Calf

by Andrea Kleine

  Tammy used her key to unlock the back door. Steffi was still on the couch in her pajamas, still watching TV. She looked up at Tammy with a tired expression, which meant, “I’m sick, you have to be nice to me.”

  Tammy went upstairs and knocked on her mother’s door. Her mother didn’t yell as much as Nick. Her mother was smart. She used to want to be a lawyer. She went to law school for half a year, but then she met Tammy’s dad and got pregnant with Tammy. Tammy once asked her why she never became a lawyer. Her mother said it was too much. Now she worked as a legal secretary.

  “Yes?”

  Her mother was lying back on the rainbow bedspread wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that were both once dark blue but now had faded to a purplish gray. Tammy knew her mother wore a bra to work, but as soon as she came home she took it off along with her skirt and panty hose, like a girl version of Mister Rogers. She was on the phone and hooked the receiver on her shoulder as she waited for Tammy to say something.

  “Hugh’s day care said to give you this.”

  Her mother’s expression didn’t change. They had just moved and her mother had been filling out forms all week. Tammy had to be more specific.

  “He had a shower cap on his head when I went to pick him up.”

  Her mother quickly said, “I’ll call you back,” into the phone and hung up. She didn’t let Tammy sit on her bed or stand anywhere near it. She pushed her out of the room, down the hall, and into the bathroom. Under the bright light by the sink, she rolled up her sleeves and picked through Tammy’s hair. She made a few noises, the kind of noises she made when she had to fish a spoon out of the drain or remove a splinter—things she found gross. At their old house they lived next door to a woman who said she was a vegetarian because she didn’t like blood. She made the same noises whenever she had to get out a Band-Aid.

  “Yeah, there they are.”

  She washed her hands.

  “Stay here.”

  She walked downstairs and Tammy heard Steffi say, “What?!” and start to whine. Then Hugh started to cry. He cried at anything. They both trudged up the stairs as her mother came back into the bathroom.

  “We’ll wash your hair first since you’re already here.”

  Her mother helped Tammy take off her shirt and transfer it to a shopping bag. Then Tammy stood topless in front of the sink as her mother dunked her head with water and lathered her hair with the gross-smelling lice shampoo.

  Tammy wiped the water that stung the corners of her eyes and told her mother that Nick yelled a lot. Her mother said Tammy shouldn’t do things to set him off. Like what? Tammy asked. Her mother said like being smart and talking back. That just sets him off and you know it. Tammy said everything sets him off. And her mother said that’s just how he is. He had been in Vietnam and he had seen some things. Tammy told her there wasn’t a war on now. And besides that, he wasn’t really a soldier, he was in communications. Her mother said that even though Nick wasn’t on the front lines, he was still in the army, and he was still stationed in Vietnam. Tammy’s mother told her she would understand when she was older. That was her response to anything she didn’t want to explain.

  Tammy told her mother she really didn’t like Nick. Tammy started to cry a little when she said that, but her mother didn’t notice because Tammy’s tears blended with the sink water running down her face. Tammy sniffed water up her nose and tried to breathe normally. She tried to be nice about it and say she thought Nick was okay as a person, but she didn’t like living with him and she didn’t like him trying to be a father. Her mother said, I’m sorry you feel that way, but you’ll have to get used to him. She said Steffi didn’t have a problem, and he was her brother’s father. Tammy said she wasn’t going to get used to him and she wasn’t going to like him. Her mother said she had to because they were married. Tammy said she and Dad were married before they got divorced. Why didn’t she just divorce Nick?

  Her mother didn’t say anything. She flicked the water off her hands, set the kitchen timer for twenty minutes, and told Tammy to wait in the bathroom. Tammy sat there on the edge of the tub. Topless, wet, and cold.

