by Brady Udall
Rusty didn’t need to go to the bathroom, though he was hungry and would have accepted a hug, no questions asked. What was on his mind was something else entirely: tits. Aunt Trish was framed by the window over the sink, a window full of late afternoon radiance that penetrated her old-fashioned loose-knit sweater so that he could make out, just barely, the silhouetted profile of her breasts suspended in a nimbus of light. This almost holy image released a profane stream of tit-related phrases in his brain: Keep Your Tits On and Tit for Tat and Tough Titties and Texas Titty Twister and Titty-Titty Bang-Bang.
“How about some cookies with your Kool-Aid?” she asked.
“Keep your tits on,” he murmured under his breath, to relieve some of the pressure. “What’s that?”
“Yes ma’am,” Rusty said, almost out of breath. “I would like some”—he almost said titties but corrected himself in time—“cookies with my Kool-Aid.”
Aunt Trish dragged Faye away from her prayer cave so she could sit in the backyard with them for lemonade and macaroons. The day was bright and cool, with a breeze that stirred the grass. Faye, who had a ghostly complexion and hair the color of apple juice, sat in her lawn chair and regarded Rusty with open suspicion. When Rusty tried to take a sip of his Kool-Aid, the girl piped up, “We need to say grace.”
Rusty, feeling uncharacteristically confident, wondered aloud why they had to say a lousy prayer every time they ate or drank something, why couldn’t they just have some danged lemonade once in a while without making a big deal out of it? Aunt Trish, who was quickly becoming Rusty’s favorite person in the world, gave him a sympathetic smile and started to say something but was interrupted by Faye, who shushed them both and launched into a prayer that lasted a solid minute and a half and touched on a range of topics, including the lonely old people of the world, the starving orphans of Peru and the fern in the bathroom whose leaves were turning yellow. She forgot to bless the Kool-Aid and cookies, but remembered to include a special request that Rusty get home as safely and as soon as possible.
Technically, Aunt Trish was one of his mothers, but Rusty didn’t know her very well, which made it a little easier to think about her without feeling weird about it. When she first came into the family she lived in Old House, and then she had the dead baby, who totally ruined the annual family camping trip, and now she spent most of her time here at the duplex taking care of creepy Faye and being sad.
After he had single-handedly dispatched half the macaroons, which he didn’t really care for, Trish went into the house for more. For a minute, Faye stared at him, which was like being stared at by a curly-haired doll possessed by a demon.
The other kids were scared of creepy Faye, but not Rusty. He stared right back.
“It’s time for you to go home,” she said.
“Says who?”
“Heavenly Father and His only begotten son Jesus Christ.”
“You’re talking to them right now? And that’s what they’re telling you, that it’s time for me to go home?”
“Yes.”
“What else are they telling you?” Rusty had to admit it, he was curious.
“That you’re a weak and bad person who is full of sin.”
Rusty blinked. Maybe she really did talk to them. “Well, you can tell Heavenly Father and his only begotten son Jesus Christ they can go suck eggs, for all I care.”
You should have seen the look on her face! She got all her power from talking about God, saying she knew what God and Jesus wanted. So all you had to do was tell God and Jesus to take a flying leap into a garbage heap and where was her power now? “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” said Faye, which was exactly what you would expect her to say.
“Or what?” Rusty said. “Heavenly Father and his hippie son Jesus Christ are gonna come down out of the sky and give me a noogie?”
Rusty snorked. He hadn’t really tried it before, but taking the Lord’s name in vain was kind of enjoyable.
Faye sat back in her chair looking sad. “God have mercy.”
“God have mercy on you too. With those huge nostrils of yours.” He snorked again. “Good luck getting a date in high school.”
And that was when Aunt Trish came back with more cookies. Faye got up and went somewhere, probably back to her prayer cave to ask God and Jesus to inflict Rusty with a bad case of cancerous leprosy or smite him with boils. Aunt Trish asked him how he was liking it over at Old House. She had heard about the underwear incident, which everyone thought was appalling, but to her seemed comical.
