He continued, “You could say it’s a landlord and tenant affair.” When he focused on my expression, his attitude shifted. He slipped the glasses on again, which made his eyes the wrong size for his face. “You’re worried.” His hand lighted like a butterfly upon my head. “All right. I’m host but there are no tenants, just uninvited guests, too small to see.” His lips crinkled, a modest grin. “Too small,” he assured me, “to even imagine.” His head tilted once more. “You won’t worry, all right?”
I promised.
I had inherited my father’s slight build, which must have cheered Bobby Bell, to think he’d found a frame, at last, more flimsy than his own. I colored easily, as well, which provided him a hope even he knew to leave unsaid: blood that surged so close to the surface would wet his wrinkled shirt, spatter his shoes, and saturate the dirt where they paced. From the moment I met him, even before he required a fight, I understood that his world was neatly cleaved into those who could beat him and those he could enslave. The division, extravagantly uneven, presented him his quest—to find someone over whom he could have dominion—all of this written upon his face, as the truth of my father’s condition was written upon mine. Which might have been why Bobby Bell thought he had an edge, as I was taller and only barely thinner. Why would he think my eyes were asking to be blackened but for a father frail as a child’s pledge?
During that time, my mother came to my bed every night to take from me whatever book I was reading and point to the ticking clock above my head. She’d sit on the mattress and tell me how well my father was doing, how this move could make all the difference.
“Friends will come,” she said the night before the fray, meaning that I would make some eventually, that perspective was the larger test—we were here to save a life, to protect him from the guests that lived within.
What a good boy I was, wanting to believe and then, after I no longer could, willing to pretend. When she left, shutting the door and light, the room drifted away in a darkness that knew no end, which I would close my eyes against, and wait for the smaller dark of sleep.
Later that night I woke and stumbled into the hall—disoriented, still in Illinois. Light at the far end of the house drew me. My mother knelt by the easy chair to fit a pillow beneath my father’s sleeping head. He wore the top to his striped pajamas, the dark hair on his thin legs exaggerated like the carbon filaments I moved with a magnet to whisker a cartoon face. Mother’s gown rose up her legs as they straightened, covering her to the hips, the tan of her legs ending abruptly in the buttocks’ white exclamation. I retreated to the hall, watching her float a flowered bedsheet over him, then touch her lips to his temple, her solemn nakedness like a holy garment—in itself a kind of prayer.
How distant I lived from Bobby Bell.
The fight I remember with a clarity that defies time, as if I had more than lived it, as if it had not yet happened. We met at the bus stop, two stupid savage children, enveloped by a crowd of onlookers I sensed more than saw. Bobby Bell pointed at my narrow chest.
“Fairy,” he accused, a rage in his throat, an evil passion in his eyes.
I had no decent reply, but spoke what first popped into my mouth.
“Pixie,” I said, wanting to laugh, but the finger, that deformed hand thrown out at me, seemed a kind of reminder, like the mechanical voice in the underground that reminds you you’re on a train, like my father’s dry cough even on a morning following a rain, the sky pristine with sunlight and the cleansing smell of creosote.
We wrestled on a patch of ground made bare by children’s shoes, exhaust from the school bus lingering in the air. We lunged and grappled like things less than human. A friend of Bobby Bell’s invented a jeer.
“You fucking Mr. Happy,” he yelled, his breath close and bitter, as if he might not be well.
Did my mother choose my father for his weakness, as Bobby Bell had chosen me? Is it cruel to suggest that she loved him most when he was his weakest? What of the girl, a few years later, who claimed to be drawn to my silence? Was she Bobby Bell in feminine guise, her white thighs holding me with such gentleness that I wept? What of the women I later met, who picked me less as a man than as a mission, and whom I treated like guests who’d overstayed their welcome? I don’t understand the first thing about love, especially that first thing, when passion inhabits your body before you’re aware, a passion you come to detect by the symptoms that endure.
As it turned out, I was weaker than Bobby Bell could suppose, and quicker, too, throwing him to the dirt, shoving his nose against the hardened ground, the blood that colored his shirt, his own. I can still hear his single cry, as I bent his arm beneath my knee. His skull I tethered by his hair to my fist, and I might have gouged a hole with it, but his arm escaped. I had to make a dive.
