, or where she got it. It’s not even that old. It looks brand new. She has it wrapped in plastic to protect it.”

  She pauses.

  “Anyway, I’ve said too much. Come hang out with your dumb, weird family,” my mom says. “You can’t spend the whole night just mooning around in your own brain.”

  “I can. I can and I will.”

  >_

  “I’ll tell you what,” my mother says. “If you promise not to be a wet blanket, and if you spend some time with your brother tonight, I will tell you a secret I’ve never told anyone else.”

  A wet blanket. The light and noise from inside the house along one side of my mother’s face, insects and evening shadow on the other. Her face is serious, but never too serious. Never serious in the eyes, anyway. Everything is funny to my mother, and it makes it hard sometimes to get close, to know what kind of woman she is underneath. She’s always laughing.

  But I do love secrets.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You’ll come inside? Make an effort? Pretend to be a real human girl who smiles?” She’s deadly pretend serious now. Negotiating. And then suddenly, an intentional crack shows warmth underneath. “I love your smile, Sunday, everyone does. When you smile, it reminds me of when you were a baby, and you would pee anywhere you wanted. It didn’t matter where you were, or who was holding you. The world was yours to pee on, and not one person complained. You would smile that wonderful smile, and your victim would start smiling, too, soaked in pee. Nobody could resist your charms.”

  “Okay, I’ll come inside,” I say, trying not to laugh. “What’s your secret?”

  “Let me tell you.” She scoots closer to me. “The first thing I ever loved about this house was the pond back there.” She thumbs the direction. “Reeds and tall grass everywhere. I loved it. Enormous dragonflies, the whole package. There’s a little wharf for fishing and tying the laces on ice skates. It was there whe
n your father first brought me home to meet his mother. It was there when he was a small child. It’s always been there.”

  “And?”

  “And two years before you were born, I drowned in that pond. I was out swimming at night, drunk and stupid. My feet got tangled in the long grass. I drowned, and I died.”

  “Like on TV?” I say, but she doesn’t answer. “Like, the paramedics told you that you were legally dead for two minutes? You saw a white light at the end of a tunnel? A bearded face appeared in the stars and called to you?”

  “I was dead for a whole day,” my mother says. “I woke coughing muck on a metal table at the morgue.”

  “That’s stupid,” I tell her, trying to figure out the joke.

  Across the road, a light comes on in one of the elephant’s windows, dim and yellow. There is no car in the drive.

  “Nothing stays dead out here,” my mother says.

  And then she winks.

  >_

  I have a recording where neither of them talk at all until the very end. You can hear the sound of their breathing, and I think you can hear my mother crying, though I can’t be sure. She sniffles, once. It could just be a sniffle. But then, after all that silence, my father clears his throat and it sounds like he’s been crying, too.

  “You made me very happy,” he says.

  I shouldn’t be doing this, recording them without their knowledge. But it is too late to stop now. This will all go into the virus. A ghost should be filled with secrets anyway, shouldn’t it? And by recording everyone, I get to hear parts of him that are hidden from me. Parts of him that are only for Simon, only for my mother. Only for my uncle Frank.

  “You get cancer yet?” my father says. He makes the same joke whenever Frank comes in to visit.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Well, don’t worry. You will. Maybe next year is your year.”

  “Or maybe it isn’t genetic?” Frank says. “Maybe it’s based on merit?”

  They laugh.

  But the recordings of my father and mother alone are the ones that feel the most personal. That feel the most important. I’ve gotten good at hiding my phone.

  Monday:

  “I wish I could come with you,” my mother says.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” my father says. “I’m dying. When I die, that’s it. The end. Cut to black.”

  “I know,” my mother says. “I’m saying that sounds nice.”

  Thursday:

  “I want Sunday to write my obituary,” my father says on the recording. “I already asked her.”

  “I thought Frank was working on something?” My mother’s voice. “I thought things were better between you?”

  “They are, but I want Sunday to write it.”

  Friday:

  “I won’t be back in time to see you tonight, love,” she says.

  “Well, then I guess this is goodbye forever.”

  “Goodbye forever,” my mother says.

  Maybe I should feel jealous, hearing my mother say those secret words. But I’m not.

  “Well, then I guess this is goodbye forever.” I play it back again and again.

  “Goodbye forever,” my mother says. “Goodbye forever. Goodbye forever. Goodbye forever.” Over and over again until it doesn’t mean anything. “Goodbye forever.”

  >_

  In the car, I record Simon and my mother singing a song. One of the waif’s endless supply of Muppet songs. It isn’t the cleanest recording in the world. You can hear the white noise hum of the car driving. The occasional thump of a pothole. But you can also hear my mother laughing and Simon practically hollering the words, “Mahna Mahna! Do doo do-doo-doo!” over and over again, all along the road to Tatamagouche. These are things worth recording. In the back seat, Simon keeps getting louder and louder. “Do doo do-doo-doo!”