  She sat there and shivered for twenty metal ticks.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Nick had the TV on in the living room and Steffi was watching it with him. They never watched TV in the mornings, unless someone was sick or unless it was Saturday when they were allowed to watch cartoons in the kids’ TV room until eleven. Sometimes they listened to the kitchen radio in the morning, but that was it. Nick wanted to watch TV because John Lennon had been shot the night before and this was the first he’d heard about it. Tammy didn’t know he liked John Lennon so much, but Nick stood there in front of the TV and didn’t eat any breakfast. Tammy thought for a moment that he might actually cry because he covered his mouth with his fist and scrunched his eyebrows up, and when her mother asked him a question, he shrugged and didn’t say anything. Steffi reached up and held his hand. Tammy didn’t understand why they were so upset about someone they didn’t know.

  “You’re going to be late,” Tammy’s mother said, and rubbed Nick’s back. That was what she did when she thought someone was sad.

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “God.” He coughed a few times into his fist and shrugged his shoulders. He turned to Tammy and said, “That’s history, right there,” and then picked up his coat and walked out the door without saying good-bye.

  Tammy went back up to her room and got her Polaroid camera, which she had unpacked the night before. If Nick thought it was that important, maybe she should take a picture of it. Maybe Nick would want to keep it. She tromped back downstairs with her camera and aimed it at the TV. The camera spat out the greeny-gray photo and Tammy held it carefully by the edges so she wouldn’t mess up the developing. Tammy’s mother told the kids to hurry up because she was going to lock the front door behind them. Tammy wanted to see the picture come out, but her mother said she would have to wait. It will be there when you get home, she said.

  THIS IS REAGAN COUNTRY

  The bus dropped Jeffrey Hackney off in front of the duck pond marking the entrance to the circle. It was called a duck pond, although there were no ducks. The homeowners’ association, where his mother served as assistant secretary, didn’t want people swimming in it. Jeffrey and his parents lived in the house at the far dead end of the neatly paved suburban enclave. Every place they had ever lived looked the same. Their address always had Cul de Sac or Circle or Court in it. They never lived on a simple Street or Avenue or even a Place. One time, for a year, they had lived on a Way. They moved around a lot when Jeffrey was a kid while his father set up businesses, little franchise colonies stretching from Kansas to Texas, KC to Big D. Each suburban neighborhood was shaped like a tentacle curling over small, sloping, artificial hills. Postwar Utopia planners had it worked out so that people could walk everywhere, mothers could push their strollers down black asphalt paths trimmed with daffodils all the way to the grocery store. No one ever did that. They drove everywhere.

  Jeffrey carried with him extra copies of the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and also pages of the New York Times photocopied from the college library. Two days after John Lennon had been shot dead on the street while Yoko screamed hysterically, it was still front-page news, although today the coverage was to be continued in the B section and it didn’t begin on the top half of the front page, but on the bottom. Still, the front page was the front page. A lot of the photos had stupid captions such as “The Day the Music Died.” The little Jimmy Olsens at the newspapers didn’t even know that wasn’t a Beatles song.

  The papers flapped under Jeffrey’s arm as he headed up to the house, which commanded the circle from the far side. They were back in a circle now. Neighborhood boys played kick the can in the street, although it really wasn’t a street, it was more like a parking lot that no one parked in with little extra villi sprouting off as driveways. If someone did park on the asphalt circle, inevitably a neighbor would drop by with a friendly knock
and say, “Hey, pal, you know you parked in the circle? Just wondering when you were going to move it.”

  Jeffrey skirted the edge of the blacktop to avoid the boys; he knew what they were like. They were the types who would try to hit him with a baseball on purpose and then say, oh, I’m sorry, mister. Really. It flew right out of my hands. Although Jeffrey was older than those boys, they weren’t afraid of him. One time they hit him with a Wiffle ball and Jeffrey didn’t look up. Just kept walking, bangs hanging in his face, stomach lumbering under his jacket. The boys started in with their “I’m sorry, mister” routine and Jeffrey refused to glance at them. That pissed the boys off and they pelted him a couple more times with the plastic ball. His mother had taught him to ignore people who teased him. Real men don’t pick fights, she said. One must turn the other cheek, just as Jesus did. Jeffrey didn’t turn his other cheek; he kept the same one aimed at the boys.