Shall I attempt to describe the feel of that inhuman hand in mine?
“You’ve made your point,” another boy said, as if it were a debate I’d won.
I climbed off Bobby Bell and backed away, studying the crowd to see who might be pleased I’d won and who might jump me if I turned. That act of accidental compassion—my world, like Bobby Bell’s, cleaved—caused in me a peculiar response. I could see Bobby Bell, his body in a twisted sprawl, but I could not see the others. As if my vision had grown too small, I could not hold them in a single frame.
“That don’t make no never mind,” consoled his friend, touching the place on Bobby Bell where my knee had pinned his knobby spine.
The others huddled—or hovered—about the fallen boy, but they were impossible to take in, the many guests, witnesses to that unfortunate accomplishment.
To be truthful, I’ve never had trouble imagining the small. I pictured the microscopic company my father kept with a clarity that was almost scientific. And I could see how, in Bobby Bell’s eyes, each thing claimed only the value of its use to him: a tool, or not a tool. Viewed in this fashion, all of creation could be made minuscule. How unlike Bobby Bell was my father, who always saw the other side even in his own slipping away.
“Such beauty,” my father said to me, gripping the rail of the bed. “I might have missed it otherwise.”
We’re fifty-three now, Bobby Bell and I, wherever he lives, whatever small place he now calls his. We have our own uneasy children. And still, I can’t retreat far enough to see them all, those bodies assembled about the fallen one. How, precisely, do they gather? How, exactly, do they stand? I think it matters. Are they stooped or standing erect? Has one covered her ears, another closed his eyes? Does that head swivel to miss the farce? Or is she laughing, giant that she has become, at the grappling of such silly and malignant boys? I carry them all with me—a fist that rises in what might be fear, shoulders that turn in what might be submission, hands that rest on what might be knees.
He told me what threatened him was too small to imagine, as if, given this, I could be spared the rest, but it wasn’t the microbes that troubled me after his death. He had it wrong, my father and his tiny beings. The guests that stubbornly remain haunt us because they’re larger than visible things.
ALMOST
NOT BEAUTIFUL
After lunch that day, Lisa’s sister drank too much.
“Saying I drink like a fish doesn’t make sense,” she argued. “It’s like saying I read like a word.”
Lisa could only stare blankly in response. Being with her family was both cruel and unusual, a barbarous act that no decent society should permit. She stood in damp grass on the wide green lawn behind their mother’s house. Lisa and her sister were in their thirties, and neither liked coming home.
“Who said you drink like a fish?” Lisa asked. “Mom just said you shouldn’t drive.”
“I don’t think of myself as a fish,” Amanda said. “I think of you as a fish.”
“I’m ignoring that,” Lisa replied.
Amanda had settled herself on the rope swing that hung from the mulberry tree whose trunk held the girls’ initials, carved one preadolescent day when they believed they would
be not just sisters but best friends all their lives. The pine board on the rope swing was barely wide enough to hold an adult, although Amanda, like Lisa, was bone thin. The rain had turned the bare ground beneath the swing into a bog. A gin bottle rested in the muck at a festive angle, with neither its cap nor its label. Amanda peeled labels. She chewed nails, ate the caps of pens, picked scabs. Twice she had tried to kill herself. Scraps of the label littered her white satin dress.
Lisa decided to find their initials on the mulberry. Nostalgia might be the best they could hope for this weekend.
“Here we are,” she said, keeping her shoes on the grass and out of the mud. The trunk’s widening girth had gnarled the letters, and erased whatever sense they had once made. The marks looked like a cubist face. The dot on the i in Lisa’s name had become a ghastly hollowed eye, while the m in Amanda resembled a pair of tortured lips, puckering up to report something it couldn’t quite say. “Never mind.” She did not know how to be with her sister, but these tree-distorted words weren’t going to help.
Amanda took a slug of gin out of a Big Gulp mug.
“Want some?” she asked.
