by A M Homes
His mother calls and invites her to dinner. His mother calls and speaks to her mother. It’s the way these things are done. All the while the lively leprechaun lolls in the background, pretending to be infantata, too small to reach the telephone, to let the touch-tone language of love link her.
Instead, she makes her mummie do it.
Like good witches in fairy tales these mothers are nearsighted, afflicted with an astigmatism of affection. They are brainless-bat-full in the belfry, the last lost generation of homemakers, trained to be deaf, dumb, and blind. They stay in the house, floating from room to room, cans of Endust and Lemon Pledge in hand, palms pumiced into soft cloths, seeping polish from the pores. Whatever they caress is transformed, the tarnish lifted. Surfaces gleaming. And when they are done—and they are never really done—but when they sit down to rest, they regress. Like little girls they play at the great game of keeping house. They chat it up on the telephone, whilst working the emery board forward and back, dipping the thin brush into the red lacquer and sweeping it over their nails. They chat it up as though the telephone were not the crown jewel of communication culture but a set of empty orange-juice cans strung together with string, stretched from house to house. Receivers tucked under their chins, they move through their kitchens making the sandwiches, stirring the sauce, frosting and defrosting their freezers and fridges, constantly keeping the curly cord wrapped around their neck—it’s a wonder more don’t strangle themselves.
“I don’t think we’ve ever met,” one says to the other.
“No, I don’t think we have.”
What does it matter. They’re all the same, all on the same boat, the same sinking ship.
“How lovely,” her mother says, hanging up the phone. “That was the mother of the boy you’re giving lessons to, inviting you for dinner. It’s so nice, you made yourself a little job. You never tell me anything anymore. Where is he in school, St. Andrew’s? A lot of the boys go to St. Andrew’s.”
Babbling in the background.
Our girl lies on the sofa, eyes closed, listening to her mother’s orchestrations, the Symphony of the Emptying of the Dishwasher; a cacophony of china, ringing glasses, the percussive rumble of the silverware bin and the lyrics of her litany. “You know, you could help me in here.”
“When’s dinner?” the girl asks.
“Six-thirty.”
“Tonight?”
“Is that a problem?”
She is horrified. As though she would need weeks of warning. Truth be told, for the young one, the one who is not so practiced, there is little need for planning. Things here are best served by moving forward without delay.
Daydreaming, she lies on the sofa, pinching her nipples, testing them, sensitizing them for future use. Her open palm rubs up and down her front. She spreads her legs. Her mother comes in—but doesn’t notice at first.
“Sweetie, what are you doing?” the mother finally asks.
“Scratching.”
“If something is irritating you, why don’t you go upstairs, take your clothing off, and run a nice bath. Put a little cornstarch in it. A good soak is always a relief.”
“That’s an idea,” the girl says, stopping her work, but remaining on the sofa.
“Where are all your friends this summer? You used to have so many friends.”
The girl doesn’t answer.
Six-thirty P.M. Fast approaching his house. Out the kitchen window slips a thin curl of black smoke. It rises. She charges up the back steps, hurls herself against the back door, which pops open as if it were a prop. The toaster oven is engulfed in flames. She snatches an open box of baking soda that just happens to be on the counter and throws the contents over the fire. The flames subside.
The mother of the house rushes into the room. “I smelled something burning.”
“It’s out,” the girl says, shaking the empty box of Arm & Hammer like a rattle.
The mother takes the girl’s head between both hands, fitting her fingers into the depressions, the dents behind the ears, the place where forceps went, a reminder of birth. “Precious,” she says, kissing the girl full on the lips, slipping her tongue in and out. “Precious, thank you.”
Six-thirty. Fast approaching. The father works on the car. He is shirtless. He is wearing gym shorts. He is covered in grease.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asks, coming up the driveway.
He sighs, rubs his blackened arm across his forehead, leaving an oily streak, filling in the blank between his eyebrows. “Stand over me when I go under,” he says. “When I ask for it, give me what I need.”
She nods.