  “Is that you, Jeffrey?” his mother rang out before he had both feet in the door. He had tried to sneak in quietly. The house was built with the front door on its own landing, a suspended foyer with one staircase leading up to the living room and the other leading down to the den and his bedroom. He was usually good at slipping in, but he was caught this time.

  “Jeffrey?”

  He glanced up at the living room where skinny metal prison bars cordoned off the staircase and kept people from plummeting to the front door. His mother was perched on the edge of the sofa surrounded by a couple of other ladies in suntanned panty hose. A plate of deviled eggs lay on the coffee table.

  “Jeffrey, come up and say hello.”

  His mother was trying to be nice. She knew he didn’t like company. When his parents threw a dinner party he preferred to fake an illness and stay in his room. His high school guidance counselor had told his parents that Jeffrey had problems with socialization. Since then, his mother was always on his case about coming to say hello.

  “I just need to go to my room for a second,” Jeffrey said and backed out down the stairs. He overheard his mother say, “. . . very shy,” and, “. . . very upset about that musician shooting,” followed by her friends’ overly understanding, “Ohhh.”

  Last year, when he started college, he wanted to reinvent himself as Jeff. Jeffrey Hackney sounded redundant. He liked Jeff. Jeff Hack. That sounded good. Macho. Jeff Hack. Don’t fuck with me. He began to write Jeff on his papers and on the first day of the semester when they had to go around and introduce themselves, something he loathed and would often skip the first class to avoid, he said, “I’m Jeff.” He hated those get-to-know-you classes, everyone sitting in a circle like duck, duck, goose until slowly it came around to him. He would practice saying, “I’m Jeff,” in his head, but when it was finally his turn, he would say it stupidly, with a need to clear his throat, or not loud enough so that some jerk would say, “What? I didn’t catch that.”

  Jeffrey placed the newspapers on his desk to be cut out later and pasted with rubber cement into a memorial scrapbook. He leaned back on his single bed with its corduroy cover and strategically positioned his feet so his shoe soles hung over the edge. He folded his hands across his middle and stared at the ceiling. He hoped his mother’s friends weren’t staying for dinner. If they were, he expected his mother would be down with a quiet knock on his door and she’d ask him to come to the table. If they weren’t, he would hear the ladies walking carefully down the first set of stairs in their sensible pumps and the front door would open and close a couple of times. He imagined it would take the same amount of time, probably half an hour. He could stare for half an hour. He could stare for much longer.

  A few months ago, he had cut an advertisement out of the paper for the Columbia School of Broadcasting. A career in radio broadcasting or sound engineering! He thought that might be interesting. Maybe he could get free records, giveaways, that sort of thing. Radio stations were always giving away free stuff. He imagined he could clean up pretty well. But then there was the downside of having to deal with deejays and their annoyingly loud voices. Even with someone dead they were making it all about them, all about the time they met John Lennon backstage. They probably did meet him, but they were so drunk or stoned they don’t really remember, and they don’t want to admit it now that he’s dead. Deejays were always telling stupid jokes on the air. They were probably that way in real life too. Probably lots of jokes around the station. Jeffrey imagined he would be the brunt of a lot of jokes, so he threw out the ad. He didn’t think he could handle it. He needed something where people wouldn’t bother him.

  He heard someone coming down the second set of stairs. Here we go, he thought. The ladies are staying. The dainty knock on the door.

  “Jeffrey?”

  Jeffrey curled up using his thighs to barricade his face and protect him from whatever was coming through the door. He hadn’t taken off his coat yet. It was an old army coat. Lots of college kids wore them even though they had never been in the army.

  The doorknob slowly turned in place.

  “Sweetie?”

