Farewell Navigator

by Leni Zumas

  A question from Famous Men is burnt onto the skin behind my forehead: “How was it we were caught?” I know a little about caught. I know enough. There is this house. There is my mother. There is until she is dead.

  She loves to plump the pillows on her Ku Klux furniture. Each pringly tassel must fall just so. She doesn’t sit on the sofa anymore; she will cause too big of a dent. She uses a folding metal chair. I go on the striped wingback, rest the dictionary on my thighs, and read aloud. Her ghouly eyes listen. Sometimes her mouth, on its way to the pudding spoon, says: Read that part again.

  The word is moxa, I say, and here are your choices: a medieval fortified keep; a small instrument used to brush hair off the South American goose; a preternaturally skilled hoagie maker; or a flammable material obtained from the leaves of Japanese wormwood.

  Hoagie is a disturbing word, my mother says.

  You have ten seconds.

  Well, she says, I don’t know what hoagie means so how can I choose?

  It means submarine sandwich. In other parts of the land.

  Then there’s that goose—

  Five seconds, I say.

  I’ll go with flammable material.

  Are you sure?

  Ha! she says happily, knowing she’s right, since on wrong guesses I never ask.

  A chewy cackle from the bathroom and I find her crouched near—but not on—the toilet. Massive gray panties swarm at her feet.

  What the fucking fuck?

  Don’t say fuck so much, she says. No wonder you’ll die a virgin, filthy mouth like that.

  And no wonder she will die beached, left to drown yelling in the tide.

  The word is umbelliferous, which might mean: excessively warlike; belonging or pertaining to the belliferae family of plants, including parsley and carrots; carrying an umbrella; or that which feeds from the underside.

  Hard one, she says.

  I’ll give you an extra five seconds.

  Maybe umbrella, she murmurs. Maybe parsley.

  Don’t forget that which feeds from the underside, I say casually, proud of this phrase. It’s one of my best ever. A long belly seamed with nipples and the sucking, splittering mouth—

  She guesses umbrella.

  Sorry, I say, belliferae family of carrots and parsley.

  Oh, damn. That was my close second.

  Kitchen, late morning, matching yellow bathrobes.

  The poison lake is awake!

  Stop shouting, I shout.

  She says, The wedding announcements page is especially interesting today.

  Who?

  Two girls from your year at St. Pancreas. It’s gotten me thinking—

  Do you want more coffee?

  About how lonely you must be.

  I’m not, actually. Hand me your cup.

  Of course you are, beechnut. And it’s not your fault. Well, some of it is your fault, because if you don’t leave the house how can you. . . . But some of it’s just plain bad luck. You’re unlucky in love.

  No, I say, I’m just waiting.

  Her mouth makes a sickle of Go ahead and believe that. Yes, mother, thank you, I will go ahead. Her haught is terrible, but when she dies, that chin won’t jut any longer. Its meat will turn to powder on her collarbone and she’ll have no chin at all.

  She will die of tapioca. Of tassels. Of watching too much space travel.

  Here are your choices: jipijapa means a Brazilian hummingbird; a hat made from tender young leaves; Hawaiian bread pudding; or—from the Australian colloquial—to be in high spirits following the beginning of study at a college or university.

  She asks, Did you feel jipijapa when you started college?

  So that’s your guess?

  Not necessarily. I am pausing to ask you a personal question. Were you in high spirits?

  I don’t remember, I say.

  Sure you do, corn nut.

  It was twenty years ago. I don’t.

  Your father got very excited when he went off to school. He wrote gushing letters.

  What is your guess, Mother?

  You’d have thought that college was a goddamn cathedral.

  Time is up.

  I love a good bread pudding.

  Wrong, I say.

  I know, she says. It’s the hat of young goddamn leaves. Are you aware that the sluttish postman has not been bringing our mail?

  It’s not his fault if we don’t get written to, I remind her.

  He is a slut, though. I’ve been watching him. He makes house calls on this very block, if you know what I mean.