He lies back on the dolly and inserts himself headfirst under the automobile. He’s in up to the waist. She squats over his knees.
“Higher,” he says.
She slides up.
He bends his knees, trapping her on top of his crotch. Each time she bends to hand him a tool, she rubs against him. He’s hard. He’s calling out: “One-half inch. Allen wrench, screwdriver. Phillips head. Awl. Awl.” He drops his tools, holds her by the hips, and grinds against her, marking her with streaks of grease. He moans. When he’s finished, he slides out from under the car and wipes himself off with an old T-shirt, a cum rag. “Thanks,” he says. “Thanks for your help. It’s just not something you can do with only two hands.”
Six-thirty P.M. In front of the house, in the turtle-shaped kiddie pool, the littlest one lies facedown. She plucks him from the water and lays him out, rhythmically pressing his chest with her hands. Bending low over him, she blows air in and pumps water out. He sputters and puffs. Hearing his coughs, his racked choking, the family dashes out of the house. They are all over her, offering her everything, anything she desires, their firstborn son?
They reprimand the little one for being so stupid as to nearly drown himself.
“I thought I was a goldfish,” he says.
“You’re not.”
Six-fifteen P.M. The first real day of summer, she departs her doorstep, showered, shaved, conditioned to conquer. Minutes later she is at his driveway, exhibiting serious symptoms of heat and humidity—huffing, puffing, redfaced. She’s unaware that she did not walk here, but truly trotted, fast flew over the green grass and the neighbors’ privet hedges. She is sweating, discharging salty rivulets down her chest and into her brassiere where they pool betwixt her breasts. She wishes she hadn’t eaten all those desserts. The fifteen mysterious pounds absentmindedly assembled during the school year are at once fully present and accounted for. Her shorts have worked their way high into her crotch. Her thighs, like clamps, hold them bunched up so the flesh is free to rub against itself, twin thighs trading smacky wet kisses back and forth until they erupt in a pimply rash.
She thinks of turning around and going home, trying again. She could take another shower, change her clothes, and borrow the car. After all, she is old enough to drive.
At the bottom of his driveway, she rests, brings her head to her knees, blood runs to her brain. Slowly straightening up, she blots her forehead with the sleeve of her blouse and waddles up the flagstone path to the front door—twice pausing to pluck the shorts from her crotch.
She raises the brass knocker and raps.
Inside the house, the mother is yelling, “Did you feed the dog? It’s your dog. You’re the one who wanted a dog. I thought you loved the dog. Why don’t you feed the dog?”
She raises the knocker again and puts her ear to the door. There is the inane sound track of a certain cartoon character, an anthropomorphized animated duck with a lisp. Again, she raises the knocker, banging as hard as she can against the door.
She stands waiting. And waiting.
One. Five. Seven minutes. There is the shift of mood that comes with waiting. Her sweat cools. Anxious to angry. Annoyed to exhausted. Disheartened. Did this dinner not mean anything to anyone but her? Of course not, but she doesn’t understand that, yet.
Wasps. Residents of the nest above the door are r
eturning home, wrapping up a day’s work. They buzz around her head, and before she realizes what they are, she swats at them. Stung. Her eye. She cries out. She stumbles, falling back against the doorframe. Her elbow hits a heretofore unnoticed doorbell. Chimes echo through the house.
“Door, door, door,” a voice calls, translating.
The clunk of a dead bolt retracting. The door is opened. Kitchen towel over her shoulder, the mother is there with a can of frozen pink lemonade sweating in her hand.
The girl’s hand is over her eye. She is pressing against it as though she can make the swelling go down.
“I got stung,” she says.
“Are you allergic?” the mother asks.
“I don’t think so.”
“Can you breathe?”
“Yes.”
The mother ushers the girl into the kitchen, her office, her great laboratory, and makes an ice pack out of the dishrag.
“Should I call your mother?”
Deeply humiliated, the girl shakes her head, not realizing that this accident will work in her favor. She is a little dumb, with none of the cunning and lithe charm of a true temptress, who would see fortune here.
