by Isla Morley
I am picturing Greg taking the elderly for test drives when he skulks back into the house, slamming the door behind him. He collapses on the couch with an exclamation: “We should have hired professionals!”
“It didn’t work?” I ask. Jakes and a friend recently paroled from prison just spent two days reroofing the garage. “A piece of cake,” they had said.
Greg shakes his head. “It’s worse.”
Of the two of us, it is typically me who holds the glass-is-half-full policy, so when my husband makes understatements, as infuriating as they often are, they always give me a measure of hope because things seldom turn out to be as bad as he assesses them to be. Just how bad can a bad moon be, I wonder, charging out to the garage to see. The smell of damp and mold is overpowering when I open the door, and then I notice little tidal pools everywhere: between Greg’s tools, next to the storage closet, around the car. What used to be water-stained ceiling tiles is now mush the consistency of porridge on the roof and windshield of our car, and on the tool bench. Water is being siphoned through the garage door opener. Turds are floating around in the cat tray. Two thousand dollars washed away. Two. Thousand. Dollars. I look up where the ceiling once was and see right through to its exposed underbelly, where it is still leaking although the rain abated hours ago.
Walking out of what will soon be a rust heap, I head for the ladder still propped up against the wall on the south side. Before I mount it, I spot at the head of the pathway next to our mailbox a small yellow box. What on earth? When I approach it, I can tell that it is a box of sandwich bags, and adjacent to it lies one of its bags sealed with something in it. Crouching down, I pick up the bag, and it suddenly becomes apparent what its contents are: dog turds.
I look around. There are no neighbors out on this drizzly morning, not that there ever are, but for a moment I think perhaps someone must have dropped the parcel while walking their dog. That is before I remember that no one walks a dog with a box of Ziploc bags. In fact, no one walks a dog around our neighborhood association, a little cul-de-sac of six homes ruled as though it were East Berlin. Certainly not since Mrs. Chung, the Kaiser, bolted billboard-sized NO TRESPASSING signs to the entry of the private driveway the day after I gave the homeless guy who sleeps on the bus stop bench (West Berlin) some food. It can only be one person. Kaiser Chung!
“Do you know what this is?” I spit, holding high the offending bag as I barge back into the house. Greg lifts his head from the back of the couch, and before he can answer I say, “Dog shit, Greg. It’s dog shit!”
I hear a sharp intake of air. “Mommy, you said a bad word.” Cleo is anxious to inspect my parcel, while Greg looks at me uncomprehendingly. I march over to the phone, flip through to the back of my address book where the association’s homeowners are listed by last name and telephone number. Punching the numbers, I feel the scorching move from the back of my throat into my lungs as I prepare to address the president of the association.
Her answering machine comes on after four rings, after four separate speeches have blazed a trail through my mind. “You have reached the Chung residence. You may leave a brief message after the third beep,” cackles Mrs. Chung’s scratchy voice. I hang up and dial Gillian Beech’s number. “God bless,” she answers before the phone has completed its first ring.
“Gillian, Abbe here from across the way. You got any idea why I have a bag of dog excrement and a box of Ziplocs by my mailbox?”
“Oh, dear Lord. I told her not to do it, but she has been complaining about your dog for weeks.” Gillian doesn’t need to name the specific “she” to whom she refers; it is pronounced as a proper noun, thereby confirming my suspicion: Mrs. Chung. “She’s upset about him—ahem—defecating on her front lawn. I told her to just talk to you about it, that we are all mature Christians, amen?”
“Gillian, our dog is enclosed in a yard. It’s our lawn he shits on,” I say, choosing a word I know will set Gillian’s sanctified soul on edge.
“Yes, well, she’s very upset.”
“You know she is mad at me because I won’t stop giving Mr. Tom food.”
“Yes. Well. She feels that this sort of thing encourages the, um, how shall we say? The undesirable element. And most of us agree. You did receive the memo about the spate of burglaries, didn’t you?”
I ignore her question. “The only undesirable element in this neighborhood as far as I’m concerned is a busybody who tries to pass herself off as a do-gooder.”
“Might I suggest we pray about this—” Gillian begins, but I cut her off.
“You tell her that she can gossip all she likes about my dog and his bowel movements, but the next time she so much as puts a toe on my property I’ll have her cited for trespassing and she can see how it feels. Oh, and you can tell her, since she’s so intent on preserving excrement, that I am returning this particular sample to her for safekeeping.”
“Well, I think it best—” Gillian begins, but I hang up before she gets any further.
Greg is still sitting on the couch when I get back from depositing the offending materials on Mrs. Chung’s doorstep. “How can it be leaking worse after a new roof?” I demand. He stands up, retrieves the newspaper from the table, and heads for the bathroom. “Good question!” he says.
Why is he not making calls? I wonder. Why is he not dressed, keys in hand, ready to drive to somebody’s house and give them hell? There seems to be no apparent plan of action, which I find intolerable, even with a head cold.
“Greg! What are we going to do?” I ask, standing at the closed bathroom door.