  His mother poked her frosted head into the room. Jeffrey didn’t move. He was good at playing dead. As a kid, he would often pretend to be asleep in the car so that when they got home someone would carry him inside, undress him, and put him to bed.

  “Honey, are you okay?”

  “Not feeling well,” he replied without moving. He said it half-muffled into the corduroy cover and he drooled a little bit when he said it.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Stomach.”

  “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

  This was her standard response to everything. His mother thought nothing could cure someone like a good shit. It was how she kept her girlish figure, she confided to her friends. She carried chewable ex-lax in her purse and fumbled around for them after lunch, brow furrowed, as though she were looking for a lost bobby pin. Then she would pop a tab in her mouth, zip up her bag, and emerge refreshed, knowing refreshment was on the way.

  His mother sat gingerly on the edge of his bed. She put a motherly hand on his leg and looked at him with her concerned, constipated eyes.

  “It’s not that,” Jeffrey said.

  “What is it, sweetie?”

  “I just don’t feel well.”

  “Can you tell me a little more what it is?”

  “No. Not really.”

  His mother paused. She stopped rubbing his leg. He could tell she was giving in. She usually didn’t give him a hard time with this routine. She was a sucker for this—the sick routine. He never had to put a thermometer to a light bulb or clam his face in a hot blanket. If he said he was sick, she simply believed him.

  “Do you want me to bring you some ginger ale?”

  Done. He was free.

  “Not right now. Maybe later.”

  “Okay, sweetie.”

  She gave him one more pat for the road and left. It was almost too easy.

  Using the least amount of effort, only one arm and one leg, Jeffrey crawled off the bed. He put on his Double Fantasy record, plugged his headphones into the hi-fi, and resituated himself on the bed cover. The curly wire bounced and stretched across the moat from his ears to the wooden TV stand he used for his turntable. His ears felt warm and cushioned inside the headphones’ black donut padding. He imagined himself listening along in a private recording studio.

  It bothered Jeffrey having the ladies in the house. He cherished the hours when his mother was out in the afternoon and he had the whole place to himself. He would often stay in his parents’ room, lying on the big, flat bed, watching the room darken as the afternoon sun descended behind the manicured suburban hillside. He didn’t know what attracted him to his parents’ bedroom; he supposed because it was the room in which he spent the least amount of time. His older brother’s room was kept exactly the way he had it in high school, before he moved on to college, the great job, and the bachelor pad. It was decorated with a collection of beer cans on wooden shelves, half a dozen mo
del airplanes, and photos of girls in short shorts—Farrah Fawcett slowly unzipping a halter top. Typical. His brother was a typical guy. A winner, his father would say. Jeffrey used to snoop around in there, but there wasn’t anything interesting.

  His sister’s room was something out of a dollhouse. She came home every now and then from the big college back East. Her room had a canopy bed piled high with snow-white teddy bears. Girl stuff.

  Jeffrey was the only interesting person in the family. Everyone else was boring. They might be winners, but they wouldn’t amount to much.

  An hour or so later, his mother was back with her soft knock on the door.

  “Jeffrey?”

  She opened the door a crack. She must have had a good dump, because the look on her face, although not completely gone, had settled into a relaxed sagginess.

  “Are you sure you don’t want something to eat?”

  “No.”

  “Not even some soup? I could heat you up a can of soup.”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to satisfy her tonight. He supposed he could agree to a can of soup and then pour it down the toilet, but he hated bringing food into the bathroom. That was something his brother would do. He would get up from the table and head to the bathroom still chewing his last bite of food.

  After waiting the requisite thinking minute by the door, she moved forward into his space, smoothed out a spot on his bedspread, and took a seat. Jeffrey pulled off the headphones. They reclamped above his head and he could still hear the tinny music playing softly.

  “Jeffrey . . .” she began in a voice that said, I have to tell you something, I really care about you, but this is difficult to say. “Your father and I love you very much. We’re very worried about you. You’ve missed so many classes and your father . . .”