by Paula Guran
All that evening he was mute, unapproachable. Finally Mama Bear came right out and asked the question.
“No . . . no, Mama, everything is not all right,” he said heavily. He squinted through his glass of bourbon, the lamplight reflecting yellow in his baleful eye. “Everything is going pretty much to shit, if you really want to know.”
Mama Bear flinched, as always, at the word. “Honey!”
“Honey’s all dried up,” he said, tipping back the whole tumbler full of bourbon in a single blink-inducing draught. “Nothing left but the ol’ ca-ca now. The ol’ poopy-doop.”
“Don’t talk that way,” she told him, scared a little, not wanting to hear what else he might say. “Oh, you don’t know how much I’ve been looking forward to having you home, Papa, even if it is only for a week—”
“It isn’t a week’s leave,” he said, heavily. He rose to his feet, staggered a little, made for the corner bar to replenish his glass. Without turning to face her, he said: “It’s mandatory leave. Indefinite mandatory leave.”
“I don’t understand . . . ?” Mama tried to face him, look into his eyes, to find out what it might mean, all of it. Papa pushed past her, not roughly but not tenderly either, shambled back to the sofa, collapsed as if he’d taken a tranquilizer dart to the flank.
“I blew it, Mama.” Staring at the ceiling, where cobwebs hung from the chandelier. “Matinee performance in Schenectady. I was waiting to go on . . . I just turned round and walked right out the big top. Couldn’t go on. Just . . . couldn’t.”
“Honey? What?”
Papa Bear held a paw up as if to forestall her; let it fall. “I just couldn’t.”
She felt she should understand without having to ask, felt ashamed because she didn’t. “Was it . . . did someone say something? Did you get into a fight again?”
“I just . . .” For the longest time he tried to say it. Not even another slug of bourbon could loosen his tongue. “Ah, what the hell. You don’t understand.”
Now the tears came, she couldn’t help it. “I want you to help me understand!” Wanted him to hold her, to say, it’s all right, it’s gonna be okay. Instead he sat back, stared at the ceiling, said as if to no one:
“You’ll never know what it cost me, to do that every day. To go through with that whole . . . that whole charade.”
“They pay you good!” She was sobbing openly now. “The best!”
“They make me jump through hoops,” he said, more in resignation than in bitterness. “They make me jump through their goddamn hoops, each and every day, and there’s not one goddamn thing I can do about it, because they own me. Bought and paid for.”
“They don’t own you! They pay you a wage! A good wage!”
“They own my ass, Mama.” Correcting her heavily. “They want me to do handstands—I do handstands. End of story. And one day—one day . . .” He was searching for a form of words to make it more comprehensible to her, or perhaps to himself. “This one afternoon in Schenectady, I was checking out the apparatus—the log, the hoops, the podiums, all set up in the middle of the ring—and I just said the hell with it. You know?” He drained his tumbler, set it down with a crack on the glass tabletop. “The hell with it. Walked. Lay on the bunk in my goddamn caravan, stayed there till the boss came knocking.” For the first time he met her eyes, blinking owlishly as one who emerges into bright sunlight from the back of a deep dark cave. “And here I am. Indefinite mandatory leave.” He snorted mirthlessly, got up to pour himself another bourbon.
Mama Bear tried to make sense of it all. “You’ve been overdoing things—working too hard . . .”
“I’ve been doing what I do,” said her husband bleakly into the middle distance, one paw on the bottle, the other bracing himself against the cocktail bar. “I’ve been dancing to their tune. All my life, Mama. Now the music’s stopped, and there isn’t a chair left for me to sit in.”
And so their dream move to Scotsford turned all the way nightmare, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. For the remainder of that evening Mama Bear alternately cried and pleaded, while Papa drank steadily and without appreciable effect, till all of a sudden he let out an enormous roar and sent the glass-top table flying against the farther wall. After that she ran crying up to bed, tiptoed down hours after in the predawn gray to find her husband collapsed on the couch, breathing stertorously through his wide open mouth. Looking down at him she didn’t know what to think—what to feel, even. She didn’t know whether she wanted things to be the way they’d been before, or what she wanted. Just not this.