“I don’t know,” is his muffled reply.
“Can you call the roofing company?”
“They are going to tell me that there is nothing wrong with the product and blame the installers.”
“Well, whose fault is it?”
“I don’t know.” His sigh is audible.
“Aren’t you going to call Jakes?” I persist, sounding even to my own ears as though Greg were to blame.
“Give me a minute, okay?” he says.
I am about to remind him that two thousand dollars has just gone down the toilet when Cleo nudges me.
“Mommy, can you fix her?” she asks. Barbie’s head is in one hand and her body in the other. This is exactly what I feel like doing to someone, definitely my neighbor, possibly Jakes, increasingly my husband.
“Not right now, Cleo. Daddy and I are talking,” I say.
“But Mommy, she has an owie.”
“I said, not now,” I reply.
The toilet flushes and Greg reemerges. “Abbe, just calm down.”
Which is what does it. The argument is explosive and brief, and Greg picks up Cleo, who begins to cry, and takes her and the decapitated Barbie out to the garden. Upstairs, I slam the bedroom door, take two slugs from the NyQuil bottle, and get into bed. Pulling the covers over my head, I do the arithmetic, but every calculation ends with us further in the red.
IT IS PAST NOON when I wake up, my cheek damp in the pool of drool on my pillow. My eyes are swollen and my head feels thick with fur, but I get up just as the guilt seeps through my feet like the chill of cold cement. Downstairs, I follow Cleo’s happy tune outside. Greg is sitting on the porch swing watching her take his nappy Russian hat for a ride in the doll’s stroller.
“Don’t leave that on the ground, Cleo, or Solly will chew it,” I call to her. “Hi,” I croak at Greg. “Hungry?”
“You just missed Cheerios and ice cream.” He smiles, and in this small exchange we acknowledge each other’s white flags.
“Mommy!” Cleo rushes over and hugs my knees. “We don’t eat boogers,” she announces.
“No, we don’t.”
“We don’t hit,” she adds. “And we don’t say ‘stupid.’ ”
“That’s right.”
“It’s not polite.” Her list of commandments is an attempt to cheer me up, and they do, even though I know she will break at least two of them before sundown. She rushes off, plea
sed with my improved mood.
“You get your calls made?” I ask.
“Some of them. And I called Mrs. Scribner to tell her you were sick,” he says.
I nod my gratitude. “I thought if I just lay down for a few minutes . . .”
“We’ll get it sorted out,” he assures me.
“Mrs. Scribner’s hair or the roof?”
“The roof is probably easier, don’t you think?”
“You’re terrible,” I say, lifting his hand and putting it on the back of my neck.
“Thank you, thank you very much.”
HEATING UP last night’s spaghetti for lunch, I pick up the kitchen phone, do the math to calculate California time, dial my brother’s number, and turn on the TV with the volume down low. Oprah is interviewing a sad, white-haired middle-aged man. Members of the audience are crying.
“Spenser residence,” is my brother’s clipped answer.
“Oh good, I’m glad I caught you,” I say.
“Sounds as if you caught something worse than me.”
“It’s a cold. It’s Greg’s fault—he passed it on to us.”
“Hey, I know it has been a month since you asked me for those photos, and I apologize for being such a sloth. I haven’t forgotten; I will get up in the attic and look for those boxes this weekend, I promise.” Rhiaan is my last living relative and the self-appointed family archivist. Apart from my grandmother’s farm, about all we have left of our family heritage are those boxes of photos that were once at the bottom of my mother’s closet.
“Keep your knickers on. That’s not why I’m calling.”
“So to what, then, do I owe the privilege?” Rhiaan always pretends it is my fault we do not communicate more regularly, but the fact is, when I do call it is often to be told by Cicely that he has requested not to be disturbed.
“I want to talk about the farm.”
“At last you want to sell it,” he guesses.
“Do you always have to know what I’m thinking before I do?”
“I do—it’s my job.”
“We need the money,” I confess, picturing him cringing.
To his credit, he refrains from offering assistance from his own coffers. “I don’t know how much a fifteen-acre farm in Paarl is worth these days. A lot more if it were closer to Cape Town, I suspect. And the exchange rate isn’t exactly in our favor, but I should think it would add up to a couple hundred thousand dollars all told. Would that do it?”
“It would, but you don’t think the curse—”
“Abbe! No one takes curses seriously, certainly not real estate agents. I think you should call the trustee, what’s his name?”
“Slabbert.”
“Right. Call Slabbert, tell him to put the word out there. Tell him to set the price high and see if anyone nibbles.”
“And the kids?” My grandmother’s farmhouse, abandoned for years after her death, is now the venue for a group of orphaned African children to learn things they will probably never live long enough to apply. Almost all of them contracted HIV/AIDS from their mothers.
“The school was never supposed to be a permanent deal, you know that. This will force them to find a proper school instead of a dilapidated farmhouse. For all we know the Department of Health is probably trying to shut it down anyway.”
“So you are all for it?”