“I’ll get you some Benadryl.”
“What’s for dinner?” an anonymous voice screams.
There is no answer.
The boy, her boy, Matthew, a gift of the Lord, comes into the kitchen. The sight of her beloved sends an almost unbearable flash of nearly nucleic heat through her. Every vessel is dilated. Breathless, she bows her head—a gesture of respect, a peasant tipping to royalty. He wears madras shorts, and an untucked, crookedly buttoned blue oxford-cloth shirt—several sizes too large. His feet are bare. It is the first time she’s seen his toes. It’s all she can do not to fall onto her hands and knees and lap at them.
“Were you, like, in a fight?” he asks.
She shakes her head. The mother comes back into the room and stands before her ready to dispense the medication in the child’s liquid form. Momentarily distracted from her boy by the teaspoon being pushed toward her lips, she swallows the stuff. It’s not nearly as good as sucking toes.
“Isn’t it two spoons if you’re over twelve?” the girl asks.
The mother reads the back of the bottle and pours her a refill.
“If you’d like,” the mother says, “I could take you home.”
The girl shakes her head. “I’m fine.”
“What’s for dinner,” the boy says.
“Turkey burgers.”
While my intention is not to interrupt the proceedings, you should be aware that I have no idea of what they’re talking about. I’ve never heard of a turkey burger and can not quite imagine such a thing. Perhaps I have been away for far too long, perhaps this item says something about these people, something I’m not quite picking up on— therefore, I leave it to you to understand its connotations. But in case you are as baffled as I am, let me add that according to the girl, the item is one that requires the combining of many ingredients into a huge bowl, the use of a frying pan, a sprayed or pumped vegetable-oil lubricant, and there are bread crumbs involved. I myself abhor bread crumbs—they are a kind of softened sawdust, an extender used in efforts to make something out of nothing.
“I hope I won’t have to feed the three of you first,” the mother says continuously from six forty-five until seven-fifteen when the father, damp and disheveled, arrives home.
“Car still in the shop?” the mother asks.
The father nods. “No taxis at the station. I walked. Hot out.” The mother pours him a cold glass of pink lemonade, which he appears to swallow in a single gulp. She pours him another, which he consumes almost as quickly. He holds out the glass for another refill.
“This is all there is,” she says, holding the pitcher close to her breast. “I made it for the children.”
The father goes to the sink and fills his glass with water. He splashes his head and face and reaches for a dish towel. “We have three bathrooms if you’d like to wash up.”
“Is that my shirt?” the father asks his eldest son. Matthew shrugs.
“You know I don’t like it when you wear my clothing.” The boy shrugs again.
“You get funny little spots on my things, spots too small for your mother to see. She pretends they aren’t there, but I see them and they don’t come out. So what about that?” Our girl watches the father and son. They seem to be in competition with each other, vying for something the boy has yet to figure out. The father is intent, well-focused on pulling the rug out from under if only to taunt, to tease, to trip the young one up. For the moment her boy has forgotten her, but she doesn’t worry. She recognizes that she must leave him alone, must learn to spend time with him that is unremarkable—that will be her way in, the seeming ordinariness of things. For now, she is content to simply watch, to witness. And although it seems strange—they have all forgotten she is there.
So far, the father, the pater of her dear one, has not so much as spotted her sitting at his kitchen table, ice pack pressed to the right side of her face, dripping chilly water onto the linoleum floor. To keep from jumping out of her skin, from jumping up and running out of the house, bellowing, “You don’t want me, you aren’t even paying attention,” she talks to the dog.
“Oh, you’re a good dog, a pretty dog, a lucky dog. Did you have your dinner? Was it a good dinner?” She rubs the undamaged side of her face against the dog’s muzzle. He licks her.