The weather turned hot and humid in the weeks that followed, those enervating dog days of summer when the only sounds across suburbia’s lazy lawns are the hissing of sprinklers and the elastic crack of tennis ball on catgut. When French windows are wedged permanently open, and ice clinks welcomingly in pitchers of cool iced tea and daiquiris fetched out to poolside. Inside the dream homes, sweltering Negro staff polished and cleaned and laundered, while life moved out on to the decks and patios. Recumbent in its thousand sweet suntraps, Scotsford stretched out in the heat, grew blasé and lethargic, tilted its face to the sweltering rays and adjusted its sunglasses.
In the house of the bears, things were different. No French window was left ajar against the heat, and all the blinds were drawn in the daytime. No one came in or out of the house: the cleaner, Hortense, had long since been let go, along with the gardener, Booker T. The only person who seemed to be let in still was the delivery boy from Biddle’s Market. Pressed on the details by Missy Scrivener, the Biddle’s boy would only say that things were kinda gloomy inside, and they mostly left his money laid out ready on the kitchen table.
Yes, and through the crack in the kitchen door Mama Bear would watch the kid come in, glance nervously around, leave the boxes on the table, grab his cash and scoot. She told herself she watched to make sure he left the groceries and was off on his way with no shenanigans, didn’t steal or poke his nose in where it wasn’t wanted . . . but a part of her she couldn’t really get to, let alone acknowledge, probably watched him because he was the only thing worth watching in all that gloomy house. The only creature moving at the noon.
More and more Papa was sleeping through the hot hours, midday till six. When he rose, he’d mostly just lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling; only when the sun was slipping down behind the roof of the Lockes’ house would he even consider stirring. One evening Mama Bear heard a fearsome crash from out back: running to the French windows she saw Papa sprawled amidst the wreck of the swing set on the lawn. The tube-aluminum frame of the garden furniture was all wrenched out of shape, bowed and bent beneath his helpless bulk. Papa, she thought, though it was dusk already and getting hard to see, was crying. That evening in bed, desperate to restore what she could of his dignity and self-esteem, she presented herself to him. After a brief humiliating interlude of strain and poke he rolled away, as if from the failure of some trick he’d learned once for a special performance, but long since forgotten how to do properly.
After that, they mostly kept out of each other’s way. Papa hit the bottle with increasing frequency, and Mama began to find herself doing odd little things around the house, things she couldn’t always have consciously explained but which just felt right. She sent Baby out to the woods to gather dry leaves and twigs, which she strewed throughout the rooms. She found herself one day dragging her claws through the jazzy patterned wallpaper, leaving a crosshatched pattern of parallel score-marks clean down to the plaster underneath. Once, she came to as if from a stupor to find herself squatting to stool in the darkest corner of the dining room.
With no air blowing through, the house began to smell old and musty, like the back of a deep hibernation cave. Papa’s empties were mounting up around the study, and it reeked of stale booze in there—if failure were to have a scent, it would surely be the sour stink that lingers round a sticky flyblown liquor bottle. Mama’s occasional indiscretions, mimicked eagerly by Baby now, lent an e
arthy tainted smell to the dining room, and drew flies in the hundreds in their own right. Those doors were kept shut; other rooms they wandered through in a kind of desultory fretfulness, as if looking for something but unable to remember quite what it was. Curling up for a while, fast asleep in the fever heat, forgetting in the instant of their waking what they’d just that second dreamed. Passing each other without a word, without a touch.
For the most part the bears ate alone now, each one wandering through to the kitchen and raiding the refrigerator or the pantry shelves. One day—one afternoon of pregnant rumbling thunder in the far-off hills—Mama went to the Westinghouse and found it empty. Only condiments and rancid month-old butter, was all. She stared into the chilly glowing void for what must have been a long while, till the buzz of the refrigerator motor kicking in woke her with a little start from her stupor.
