“No,” I said. “Of course you can’t. Have a seat and relax.”
She had on a pair of brown corduroy slacks with slightly flaring legs and a ribbed orange turtleneck jersey. Over the jersey she’d flung a truly horrid shawl, a crocheted brown-and-orange lap blanket kind of thing that could only have been purchased at one of those nursing home crafts fairs she attended on a regular basis. I’d yet to figure out why it was that Agnes always added to her outfits some accessory—a shawl, a scarf, an eight-pound brooch—so dazzlingly ugly even she seemed self-conscious about it. She peeled the shawl off her shoulders, practically lighting up the room with sparks of static electricity, and draped it over the back of a chair. “Oh, Clyde,” she said, “a sofa in the kitchen. I’d forgotten how bohemian you are.” She checked the cushions to make sure there wasn’t anything unspeakable there and lowered herself down. “But it doesn’t make sense. Why put a sofa in the kitchen? I’ve never heard of that.”
There was a ticking of nails on the stairs, and Otis pranced into the room, sniffing the heavy honeydew scent of Agnes’s Summer Meadow “splash.” In the past week or so, the dog had begun to show some signs of increased confidence. He frequently roamed around the apartment by himself, and although he started out the night sleeping on his pile of blankets in the corner, I usually woke to find him curled up at the foot of my bed.
Agnes sat upright on the sofa and clutched the handles of her shopping bag. “Oh, that’s the little dog. He’s adorable,” she said uneasily. “He doesn’t bite, does he?”
“No, dear, of course not. Look at him.”
He sat on his haunches in front of the sofa and eyed Agnes, his stringy ears pulled back and his nose twitching.
“What’s he trying to say?” Agnes asked.
“I don’t know. I think he just wants to say hello. Isn’t that right, Otis?” I asked gooily. To my enormous satisfaction, he responded to my insipid tone by wagging his tail.
Agnes reached to pat his head, then snapped back her hand as suddenly as if she were testing an iron for heat. “He has eyebrows!” she said. The dog cocked his head to one side, lost interest, and checked the corners of the room for edible trash. Then he went to the chair with Agnes’s shawl, flattened back his ears, and started to sniff.
“He isn’t going to do anything, is he?”
“Otis,” I said, and he turned his head toward me, “you aren’t going to pee on Agnes’s shawl, are you?”
He smiled and panted.
“Well, don’t suggest it, Clyde,” Agnes whispered.
I pointed to the stairs and snapped my fingers. “Go,” I commanded. He whimpered but headed back upstairs slowly, his body close to the ground. Only a few days earlier, he’d started obeying my commands, and I’d been basking in a testosterone rush since. It’s obvious why dogs are such an appealing possession to the kinds of men traumatized by Hillary Clinton: loyal and obedient, not to mention that with a dog at your side, at least one set of balls is hanging out in plain view.
“I didn’t think I should come empty-handed,” Agnes said, “so I made some cookies last night.” She sighed and pulled at the ribbed turtleneck, straightening out the lines running down her chest. “I’m afraid they got a little burned. I wonder if there isn’t something wrong with the oven. I called the maintenance man, but they never come when a woman calls. A man calls—oh boy, they drop everything and run over as if it were a medical emergency.”
“That bag is filled with cookies?”
“Not filled. I brought some beer, too.” She reached in and took out a six-pack with five bottles in it. “Put these in the fridge, will you? Oh, what the heck, maybe I’ll have one. It’s almost noon.”
I went to a cabinet to get her a glass, and while my back was still turned, Agnes said, “Well, don’t make me feel like that, Clyde, I’ve had a long, exhausting drive. Barbara didn’t fall asleep until we were in Cambridge.”
“But I wasn’t even looking at you, sweetheart. Honestly.” I handed her a glass. “Maybe you should ask . . . Dad to call maintenance, if a man’s voice would help.”
“I did,” she said calmly. And then, so suddenly that it took me a moment to realize exactly what had happened, she burst into tears.
I retreated until I was backed up against the counter and could do nothing but look on in horror. Agnes’s whole frail body was trembling. From outside, I could hear the sounds of Donald and a friend setting up a table. They’d put one of Donald’s speakers in the yard, and “Jumping Jack Flash” was blaring from it, the high notes crackling and the bass distorted. Sunlight was pouring in the windows of the kitchen, too warm, bright, and intrusive.