Lisa liked the idea but didn’t want to venture into the swamp. Her sister’s running shoes were caked in mud.
“You’re too hard to get to,” she said.
Amanda pat-patted the mud with her feet, making a sloshing sound.
“Don’t be a haddock,” she said, smiling at her own cleverness. “You’ve always been a haddock.”
“And you’ve always been a charmer when you drink,” Lisa said. “Why are you wearing running shoes with that dress?”
Amanda laughed as she swallowed. Gin flew out of her nostrils. Instead of replying, she gave herself a push. Mud flew from her feet, forcing Lisa to back off.
“Whee,” Amanda called out. “Tweet, tweet.”
At least she didn’t drink gin through a straw, Lisa thought. At least she isn’t out here naked, clucking like a chicken. Lisa liked to look on the bright side, but she was often too perceptive to find one. Invented bright-sides encouraged creativity, she liked to think.
On the downswing, Amanda’s foot tapped the neck of the gin bottle and it began to spill. Neither woman made a move to grab it.
“Now nothing will ever grow there,” Amanda said sadly.
Like any reasonable person, Lisa hated to see good liquor go to waste. But there was no way to save it without getting muddy and likely kicked in the head.
“You may have invented a new drink,” she said. “Beefeaters and Mud.”
“A Muddy Mary on the rocks, please,” Amanda said. “ Garçon, bring me a turbid toddy,por favor. A murkarita, no salt. A bourbon and bilge water, if you please.” She set her feet against the silt to stop the swing, splashing her dress. “Come on, Sis. You can come up with something, can’t you?”
“Sydney’s making margaritas for happy hour.”
Amanda glared at her, as if the comment were a rebuke. “I have a memory.”
“Of course, you have a memory,” Lisa said, her voice light and false. “No one could get by without a memory.”
Amanda took another swallow from the Big Gulp. “That’s not what I mean.”
Lisa knew what she meant, but didn’t want to hear about her sister’s wretched past. They were only two years apart, and Lisa could not see how her childhood had been more or less ordinary, while her little sister’s had been made up of nothing but anxiety and pain. Amanda had a grudge that she could neither release nor satisfy, and Lisa was weary of it.
“Okay,” said Lisa. “I’ll bite. What is it you’re talking about?”
Amanda shook her head. “Lost your chance.” She bent low to retrieve the bottle, and almost fell from the swing. She dipped the mouth of the bottle to let muddy water roll in. “A mucktail,s’il vous plaÎt.” She held the bottle up to the sunlight and studied the brown swirls. She took a drink. Almost immediately, she spat it out. “Let’s have ourselves a cognac,” she said. “Cognac is the proper drink for dusk.”
Lisa crossed her arms against the whole display.
“The sun won’t set for another three hours.”
“Head start,” Amanda said. “With a head start anything is possible. You of all people should know that.”
As she climbed from the swing she dropped the bottle into the mud. It landed upright, and she kicked it over as she sloshed her way to the damp grass.
Pelicans can fly three thousand miles without stopping. The pelican skims the surface of the ocean at speeds equal to a commuter train. In the purse of its whopping beak, the pelican is capable of carrying a newborn hippo. During the Second World War, pelicans were used to transport supplies to troops trapped behind enemy lines. Sexual intercourse between pelicans and humans has never been documented, despite persistent rumors to the contrary.
Lisa had dressed like a trout—a new but shabby silver dress with a glossy diaphanous exoskeleton, and everyone else at the dinner party was in jeans. It wasn’t the kind of mistake Lisa often made. In fact, she had never before purchased such a dress, a thing of such formal ugliness that one could not help but think the wearer slightly deranged, lost either to nostalgia, stupidity, or mild brain trauma. She recognized this but thought she could pull off “ironic yet funky.” Optimism, once again, did her in.
To make things worse, the dinner party was an excuse to introduce her to a single heterosexual male who had just started working with one of the hosts. There was also a new couple in the neighborhood there for filler. The hosts, Max and Roberto, had become Lisa’s best friends, and they hated to see her without a man. “No one should be without one,” Max liked to say. He directed local commercials and had invited a new cameraman, who arrived at the house in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, his chin as square as Clark Kent’s. Heterosexual, employed, and possessing a chin: he seemed too good to be true.