  “Okay,” my mother says, finally. “Okay, that’s enough. No more ‘Mahna Mahna.’ I’m going to lose my mind.”

  “Well, what should we sing?” the waif says.

  “Anything else. Literally, anything else. Maybe something quieter?”

  There is a brief pause, and then very quietly the waif starts singing again, doing his Bert voice. “Got my hat on my head. Got my scarf around my neck. I’m all dressed up . . . and ready to gooooooo!”

  When we arrive at the hospital, that nurse is there. She steps out from behind her station.

  “We’ve been trying to call you,” she says.

  “We don’t get reception in the—” my mother starts, but she stops when she realizes what’s happening. “Oh,” she says.

  “I’m sorry.” The nurse reaches out for my mother’s arm, but doesn’t connect. My mother has taken a step backwards. “I’m sorry. He’s gone,” the nurse says.

  Our father is dead, she says.

  And then she keeps right on saying it.

  >_

  While the nurse talks, my mother listens calmly, with her arm protectively around Simon’s shoulder, her other hand holding mine. I try to squeeze back, but it feels like all the strength has gone out of my muscles. Neither Simon nor I are looking at the nurse. We’re watching our mother.

  Our mother is staring straight ahead, though. She looks almost angry. Eventually, the nurse stops talking and tells us she has to go find the doctor.

  “He wanted to speak with you,” she says to my mother.

  “Of course,” my mother says. “Of course.”

  We watch the nurse go back behind her island, where she picks up a phone. As soon as she looks away, we’re moving. My mother takes us to the women’s bathroom, pushes the door open, ushers us inside. There, her hand slips away, and she lets out a barking sound. Simon jumps, and I almost laugh. I’m so scared. Our mother lets out another bark, and then she’s crying. Loud and ugly, and it sounds more like choking than barking now. She slides down the wall ’til she is sitting flat on the dirty bathroom floor, and she cries and cries while Simon and I stand there and watch. I keep expecting Simon to start crying, too, but he just stands there as stupidly as me. I don’t know what to do. Neither of us do. We stand in the women’s bathroom and watch our mother sob on the floor until there is spit and tears all over her face.

  She cries like we aren’t even here.

  In the context of hundreds of pounds of meat and bone and muscle, of course their eyes seem gentle.

  The cows are waiting for us to do something alarming. Simon looks even smaller next to these animals. I imagine him astride the largest, sitting proudly in his button-up shirt, the sun shining behind him. Purpose setting those slight shoulders. Why are there no legends of children who ride cows? There should be. We could conquer this whole continent, riding great beasts like these.

  “We should name them,” the waif says, his hand on a huge flank. I’ve been scared to touch them, but I do so now. The cow does not rear or buck. It does not snort or gnash. It accepts my touch with the indifference of a giant. Of a machine. I am trying not to think of it as stupid meat and bone and muscle. I am trying not to think of myself as stupid meat and bone and muscle.

  “This creature will be called Lydia,” I say. “She will be called Lydia the Destroyer. Lydia the Great Flame, and together we will burn the countryside.”

  “Lydia the Tattooed Lady!” Simon says, and he starts to sing. “Lydia, oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia? Lydia the Tattooed Lady!”

  “She’s got eyes that folks adore so,” I sing, too.

  “And a torso even more so!”

  We have filled every afternoon this week riding up and down the red asphalt on our bikes. The Malagash Bible Camp. The salt mine memorial. The church, the beaches, the wharves. We’ve touched every lobster trap. Climbed inside every abandoned rowboat. We spent hours sitting on top of barns, sneakers on hot metal. Fingers tracing rivets.

  We should not be this close to animals this large. But wh
o is left to tell us that? There’s no sign posted out in this field. Nobody is watching. Our grandmother is on her errands; our mother won’t leave her room. We are subject to no authority, my brother and I. We are free. Governed only by what little sense we were born with.

  -- FOUR --

  >_

  We wander up and down the rows of a vineyard, grape vines that grow taller than us. We walk in separate rows, so that we are just our voices. Simon’s voice is high and strong now. It feels stronger every day. We spend all our time together now, just the two of us, talking and making stupid jokes. Filling the hours with our company.

  The dirt at the bottom of every row is dark today, still wet from this morning’s rain. This vineyard is three fields over from our grandmother’s house, and we usually stop here on our way out farther or on our ride back home. Like a pit stop. The grapes are too sour to eat, but we keep trying.

  “I know where Dad used to hide his knife collection,” I’m saying. “The little table in the living room is a chest. It has all his knives and his hunting rifle. If we ever go home, I’m going to take one.”

  “Which one?” my brother says.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet,” I say. “The one that feels the most like our father.” I try to remember him showing me his knives, try to remember which ones he even had, their shape and size. There was a big military-looking knife. Like a Rambo knife. I remember that. And a switchblade. Which one was the coolest? Which one did our father like best? There were more, I’m sure of it. But I can’t picture them. I can only see my father’s big goofy grin. “You should take one, too, Simon. He would want you to have one.”