After pulling plates from the cupboard, the mother decorates them with artful arrangements: beds of lettuce, piles of potato salad, rings of onion, and tomato wedges. She hurries back and forth from kitchen to dining room, laying the table, flipping the burgers, fetching the ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise. No one helps her. Her servitude is unspoken and predetermined. She does it all herself. The girl could help. She has taken home economics and is well educated in these matters, but knows that to act would divide the room into male and female, waitress and waited upon, would separate her from what she wants. Instead the girl scratches the dog’s ears. He sniffs her crotch and attempts to mount her leg.
“Wallace,” the mother says, grabbing the dog by the collar, jerking his neck. “Stop.”
The two boys wrestle in the hallway, the little one screaming joyously for help as his bigger brother flips and flops him, braiding his limbs like a soft pretzel. The father has for the moment disappeared, excused himself to make a phone call from somewhere quiet, somewhere where he can think, where he can talk and be heard.
Burgers are piled onto a platter. “Dinner is served,” the mother announces. “Dinner,” she repeats. And the troops are assembled. A guest, a guest. It is as if rumor of the girl’s attendance is only now circulating as family members find themselves ushered into the dining room and not the kitchen, as they find the napkins are cloth and the glasses crystal. No plastic or paper. Surprise. Surprise. The mother takes the ice pack from our girl and leads her to her place, next to the little one, across from her boy and close to the father. Our girl smiles. “Nice,” she says.
“This is Matty’s tennis teacher,” the mother says, formally introducing the girl to the father, who takes one look at her and then excuses himself to mix another drink. “I was on the team at Penn, nationally seeded,” he calls in from the living room, before returning to the table vodka tonic in hand, but smelling of Scotch.
“Ice maker’s on the fritz,” he tells his wife as he steals ice cubes from his children’s glasses, stirring his drink with his index finger, which all too recently could have been up the bum of an office boy or sliding in and out of the slippery slit of a secretary. He pulls his finger out of his drink, licks it, then begins to pick at his dinner.
“We’re going to need a new fridge any minute now, I’ve been telling you for months,” the mother says.
“I don’t want to know about it,” the father replies, attending only to his drink. He wishes to be oblivious, wishes all parts of his spread to be wondrous and beautifu
l. Beyond that, he could care less, so long as it doesn’t set him back. And it is exactly that, the sensation of being set back, kept against his will, held hostage by the ice maker, the garbage disposal, the old copper pipes, his wife and children, that fouls his mood. The father is a bitter and stingy man.
“What year are you?” he asks the girl.
“Junior,” she says.
“And your field?”
“Psychology and literature.”
“Is Freud still part of the program?”
She nods.
“Ah,” the father says, excusing himself to mix another drink.
“Isn’t it enough?” the mother asks. The father doesn’t answer. He returns to the table with half a glass of vodka, this time mixing his poison with the last of the pink lemonade. He tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and sips. The burger on his plate remains untouched.
He turns to his son. “That’s my shirt isn’t it? Did I ask you that before?”
The boy shrugs.
“You know I don’t like it and still you do it,” the father says, shaking his head. “Ketchup,” he says, without pausing for breath, and the bottle of Heinz is slapped into his hand. With a farting sound a clot puffs out the top, splashing his fingers. The father, disgusted, wipes it off. “Clean napkin,” he says. And his wife slips one onto his lap.
“I’m so happy you’re giving Matt lessons,” she says, picking up the slack, keeping things moving, smacking the wrist of the youngest one, who’s playing peculiar games with his food. “Fifteen dollars an hour, that’s a deal. At our club it’s thirty, and the pros haven’t played in twenty years. And you’re on a team, that’s wonderful.” She pauses. “It’s funny. Last month I wanted to sign Matt up for group lessons and he refused. But private lessons. Fifteen dollars an hour. We feel very lucky.”
The kid is making money, fifteen from the mother, ten from the girl, pocketing twenty-five a pop, fifty to seventy-five a week—raking it in. She is pleased. He’s not as dumb as you’d think. She looks at him across the table. He’s fidgeting. She winks, but because one eye is already closed, it looks more like an extended blink. He’s rolling in dough. He’s got plans. She is all the more excited.