I made a move toward Agnes, but she held up her hand to ward me off, and composed herself as suddenly as she’d fallen apart. “I’m fine, Clyde. I really am. I don’t know what came over me.” She twisted off the bottle cap with the kind of confidence all her other gestures lacked, poured the beer into her glass, and siphoned off a layer of foam. “It’s a lovely day for a cookout, isn’t it?” she asked. “Nice for this time of year. Anyway, I did ask. . . Dad to call maintenance.”
Then she began crying again, great heaving sobs this time.
“Oh, Agnes,” I said. “What is it?”
The front door banged open, and Barbara appeared in the kitchen doorway, her eyes still puffy with sleep and her face flushed. She looked at her mother in disgust and pulled back her hair to reveal the shaven sides of her head and a line of silver studs running up her right ear. “Can I have that hundred dollars now?” she asked.
Agnes stomped her foot and, through a fog of tears and phlegm, said, “No, you cannot. You can’t even be civil. You didn’t even say hello.”
“We made a deal, Mom.”
“I said you could have seventy-five!”
Barbara sat on the opposite end of the sofa from her mother. She was wearing the same baggy overalls and flannel shirt she’d been wearing when I visited in New Hampshire. She crossed her legs, resting one ankle on her knee. Sitting next to Agnes like that, so composed and solid, she looked particularly sensible, pincushion ears, nose stud, and shaved head notwithstanding. At moments, she had the kind of easy Gary Cooper swagger that was prized in women these days and considered despicable in men. “She’s crying about Grandpa, right?” she asked. She reached over and took one of Agnes’s hands in one of hers, a simple gesture of unexpected tenderness that flooded me with fondness for my dear, kind niece. “Did she tell you he’s got a girlfriend?”
“Girlfriend?” I said, wondering if I’d let it slip.
“He does not have a girlfriend!” Agnes sobbed.
“He’s got a girlfriend, Clyde. He’s been sneaking her in and out of the basement. It’s revolting.”
“We’ve never met her,” Agnes said. “She’s his nurse.”
Barbara tossed aside her mother’s hand. “You’re hopeless, Mom. I want that seventy-five bucks.” She turned to me. “We made a deal. She thought it would look less pathetic running down here to see Marcus if she dragged me along. So we’re helping each other out. Did she tell you she has to give Grandpa another fifty bucks a week?”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Agnes?”
Agnes had calmed down enough to pour the rest of her beer into her glass. “I think he’s paying the nurse,” she said, “that’s why he needs the extra money. But here’s what really worries me, Clyde: he’s going to visit Uncle Lon this weekend.”
“Well, what’s so bad about that? At least he’s getting out.” Since that ridiculous cover had been my suggestion, I felt some need to defend it.
“They can’t stand each other! He’s trying to make amends with everyone in the family. I got so nervous about it, I just couldn’t stay out there in the country. I figured coming down here would be a distraction.”
“I’m going back out to the car to sleep,” Barbara said.
“Don’t forget about the cookout. You haven’t had lunch.”
“I’ll stay for food, but then I want t
hat money.” Barbara stood up and bracelets jangled down her arm under her bulky shirtsleeves. She lifted her hand and shook them back up to her elbow. A strong smell of patchouli oil wafted over to me.
As Barbara was heading out the door, Otis came into the room and made a hesitant approach toward her, taking a few steps forward, cringing and retreating, then making a new, more decisive advance. “Oh, look!” Barbara said, her voice suddenly the high-pitched squeal of a little girl. She lay flat on her back on the dirty linoleum and made whimpering, come-hither sounds until she’d enticed him to her side and then up onto her chest. He stood there, looking down into her face, and then started to lick her nose.
Barbara pulled at the tuft of fur on top of Otis’s head until it was standing straight up. “A Mohawk,” she said.
In addition to the cookies, which I didn’t have the heart to look at, and the beer, two more bottles of which she drank in the next hour, Agnes had brought with her a copy of as much of the manuscript of our mother’s cookbook as she’d typed out. “I’d appreciate it if you could pass it on to Louise,” she said. “As a writer, she might have some suggestions.” She took a sip of her beer and laughed self-consciously. “Who knows, maybe she’ll want to show it to her editor.”