“I’m never going back there, if that is what you are asking. And I don’t imagine you will either, will you?”
“No.”
“Then there you are. Go for it. In my opinion we have hung on to it for too long. It’s time. It’s more than time.”
“Rhiaan?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you.”
“What for?”
“For always looking out for me.”
“Si vales valeo: If you are well, then I am well.”
Before I hang up, I ask if he is writing again.
“Just a slightly immovable writer’s block to deal with first. Nothing a bottle of Glenlivet and my wife’s undaunted cheer won’t cure. But you take care of that cold now—let the preacher take care of you for a while. And give that gifted niece of mine a well-appointed Snoopy kiss.”
After hanging up, I turn up the TV’s volume. The white-haired man is the author of Under Currents, the true-life story of a freak boating accident off the coast of Maine that cost him the lives of both his sons, his marriage, and his career in the attorney general’s office. The strangest thing, he remarks, is that his wife told him not to take the boys out sailing that day, even though the weather was the finest it had been in a month. “She didn’t have a premonition, or a bad dream,” he explains to the talk show host. “She didn’t even say that she thought something would go wrong. She simply asked me not to go. ‘Don’t take the boys out today,’ she said, but I didn’t listen. The boys didn’t even say goodbye to her, they just waved from the truck.”
“Do you believe in omens?” Oprah asks.
Just then Pilgrim yowls from somewhere below the kitchen window, which sets off all the neighborhood dogs and sends an electric current of fright through my body. I rush out the back door and down the path to the gazebo, calling him to stop because his quarreling sounds like the tortured cries of a frightened baby. Just then I see the offending streak of black fur run out from under the gazebo and into the safe confines of Mrs. Chung’s yard, and the superstitious flash of bad luck prickles my skin.
“Pilgrim, get in the house!” I scold our tribal tabby with his bottle-brush tail and ears pinned low, emerging triumphant. “You’re too old for this!”
I look up when I hear the low growling of the heavens and see the dark clouds pulling together again over the mountains. Another storm.
“Can I watch TV?” Cleo asks when I get back in the kitchen. There is a commercial for laxatives, and I know there is no chance I can go back to the show.
“No, love,” I say, “TV rots your brain.”
“What’s a brain, Abbe?”
“Cleo, don’t call me Abbe, call me Mommy.”
“But I like to call you Abbe.”
“Yes, but nobody else can call me Mommy—only you; it’s a very special name for me. And a brain is something that makes you smarter than your silly cat, who doesn’t know that he is too old to be getting in fights.”
“Fighting is bad,” she says.
“It is indeed.”
“Can I watch TV, just for five minutes?” she asks, but I pretend not to hear.
“Just two minutes, Abbe?” she implores.
For one horrible moment, I think my “Okay” is going to come out like Pilgrim’s screech, but Greg walks in and hands me the largest red hibiscus I have ever seen, so instead it ends up like the gush of air from a deflating balloon.
While Cleo watches a purple dinosaur lead a bunch of one-dimensional children around a cardboard yard, I fold laundry at the dining room table. I cannot stop thinking about the father and the tragedy that made his hair turn white. What’s a couple thousand dollars, a roof that leaks, a few rusty tools? I live in a house on a hillside of Honolulu with a daughter who recites Scripture and a husband who doesn’t beat me. So what if he is the constant, peripheral blip on my radar to which I seldom steer? Is it really that bad that we have lost sight of each other over the great swell of laundry, the never-ending chatter of a demanding child, a mound of bills, and the plight of a declining, fussy congregation? There are worse things than tedium; just ask the man with white hair. Tedium, it seems, can be remedied, perhaps with as little as one earnest dollop of will and a smudge of lipstick. Throw in the pair of strappy silver high heels and we just might have the makings of a stellar night out. It might just be all it takes.
Putting away thoughts of perished sons entombed in the wintry waters off the coast of Maine, I send a hasty e-mail to the executor of my grandmother’s estate and then reach for the phone. It is Jenny’s number I am first inclined to dial. Cleo’s godmother and the first among my friends would have been mor
e than happy to babysit a few months ago, but lately she has complained of backaches and fatigue. Even so, I can’t help but wonder if she is standoffish because of our differences on the matter of disciplining Cleo. Jenny, having the clear advantage of being both parent and teacher, issues advice as if the world of parenting were always black and white. My problem, she reported at the New Year’s party after we all had just endured one of Cleo’s fits, was that I “didn’t follow through.” I knew better than to argue, especially after all the champagne, and I certainly knew better than to cast aspersions on her expertise, but dammit, why did it always have to be my fault? On the way home in the car, Greg had said my lecture to her “was uncalled-for,” and I knew it, which is why I called her the next day to apologize. Of course she forgave me, but her back has been sore ever since.
Now is not the time for another one of Jenny’s excuses, so I call Theresa instead. She answers after five rings and instead of saying hello I hear her holler, “You made that mess, you clean it up or, so help me God, your ass and my hand are going to have a tête-à-tête!”
“Teaching the children French now, are we?” I tease.