Max and Roberto had a gift for decor. Their house had little details that made it stand out, such as the chrome molding along the floors and ceilings. Lisa had predicted the chrome would look ridiculous, but instead it reflected the glitter of the chandelier Roberto had found at a garage sale and lent the room definition and dignity. Something about this chrome experiment had led Lisa to buy the trout dress. It was really their fault.
Max sized her up the second he answered the door. “This is a cry for help,” he said. “Do you want a cap? Then no one could mistake your intent to look foolish.”
She waited on the doorstep while he retrieved a Dodgers cap, which she wore backward. The single man, whose name she has mercifully forgotten, flinched when he saw her, literally flinched. She thought he might fall down and break something.
“I usually dress normal,” she said. “Utterly average dresser on most occasions.”
Max and Roberto backed up this claim. The new neighborhood couple decided the best way to be polite about the dress was to make endless inquiries about its purchase, a technique Lisa recognized as a way to seem complimentary and yet remain virtually honest. They would begin laughing as soon as their car doors shut. They’d be up a good part of the night laughing in bed, and then they’d make riotous love. Lisa understood the advantage of having a stooge at a dinner party. She just didn’t relish the role for herself.
She drank too much. Around midnight she was carried to the couch. Max and Roberto pulled up chairs and chatted with her once the other guests were gone.
“How’d I do?” she asked. “Sweep him off his flip-flops?”
Cheerfulness in the face of utter humiliation seemed to Lisa a noble form of self-deprecation.
“He seemed to enjoy carrying you,” Roberto noted.
In the morning, hungover and still in the stupid dress, Lisa joined Max and Roberto in their kitchen for breakfast. They had just had a dinner party the night before, yet the room was so clean it hurt her eyes.
“I’m going to be alone the rest of my life,” she announced.
“Get a pet,” Roberto suggested. “Take up golf.”
“Go see your family,” Max said. Lisa had told him about her mother’s invitation. “And come back feeling sane in comparison to the others who share your genetic curse.”
“Hear! Hear!” Roberto said, and the decision was made.
Lisa found her mother—her given name was Ophelia—sprinkling white powder on a window ledge.
“Ant poison,” she explained. “Don’t let your sister sniff it up her nose.”
The house was old and stately, but, as their father had liked to say, the foundation held more cracks than hard places. Ophelia lifted the rugs and salted every crack with the poison. “They wish to eat me,” she went on. “I shall not be eaten just yet.” Their mother liked to strike an imperial pose now and again, usually during happy hour. She spoke as if she were accustomed to being waited on by maids and menservants when in fact she had worked all her adult life as a postal employee and had retired only two years earlier. When Ophelia and the girls’ father bought the house in the early 1960s, it had possessed a kind of majesty. The girls’ father—everyone had called him Snookie—had come into a modest inheritance and put it all into the purchase of the house. He’d had no siblings with whom to share his parents’ wealth. When Snookie died, the paternal line ended.
“We’ve had ants before, but never like this,” Ophelia said, lifting a couch cushion and shaking powder onto the covered springs.
Sydney, their mother’s lover, stirred a tall pitcher of margaritas, his free hand in his pocket “counting his cock,” an expression for male self-fondling Lisa and Amanda had used when they were teenagers. One of their uncles constantly played with himself, but their mother insisted he was counting the change in his pocket. Amanda had come up with “counting his cock,” and did impersonations of him for their friends.
“One,” she would say, her hand working her pocket. “No, no,one,” she’d say. “Let’s see…one.”
Sydney wore no shirt and whistled “Oh, Susannah” while he stirred. Lisa wished that she and Amanda could be friends again; at the same time, she didn’t really want to put up with the bother. Her sister was a mess and seemed at her worst around the family. Three times she had taken “vacations” in places now called therapeutic health centers. Her letters, a requirement of the first institution, eviscerated her binmates with such comic clarity that their mother had argued she must be ready to come home.
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards Page 17