  I really don’t, I say.

  Please don’t act like the virgin you are so bent on remaining. Anybody with one eye could see what he’s up to. Mrs. Poole in the split-level? Mr. Brim in the Oldsmobile? They’ve been getting their fill of our most venturesome mail carrier.

  Who cares, I say.

  She grunts: It’s almost better than television.

  On the flickery screen, people in jeans and puffy shirts are learning to waltz. An instructor taps out beats of one-two-three.

  I put down the grocery bags and ask, Why are you crying?

  I’m not, she says, turning wetly away.

  What, do those people all have cancer? Are they dancing to distract themselves?

  Isn’t it shocking that nobody wants to marry you, with a sunshine attitude like that! Those are just some idiots on public access. I had to switch from my regular channel because (with thumb and forefinger she kneads the loose skin at her throat), because there was an accident.

  A crash?

  Yes, a crash. The ship crashed. The ship has been lost.

  Did the schoolteacher parachute to safety? I ask.

  Is this the day your brain decided to stop working? There are no parachutes in space. There is cold air and death.

  Sorry, I say.

  The galaxy is too big out there, my mother says.

  The word tonight is flocculence—

  Don’t be coarse, she says.

  Your choices are thus: the silence that follows a bad joke; the state of being covered with a soft, woolly substance; the crunch made by teeth on potato chips; the rate of torsion in the flight of seagulls; or an Icelandic sleeping porch built of marble and walrus tusks.

  Be nice to have a sleeping porch, she says. You know it’s hell on my legs, climbing those stairs every night. Makes them ache to a fare-thee-well. My veins are getting like goddamn garden hoses.

  We’ll need to install an elevator, I say.

  Your dad’s insurance won’t stretch that far.

  (It’s getting less stretchy all the time.)

  You might have to get a job again, sour ball.

  I say, Choose or forfeit.

  I choose none.

  None?

  I think they’re all fake. You’ve done a trick this time. Whatever I choose will be wrong.

  Just choose goddamnit.

  I won’t, because I don’t think it’s a real word. I think you made it up—

  I ask, Is that your final decision?

  She nods. I shut the dictionary. She leans her spoon on the rim of the tapioca bowl, sniffs, tucks her chin. Folds of skin accordion at her neck. James Agee could have described her much better—would have done justice to the weirdness of my mother, her loggishness, her ghouliness, her secret gentleness. He could’ve spent pages, maybe a whole chapter, doing her justice.

  About me, there’d be little to write. She sits at home of an evening. With mother, with dictionary. He might have wrung a sentence or two out of my eyes, which are a not-bad shade of blue. He’d have piled adjectives upon this blue, lavished it with taut slippery words until it was unrecognizable as a color and had become—a feeling.

  I wonder where the funerals will be, she says.

  In the astronauts’ hometowns?

  Too ordinary.

  At the launch pad in Florida?

  Too tacky. I’m thinking Arlington Cemetery.

  That’s for veterans, I say.

&n
bsp; And what are they, if not veterans? Soldiers in the space race? Battlers of the galactic elements?

  Vomit, I say.

  There’s that sunshine. There’s that charm. Hark!—she cups a hand at the back of her ear—I think I hear the suitors lining up now! Do you hear them? Outside the door? The line is forming around the block. Nobody loves a sour ball, sour ball.

  James Agee wouldn’t have minded; he was sour too. He’d have whispered, We better clean out this mouth of yours! before he kissed it.

  Next time I go shopping, I’ll be leaving her tapioca off the list. She wants pudding, she can goddamn well figure out how to get it delivered. Or she can put some shoes on for once and hop in the car.

  James Agee, please write her into the ground. Tell about the wet earth clumping down onto her coffin. Describe her bone-box with your best, your most precise exaggerations.

  In the yellow kitchen, her face is a lump of smile. She has seen the postman getting out of Mr. Brim’s car. Dirty deeds, she hoots. Oh, very dirty. She swallows coffee in triumph and I want her to stop smiling, stop watching out the window, stop thinking she knows.