“Don’t count on it, Mom,” Barbara said. Instead of going to the car to take her nap, she’d fallen asleep on the floor, with Otis on her chest. Every few minutes, she woke to criticize something Agnes had said.
“I’ll give it to her next time I see her. It’s possible she’ll drop by this afternoon.”
At this, Agnes seemed to grow distraught. She began to pluck at her jersey, as if she were picking lint from it. The prospect of having to face Louise, a celebrity author in her eyes, though one whose books she couldn’t remember, was too much for her. She was pretty, sitting there with the sunlight slanting across her face and making her shorn hair look smart and shiny. If she’d been an actress playing a waif, she would have been charming right then, maybe even beautiful. But she wasn’t acting, and her emotions were gnawing at her so obviously that, instead of pulling me in, the sight of her made me want to look away. I went and lowered the match-stick blinds, then sat next to her. “Don’t worry about Louise,” I said. “She’s as insecure as the rest of us. And about. . . Dad,” I started. She glanced up from her jersey, let her hand drop onto the wooden arm of the sofa, and began to run her fingers over one of the cigarette burns.
But I wasn’t ready to confide in her yet, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to offer, I asked if she’d like another beer.
Sometime after noon, Marcus did finally show up, but not alone. He stumbled into the apartment with a statuesque beauty attached to his left arm. It had turned into a warm day, and both of them were glowing and smelled strongly, pleasantly, of healthy, hard-earned sweat. It was obvious from the stunned expression on his face when he saw Agnes sitting on the sofa, and Barbara sprawled out on the floor, that Marcus had forgotten he’d invited my sister, had forgotten about the cookout itself.
But Marcus had a way of recovering quickly, at least in social situations. He pushed a hank of blond hair behind one of his big ears and, with an abundance of good cheer, said, “I am so glad you decided to come, Agnes. I was afraid you wouldn’t. This is my friend Sheila.”
Agnes, unsure of whether to stay seated or stand, attempted an awkward handshake, and Barbara waved from the floor without bothering to get up or even open her eyes.
Like most of Marcus’s girlfriends, Sheila appeared to be somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-six, old enough to know what she was getting into but neither old enough nor young enough to care about the consequences. She was nearly as tall as Marcus and had a high, shiny forehead, ripe lips, and a jaw that was probably a little too long and square for the rest of her face but didn’t detract from her overall radiance. Her hair was the color of cherrywood and fell almost to the middle of her back. When she reached out to shake my hand, a great Pre-Raphaelite curtain of curls fell across her face. She lifted a heap of it away from her eyes with the back of her hand, sighing as if it were a terrible annoyance. The gesture was so languid, even I wasn’t immune to its sensuality. “Marcus has told me all about you, Clyde,” she said.
“Are you at—at Harvard, too?” Agnes asked, slitting the label on her beer bottle with her fingernail.
“Art History,” Sheila said. She looked down, and as she untangled a strand of hair from one of her bracelets, she rattled off a jumble of academic abbreviations: USC, Ph.D., UCLA, Ed.D., UC Davis. Agnes and I nodded as if we were following whatever narrative was buried under the list.
Barbara swam to the surface of consciousness. “Isn’t it about time you, like, graduated, Marcus?” she asked. It was an unfair question, but then again, Barbara had been four years old when Marcus finished his course work.
“I’m getting there, Babs,” he said. “One damned day at a time.”
“Of course you are,” Agnes said. “When she gets to college she’ll understand.”
“Right. Like I’d ever even consider going to college.”
“What makes you think they’d let you in?” Sheila asked. She leaned against Marcus’s shoulder, lifted a foot, and scratched her ankle. “So that’s the little dog you’re taking care of.”
“It is,” Marcus said. “Clyde and I are doing our best to keep him happy, aren’t we, Clyde?”
“We are,” I said. Marcus was doing his best, which was one of the things that made me so concerned for Otis and his master.