“Stinks, pretty much,” he said. “It’s not fair that I’m still doing it when no one else is.”
Trish could not argue with the boy. The family exchange program had been instituted with noble designs and high hopes: to unify a family that was, like so many overextended empires before it, coming apart along the seams. Trish kept her own little outpost, lived by her own rules, and was not much more than a spectator to the ongoing hostilities between the houses. As the children grew and the wives became more set in their ways, the differences between Old House and Big House were clearly deepening, becoming harder and harder to reconcile. Nola and Rose-of-Sharon, after years of trying to compete with Beverly’s high standards and regimented approach, had largely given up. In fact, much of their hands-off parenting style seemed designed to spite Beverly, to let her know her control and influence had their limits. Five years ago they took the drastic step of sending their children to public school, thumbing their noses at Beverly’s cherished home-schooling policy, which, she believed, kept God’s most precious souls from the evil influences of relativism, evolution, communism, feminism, and amoral hippies masquerading as teachers. The sisters not only released their children out into the impure world, they allowed the impure world inside: on any given day you could walk through Big House and find the kids inside reading comic books, playing ping-pong, eating generic-brand fudgesicles and listening to Satanic music by the likes of Bread and Captain & Tennille. While the Old House children lived according to an exhaustive master schedule—twice-daily family prayer and scripture study, five hours of home instruction, two hours of chores, recitations of Shakespeare and Frost every Wednesday night, annual performances of The Sound of Music or Fiddler on the Roof—the children of Big House slept and ate according to their whims, hollered and fought and caroused, listened to the radio and conducted impromptu boxing tournaments in the basement, and took great pleasure in corrupting the children of Old House.
During her first year in the family, she’d noticed these divisions—all families had them in one way or another, but lately they had become acute. More and more, the children were closing ranks according to their allegiances to the respective houses; even the younger children, sensing something beyond their understanding, were not mixing and playing together as readily as they once had. And now poor Rusty here seemed to be the last hope. If he, family terrorist and resident troublemaker, could be brought in line using traditional Old House methods (the prevailing sentiment seemed to go), then maybe there was hope for the family. If the experiment failed, and Rusty was sent back to Big House in disgrace, it would only reinforce the notion that the two families did not belong together, that their values could not be reconciled. Yes, it did seem a little unfair to put all of this on the head of an eleven-year-old boy.
Even though Nola and Rose were suspicious of Beverly’s motives in instituting the Exchange Program, Trish thought it was a wonderful idea, supported it wholeheartedly—she wished that she’d thought of it herself. Her first exchange child was Deeanne, who was supposed to be a playmate for Faye, to show Faye by example how a normal girl should act, to bring Faye out of her shell. Deeanne lasted two days. Faye, the girl insisted, gave her the willies. She begged to be allowed to go back to Big House, cried herself to sleep at night, claimed that Faye pinched her when Trish wasn’t looking and whispered into her ear that God was unhappy with Deeanne’s bad singing voice and secret nose-picking habit. One afternoon, wh
ile Trish was doing the dishes, Deeanne ran out into the street, hailed a passing pickup, and claimed she had been kidnapped by a drifter and needed a ride home.
Things went better, at least initially, with the next one. Em, Beverly’s oldest, bonded with Trish immediately. The poor girl had spent most of her life as little more than an indentured servant, a nanny and washmaid and cook, a lieutenant-mother who never had the chance to be a true teenage girl. In the first couple of days with Trish her earnest demeanor and industrious habits dropped away and she became another person entirely: a teenager who slept in, took extra-long showers, stayed up late eating Oreos and playing Uno and gossiping with Trish, giggling into the night like sixth-graders on a sleepover. There was no scripture reading or poetry reciting or hymns sung around the piano for them; they pretty much let Faye pray on their behalf. Eventually Trish gave in, dragged her toiletry case out from under the bed and instructed the girl in Makeup 101: how to mix and apply base for proper skin tone, the basics of rouge and mascara and eyeliner. Trish loved the way Em’s eyes grew wide when she saw her own face in the mirror. Somewhere along the line, Trish realized, she was closer in age to Em than to any of her sister-wives.