  Mother, I say.

  Daughter?

  In case you weren’t aware, that rocket ship didn’t crash yesterday.

  Of course it did, beechnut. I saw it with my own peekers. No survivors.

  It crashed in nineteen-eighty-something! The teacher has been dead for decades. How can you be so fucking—

  Language, she reminds me, and gets up from the table.

  Your word tonight is thole.

  Soul, you say?

  Tee-aitch. Here are your choices. To murder someone using brainwaves only; to throw a body into a hole; to sew up a person’s face so she can’t smile; or to suffer long, to bear, to endure.

  What a jolly lineup, my mother says.

  I wait. She sips a bite of pudding off the spoon.

  I guess I’ll pick the most horrible one, then.

  Which is?

  The long suffer, silly. The endure.

  I was a dot in a teenager’s egg sac while James Agee was wrecking his looks with smoke and drink and screenwriting. The moment he fell, crumpling on the plastic-taped leather of a taxi seat, I was swinging around in a belly, as yet unfertilized, to sock hop music. He was the man for me and never knew it. He left the planet without being told I was on my way.

  My mother has found a new delight to replace her rockets. It is a show about dragons. There is a lot, evidently, to learn about them. They are usually deaf but have excellent eyesight, and it takes a thousand years for a dragon egg to hatch.

  She says: I know they aren’t real, but maybe they are.

  Maybe they are, I agree.

  Who can tell for certain?

  Not us.

  Maybe, she says, they only live beneath the remotest mountains. Or in the deepest pockets of the ocean.

  From the porch I watch firstlings of heartsease climb the fence. Tiny green shoots fill the pavement cracks and sunned dirt sends its hot smell into my mouth. It’s an hour past mail time. Maybe we have gotten none, or my mother was accidentally right and he’s been visiting Mrs. Poole on her carpet.

  Then he comes whistling round the corner in his gray-blue shorts. He grins at me with a mustached lip. I want to smile back, but I look down instead.

  Beautiful day! is his observation.

  I want to answer, but my mouth refuses. It makes a little fist on my face.

  I bring you treasure, he continues, our jaunty postman, and holds up an envelope from Eternal Meadow Insurance Company. I start to say Thank you, but he is gone before it can come out.

  The money won’t last forever. I’ll have to get a job again. I will work, and my mother will die, and James Agee will live in the pages under my pillow. I carry the check indoors to my mother, who likes to touch money with both hands before it gets deposited. She lifts her eyes from the blue screen, face sweaty and pleased. She has been waiting.

  Listen to this, she says. This is marvelous. Dragons have such peculiar diets! The seafaring ones eat starfish only. The ones in caves eat bats and mold. And the meadow-dwellers are thought to survive entirely on honey bees!

  Amazing, I say.

  Amazing, she agrees.

  THE EVERYTHING HATER

  My brother has enrolled in a writing class at the community center and says the other students make him want to kill himself and one day soon, he warns us, he probably will. Our mother laughs, but tells me to keep an eye peeled. My duties as the non-suicidal child include frequent phone calls and unannounced visits. I call frequently, and if he doesn’t answer I call back until he does. I drive over to his apartment and stay an hour or two, coughing on his smoke, listening to crackly records whose brilliance he says I don’t appreciate.

  There is often a pile of dishes crusting next to the sink. Not in the sink, because Horace needs the sink for watering and draining his large pots of decorative nightshade. You don’t have to, he might say feebly, as I turn the taps, to which I reply, It’s not a big deal, because it isn’t, after all, a big deal to soap and rinse a few cups. So why doesn’t he wash them himself? I accuse my mother of raising a boy who can’t do his own dishes and of raising a girl who feels obliged to do them. Don’t give me that, she says, did you check the bathroom? and I nod and say, Just mouthwash! because it would not ease her mind to tell her what is in my brother’s medicine cabinet.

  What are you writing about for your class? I ask when the plates are dripping on the rack, September wind pushing the panes, night ready to fall.