Dully she hunted through the cupboards, found nothing that spoke to her rumbling slavering hunger. There was a packet of porridge oats, which she tried dry and spat out. Tipping the contents into a saucepan, she added water and watched while the mess bubbled up on the greasy crusted stove. The smell drew the rest of the family, and in their various stages of wakefulness they all sat around the table and waited for the porridge to boil.
Finally it was ready. Mama dolloped the gray goop into large Tupper-ware mixing bowls and placed them on the table. Baby took the bowl in both hands and lapped eagerly at its contents, only to recoil in shock and pain. “Too hot!” he squeaked. The dropped bowl skittered around on the tabletop, coming to rest in a glutinous blob of spilled porridge. Mama winced internally—she’d meant to check the temperature. She’d meant to order food; she’d meant to do a lot of things, one way and another. She was so forgetful nowadays . . .
Impervious to scalds, Papa tasted his portion and spat it on to the floor. “Needs sweetening,” he grumbled. “Don’t we have any damn sugar in this house?”
Mama was fairly sure they hadn’t—in fact, she vividly recalled pouring the best part of a packet down her maw, crusting her muzzle with sweet granules as she tore apart what was left of the bag with her rough tongue—but she went through the motions of looking anyway. “Okay, that’s it,” ordered Papa. “In the car, now.”
And so the whole family piled into the station wagon, which Papa proceeded to drive all herky-jerky down to the store. Cars threw on the brakes and honked horns as Papa shot one intersection after another, jumped a red light downtown, made a huge and illegal U-turn across the flower-bedded midway on Main to park up outside Biddle’s.
Inside, Mama hurried timorously down the aisles in Papa’s snarling wake, wincing as he swept the entire contents of the honey shelf into his cart with a swipe of his paw. At the checkout there was another contretemps, when the girl at the register wanted to see some ID for the roughly scrawled check he’d presented. “You see the check?” he growled. “You see the name on the check?”
“Um, that’s, er, Bear, yes I do, sir,” confirmed the nervous teenager.
Papa Bear loosened his collar, pushed back his trilby, and thrust his face to within an inch of the checkout girl’s. She recoiled, tipping over her castor-wheeled stool. “Well, here’s my ID, then,” he said, and barged his shopping cart on through and out to the car. Scalded by shame, Mama backed away, trying to keep up with her husband while apologizing to the gathering knot of Biddle’s staff.
And so, after another death-defying chariot ride through the downtown, they came once more to a squealing halt in their own driveway, demolishing a flowerbed and knocking over their own mailbox in the process. Laden down with honeypots, they staggered the few yards from car to front door, left ajar in the haste of their departure. In the houses and gardens of their neighbors, this excursion had not gone unnoticed. As the front door banged shut after the bears, a murmur of adverse comment blew up and down the avenue like a dry harsh Santa Ana.
Inside, Papa was heading for the kitchen when he came to a sudden halt. Head up, he sniffed the stale hot air. “Honey?” asked Mama Bear, bumping in to him from behind.
“Nah . . .” He shrugged, and carried on into the kitchen. Where they both stopped and gaped.
The porridge had been flung all over the walls and ceilings. Great globs of it dripped down to the spattered floor; over by the back door, Baby’s little dish, still stuck with its gloopy contents, slid slowly down the wall like a Tupperware snail.
Mama let out a single barking sob. Papa, meanwhile, pushed past her into the dining room, rumbling “What the . . .?”
In the dining room there was nothing; nothing, except the certain knowledge that some uninvited guest had passed that way not minutes before. Call it a spoor: every animal leaves some kind of track, after all. Following his nose, Papa hurried through to the living room.
Pushing aside the room dividers, he yelped in harsh surprise. All of the cushions on all of the chairs lay ripped apart, like so many chickens torn by the fox. Feathers fell through the air still, settling on the leaf-strewn carpet, the denuded chairs; settling on the triangular-bladed kitchen knife that had doubtless done the damage. The knife from their very own kitchen, part of a set. When everything had been perfect, back in the beginning.