For both of them it was like a three-week vacation that came to an end a week and a half early. One Saturday afternoon in July, Trish and Em were cleaning the kitchen and listening to the Bee Gees on the radio. They had been out back on the deck sunbathing, and they were both wearing clothes from Trish’s suitcase: ribbed tank tops and cut-off jeans. The kitchen smelled like Pine-Sol and coconut oil.
Trish was doing a little microphone twirl with her sponge mop and straining to hit the high notes of “How Deep Is Your Love” when out of the corner of her eye she saw Em make a sudden lunge across the counter and pull the plug on the radio. Trish turned around to find Beverly standing in the kitchen doorway, holding Em’s clarinet case, and taking in everything with a demeanor that said, Well isn’t this nice. Reflexively, Trish saw the scene as Beverly surely saw it: Em, sweet and innocent Em, dressed up like a slut and cavorting to perverted music made by grown men hee-hee-heeing like prepubescent girls.
Beverly quietly told Em to gather her things and get in the car.
“We’re having a little fun, cleaning the kitchen,” Trish explained, even though she knew there was no use. Beverly gave her a long, sad look while Trish’s hips, despite everything, still twitched in disco-time.
It took Em only a minute to change back into her own clothes and to pack her bag, and it hurt Trish somehow that the girl didn’t share a secret look with her, that she wouldn’t glance her way. Even now, three months later, Em treated Trish with the polite deference she reserved for any other adult.
Out on the deck in the cool winter sun, Trish watched Rusty survey her yard and the fields beyond. He picked up his glass and pretended to take a sip from it even though there was no sip left.
He asked if he could use the bathroom. He didn’t really need to use the bathroom but he wanted to go back inside the house, snoop around a little and take a look at things, maybe slip something into his pocket he could later claim to have found, which would give him an excuse to come back to return it before his next lesson.
“We’ve got a little problem on that end,” she said. “Toilet’s backed up. I was watching the second twins over the weekend and I think one of them dropped something in there.”
“You plunger it? I can plunger it for you.”
“I plungered it all right.” She smiled. “Plungered the living heck out of it. Your dad was supposed to come over to fix it on Monday, but he didn’t have time and now he’s gone again—”
“He’s always gone.” Rusty popped his lips and gave his head a little shake.
“Well, not to worry, the place next door’s vacant and I’ve got the key, so we’ve been using the bathroom over there.”
“It’s all right,” Rusty said. “I can hold it.”
“It’s no problem at all.” Trish stood. “The key’s right in the kitchen.”
Rusty shrugged and squinted for a moment into the low sun. “I’m fine. I’ve been practicing my self-control. I can hold my breath for like five minutes, and sometimes I don’t eat breakfast.”
He gave her a quick look to gauge her reaction, walked to the edge of the deck and toed the tufted head of a dead thistle.
“If you want,” he said, “I could, you know, do some work for you. For free.”
“What kinds of things do you know how to do?”
“I can mow your lawn.” He shrugged, and his voice seemed to tighten. “I could, you know, trim your bushes.”
She thanked him, told him she was sure she could use his help in the future, when summer came and the lawn and bushes actually required attention. “You probably ought to get going, Aunt Beverly will be on the lookout for you.”
“She doesn’t care where I am, not really.”
“I think she does. She seems to get rather upset when you’re not where you’re supposed to be.”
“Everybody over there, they act like I don’t even exist, it’s like a big game. When I try to talk they say, Did you hear something? I didn’t hear anything, did you? It must be the wind. Like that.”