  Some bullshit, he says.

  Story or poem?

  You could call it a story, he says, if you were feeling generous.

  About what?

  You’re asking the wrong question, he says, pressing his finger down on a little spider inching across the stacked guitar cases that serve as a coffee table. Die, die, my darling, he whispers before announcing, A salt-worthy story isn’t about something—it is that something itself.

  Then what is the something that your story is?

  Bullshit, my brother replies.

  If he happens to be in a good mood, he will ask me a question or two. How is my sell-out job? Have I found a boyfriend yet or is there no man alive under the age of fifty willing to go to bed with me at ten P.M.? Do I derive satisfaction from my sellout job? Do I remember that I used to be creative, back in childhood when I made dolls out of pebbles and felt? Can I lend him eighty dollars? Does Mom consider him pathetic? Would Dad have considered him pathetic? If eighty’s too steep, how about sixty?

  When his mood is not good, he goes on choked tirades about the other students in his writing class. Do I understand the ridiculousness of these people? They have experienced nothing of life. They are naive, dull-witted, they are sheep blinking in the glint of the blade—which is to say, he explains, they can’t think for themselves and have no idea the government’s hand hangs poised to slit their chubby throats.

  Is that a metaphor? I ask.

  No, Horace says.

  And the students’ writing is so bad—so appallingly, devastatingly bad—the word wretched springs to mind and their puny efforts to sound deep fail so miserably the word failure is actually charitable and my brother can’t figure out why a single one of these people chose to pick up a pen in the first damn place. It’s not as if they have talent. It’s not as if they have anything, and Horace means anything, to say.

  Maybe they just like to write, I suggest.

  My brother wants to know how you can possibly enjoy doing something at which you suck.

  We are nothing for Halloween. In sweatpants, I mix a batch of cookie dough and set the bowl on the couch with two spoons. In sweatpants, Horace comes over with beer, his skull ashtray, and horror movies from Slick Flix where Duke, his sometimes friend, works. He and Duke are speaking at the moment, which means free videos. But the first movie, Cuddle of Death, has to be turned off after five minutes because its soundtrack includes a song by a band whose s
inger used to sing, years ago, in Horace’s band. Not only is the song horrendous, my brother says, but can I imagine the agony of listening to caca from the anus of a talentless hack who was once just like Horace (poor and unknown) but now never has to work a day in his life?

  Instead of putting in another movie, he opens another beer and starts complaining about his writing teacher. She is too loose with her praise. She says stories are interesting when they’re not. It makes these people think they have potential, he says. She bats those big yellow eyes and goes, Interesting. But it’s not! Sex in dorm room: not interesting. White boy traveling in Morocco: not interesting. Old age home: not interesting, depressing, unless you make something cool happen, such as mutiny. Patients bludgeoning nurses with walkers, etc.

  The bell buzzes. Horace yells, Après moi, the razor blades! and I go for the door. Two ghosts and a scary clown hold out plastic pumpkins. I drop a bag of gumdrops into each pumpkin. Thank you, they say without enthusiasm.

  You’ve got boring candy, Horace tells me. Those kids are out there right now talking shit about you.

  And my degree of caring about that is . . . ?

  Higher than you’re willing to let on. You secretly wish you could give them something badass, like miniature guns that shoot chewable bullets. But all you have is piano-teacher candy.

  Dad liked gumdrops, I point out.

  And you greatly honor his memory by distributing them to pissed children. He had bad taste, face it. He liked bow ties and soft rock. He liked Mom, for god’s sake! Horace crushes out a dwindled cigarette on the teeth of the skull.

  When the beer is gone, cookie-dough bowl licked to gleam, he is still fretting about the singer. It’s just stupid, he repeats. How did that band get on a soundtrack?

  It’s only Cuddle of Death, I reason. It never even came out in theaters.

  Yeah, but.

  I yawn and he goes to my refrigerator to see if there might be any beer he didn’t notice before.