The trail was so fresh, though, it drew Papa on with hardly time for a glance at the damage. Onwards, up the stairs to Baby’s room. At the turn of the landing, he stopped and waited for Mama to catch up. With a jerk of his huge heavy head he indicated the door to their son’s room. Together they moved towards it.
And there she was: the culprit, the interloper, the crafty assassin of hearth and home. Picture perfect, Shirley Temple in ribbons and curls, the Locke girl, little Goldie Locke, caught mid-bounce on Baby’s mussed-up bed.
It was Mama who moved first of all, though she hardly knew she was doing it: a lunge forward and the beginnings of a roar, and then she got wedged in between Papa and the doorframe, luckily for little Goldie, maybe. But even a doorway full of angry bear didn’t seem to shake the Locke girl’s composure. She completed the bounce by landing on her little keister, shook her hair from her eyes and regarded the bears with the haughty self-possession of a born aristocrat.
“What . . . what . . .” Mama couldn’t even get the words out; Papa was still mute in the grip of some complicated emotion. It was left to Baby, pushing in between their legs, to ask the obvious, indeed the necessary question: “What are you doing on my bed?”
“You left the front door wiiide open.” A lisping singsong, befitting her gingham and curls. “Stupid bears.”
All three of the bears were shocked into silence. It was as if, after all the whispering campaigns and sly talk exchanged behind their backs, Scotsford was finally showing its hand.
“Stupid bruins,” Goldie Locke continued happily. “Stupid, stupid bruins. You smell.”
Mama opened her mouth, and shut it again.
“You do so!” The little girl answered the thought, rather than the unspoken words. “You do ca-ca in the dining room! Where you eat your dinner!”
Mama looked round at her husband. He was staring, not at the girl but at her. Hastily he looked away, as did she.
“Stinky, stinky bruins . . .” An extemporized schoolyard rhyme, complete with mocking rise and fall. “And you got leaves and branches everywhere round the house! And old bottles! And ca-ca! You’re like . . . tramps!”
The three bears shrank together.
“My mummy said all bruins smell, so I came inside to see. And you do smell.” The vindication made her giggle, and she lifted a hand to her mouth. Politely, as she’d been taught by her mother. “You’re stinky. Stinky poo-poo.” And then it was simply too funny for words, and she laughed at them, right to their faces.
Recovering from her laughing jag, hiccupping a little, the little girl regarded the bears. “I wanna go home now,” she said. “It smells in here.” She got up from the bed. The bears made no move.
Goldie Locke frowned. “You get out of the way,” she told them. “Stinky bears. Go on no
w! Or I’ll tell my daddy.”
Still the bears did not move. They stood as one and looked at her.
“My daddy says you should all be in a zoo!” The Zee word. At his mother’s side, little Baby burst into tears. Slowly, without taking her eyes off the girlchild, Mama lowered a paw to the top of his head.
“He says you get money by tricks, and you stink, and you belong in a zoo. I don’t wanna stay here, it’s stinky and I feel sick to my tummy.” She glared at them in unconcealed disgust. “You let me go past, you hear?”
What did they feel, Mama, Papa, Baby? What stirred in the thick gamy meat of their hearts as the little blond girl mocked them and insulted them? What might their reaction have been, had they only found it in their nature to react?
Impatiently, Goldie Locke stamped one perfect sandaled foot on the unvacuumed carpet, lifting a little puff of dust. “Get back!” she ordered, with a shrillness that brooked no contradiction. Every ringmaster’s whip that ever cracked, in that command; every lick from the licking stick.
As if by magic, the three bears shuffled back a pace. With all the confidence in the world, little Goldie Locke stepped towards them.
Later that evening, on the piney hillside above Scotsford, Papa Bear paused for breath near the top of the ridge. He’d been carrying Baby on his shoulders, and now he set him down on the sandy ground while he waited for Mama to catch them up.
Hampered by the . . . well, by the hamper she was carrying, plus the sundry bags and coats and what-nots, Mama lumbered after them up the hill. Her dress was torn from pushing through the bushes back down in the valley, but it had been necessary—very much necessary—that their departure go unobserved. Hence the unconventional route through the back garden.