By one in the afternoon, a loud little group had gathered in the backyard. From the kitchen window, I could see bobbing heads and glasses of beer and occasionally hear a forced, braying laugh that had to be Donald trying to drum up a little merriment. “Why don’t we just get this over with,” I said.
I picked up Agnes’s shawl and handed it to her, but she shook her head frantically, trying to disown the thing before anyone noticed it.
The afternoon was unseasonably hot, too hot for my liking, but far from the weather disaster I’d imagined. Marcus and Sheila went to change out of their sweaty clothes, but when, a few minutes later, their laughter drifted into the kitchen, I gathered up Agnes’s bag of cookies and what remained of the beer she’d brought and led my sister and my niece out the door.
As we were clomping down the dark staircase, I said, as casually as I could, “Now, have either of you ever seen this . . . nurse of. . . Dad’s?”
“His girlfriend?” Barbara said.
“We’ve never seen her,” Agnes said. “She does her job, very professional. Is that girl a student of Marcus’s?”
“No, Mom, she’s his nurse. She’s giving him his medication right now.” Barbara turned to me. “They drive right into the garage, Clyde, and sneak into his cave down there. It’s like they think they’re in a James Bond movie, except in this case, no special effects and everyone’s ugly.”
“Well, let’s not talk about nurses,” Agnes said sadly. “Let’s try and have a nice time at the party.”
DONALD WAS WEARING A PAIR OF PALE, shapeless blue jeans with a signature and a horsey design stitched on the back pocket; his billowing sweatshirt was printed with an advertisement for some drinking establishment in one of the more depressing suburbs. The stereo was playing early Rolling Stones, the sound muffled and distorted, as if Mick Jagger were singing “Ruby Tuesday” with a sock stuffed in his mouth.
“I thought you’d left town,” Donald said, grinning and slightly drunk. “That’s what I would have done, if I’d looked out the window and seen this party.”
He ushered us into the little yard with big welcoming gestures, hostly and grand.
“This is my sister, Agnes, and her daughter. They came all the way from New Hampshire,” I said.
“I’ll tell you something, Agnes,” Donald said, with absurd sincerity, “I love the country, all safe and cozy.” He ran his eyes up and down Agnes’s slim body with a look that struck me as a cross between appreciative and leeri
ng. Then he snapped out of whatever pastoral fantasy was playing in his head and returned to his jovial self. “What’s in the bag, sis? A present for me, I hope.”
“Some cookies, but I’m afraid they came out a little overdone.” She handed him the big shopping bag and folded her arms. “It’s probably my oven.”
“Cookies! Just what we need. The loser who was supposed to bring the food had an accident on the way over, so who knows when the burgers will arrive. Last I heard, they were still sewing Jerry up. The guy has an accident every time he pulls out of the drive. We’d better put these out, before the mob riots.”
He took Agnes by the arm and led her over to a table against the chain-link fence. Four big, empty plastic bowls sat on top of the table, and a grill and a hibachi with nothing on them smoldered beside it. The only food on the premises appeared to be the potato chips and corn chips and similar greasy snacks spilling out of bags that had been ripped open and tossed onto a couple of lawn chairs.
“That’s the host?” Barbara said.
“I’m afraid so.”
Barbara rolled her eyes and surveyed the rest of the crowd with a grimace. It was a fairly dismal gathering of about twenty-five people, mostly egg-shaped men who looked as if they were trying to compensate for their height by living on weight-gain powder and following a poorly designed power-lifting regime. They were all wearing loose cotton pants resembling harem pants, in wild zigzags of lurid color. These had become popular attire for men in Agnes’s neck of the woods in the past few years, possibly because all that loose, sagging cotton gave the impression of hidden assets. The women were gathered in a circle near the back door of the house, smoking cigarettes and casting wary glances at the eggs. Most of them had extraordinarily thin legs, which they’d encased in tight blue jeans, and they were all perched atop dangerously high heels. The yard wasn’t too much bigger than our kitchen, and what little grass there had been early in the spring had long since been scorched and trampled. Even a group this small seemed jammed in, as if we’d all been herded and then locked into the wretched little pen. Donald had bought a few mums, which he’d left in their cardboard pots and stuck into each corner of the yard, a noble but failed attempt at dressing the place up.
The Man of the House Page 15