“That’s terrible,” Trish said. “They shouldn’t do that.”
Rusty shrugged, stuck out his lower lip and said that he didn’t care. Trish couldn’t tell if it was eleven-year-old bluster or if he really meant it.
“Maybe I should tell Aunt Beverly what’s going on.”
“She knows. They all do it, even the little ones. And Aunt Beverly does it except when I break the rules, and then all the sudden I’m not invisible anymore. So being invisible isn’t all that bad.”
Trish wanted to tell him that, despite its immediate rewards, invisibility was not anything to aspire to; it got old very quickly.
She asked him if he wanted a ride home and he told her he’d ride his bike. He picked up a macaroon from the plate and walked to the barbed-wire fence. The turkeys, who where pecking their way along the irrigation ditch by the road, hustled over in one big mob, stood in front of Rusty, gave him their undivided attention.
“Will they eat a cookie?” he asked.
She told him they would eat pretty much anything, including newsprint and styrofoam peanuts.
With a sidearm motion he winged the macaroon over their heads and they made a mad dash for it, gobbling and thrashing their bony, clipped wings, climbing over each other to peck at the cookie with violent stabs of their heads.
Rusty put his hands on the fence wire and watched. He cleared his throat as if he had something important to say. He said, “What a bunch of stupid turkeys.”
RUSTY TO THE RESCUE
She washed her tea mug in an otherwise empty sink, looked out the window at a flock of sparrows wheeling and diving over the Gunthers’ hay barn in the dawn-pink sky and thought, I am getting along fine. She was discovering the only way to make it through each day was to hunker down and wait it out, like in a hurricane or high drought, something to be survived. It had been, what, ten days since she had been alone with Golden, since he’d stepped foot in this house? She could handle it, she knew she could. She knew how to wait. She knew how to be alone.
In those ten days there had been only three or four nights when she’d slept badly and only one when she’d curled herself against the headboard and given in to a fit of whimpering. Mostly bearable nights visited occasionally by the same dream: Trish sleeping exposed on the edge of a rocky precipice, knowing somewhere in her sleeping mind that if she rolled over or shifted her weight even a little, she’d go over the edge into the bottomless dark.
And then last night a real curveball: a prolonged sexual dream that woke her suddenly with its sweaty fervency, leaving her limp and trembling—and curious about who could have broken into her dreams and brought her to such a pitch.
She set the mug in the drainer and went to check on Faye, who slept with such an eerie stillness, her pale skin nearly the color of
the sheets, her features so sweetly serene, that no matter how much Trish tried to tell herself, She’s fine, stop your worrying, she could not restrain herself from putting her hand against the girl’s neck to feel for the delicate vibration of blood under the skin.
She waited another hour for Faye to wake up, spent too much time preparing a three-course breakfast the girl hardly touched. She started the laundry, fed the breakfast leftovers to the grateful turkeys, and read scripture with Faye, only because Faye would become agitated if they didn’t.
After lunch she vacuumed the hallway, folded the laundry, and sat down at the table to wait—she didn’t know what she was waiting for. She had no idea. She thought—and it was not a thought that bothered her as it probably should have—that she might be losing her mind.
Around two o’clock she heard a faint clanking sound out front. She ignored it, but it continued, softly, a chorus of metal clanking, like someone rustling through a cupboard of pots and pans. She opened the door to find Rusty climbing the steps on the porch, wearing an overburdened tool belt and a rusted plumber’s snake coiled crossways around his torso like a Mexican bandolier.
“Hey, there,” she said, and he said, “Hey, there,” back, huffing a little with the exertion of riding his bike across the valley loaded down as he was. He took a big breath and gave her a terse, professional-style nod. She couldn’t have been happier to see anyone.
He said, “I’ve come to fix the, you know, the john.”
She let him in and he moved purposefully across the room, holding the head of the long framing hammer that hung from his belt so it wouldn’t bang his knee while he walked.
