by Alan Cumyn
Stan headed down to the basement to gather the gear. The rods were on shelves behind several boxes of Christmas ornaments. It was a matter of moving a few things . . .
“The new one won’t fit,” Stan heard his father say to his mother on the main floor.
The heating vent was right over his head. They might as well have been using a loudspeaker.
“I don’t believe this,” his mother said.
“It’s a standard size, but the pipes here aren’t standard.”
“I don’t believe this,” his mother said again.
“There is an adapter. But I have to go back to the store.”
“Did you call her?”
“I think it’ll be all right.”
“Did you call her?”
There were the fishing rods. Stan had no reason to stay under the vent, but he lingered, anyway.
“She’s pretty adamant,” Ron said.
“About what? Leaving you? What about Feldon?”
Maybe Stan could just get Feldon out quietly. He wouldn’t have to say where they were going.
“Ron! Say something!”
He could just leave a note, maybe.
“What did you do to get her so angry at you? Did she really leave you, or did you leave her and take Feldon with you?”
If Ron was explaining, Stan couldn’t hear it. Feet moved over his head.
“It’s just a simple adapter,” said Ron. Heavy footsteps down the hall. Then the front door opened and shut.
Stan got the tackle box and silently climbed the stairs again. Feldon wasn’t buzzing around anymore. He didn’t seem to be anywhere. Stan quietly called for him in the kitchen. Ron had gone — probably to the hardware to get the adapter. Did he take Feldon?
“Where are you going?” His mother stood blocking the passage to the front door, her hands on her hips. The rims of her eyes were dangerously red.
“I’m sorry,” Stan said.
“Yesterday you just walked out! You dragged yourself back in the middle of the night . . .” If she grimaced any further her jaw was going to crack.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. He felt pretty foolish standing in the kitchen with a couple of fishing rods. Especially if Feldon was gone.
“You just disappeared! Do you have any idea — ?”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Bits of dust fell from the spin-caster onto the kitchen floor. Stan watched the clumps fall, then wondered if he should pick them up or if that would make things worse.
“Where did you go?”
Stan’s eyes went down to the dust clumps anyway. Just for a second. The counter door was slightly open. And there was Feldon cowering with his eyes closed and his hands over his ears.
The sight of the boy drained all the counter-punch from him.
“I told you I was going to a dance,” Stan said. “I should have called. I’m sorry. I didn’t think —”
He was going to say he didn’t think she’d miss him, but of course that wasn’t true.
“You didn’t think!” she said. “You didn’t think! Now look!” She gestured toward the bathroom as if somehow, if he’d been there, Stan would have prevented the whole disaster. “He’s getting me to spend two hundred dollars on a new toilet that doesn’t fit and I don’t bloody well need!”
Stan wanted to just take Feldon by the hand and pull him out.
“I went to the dance and I got home a little late,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Lily came down the stairs clutching Mr. Strawberry.
“Fishing!” she cried.
“I was going to take Feldon down to the river,” Stan said.
“What about me!” Lily said, like her mouth was spring-loaded.
Lily, who hated fishing.
Feldon closed the cupboard door a little farther on himself.
Light rain fell on the window.
“I never get to go fishing!” Lily wailed.
—
“Did you ever do this with your dad?” Stan asked as they headed down the sidewalk toward the river. He was holding Feldon’s hand. Feldon had the tackle box and Lily had Mr. Strawberry and the smaller rod, which she kept swishing dangerously. If he wasn’t careful she would poke somebody’s eye out.
“I saw it on TV,” the boy said.
“But your dad never took you out? He never left you on the dock or anything?” Stan felt like a prosecutor pulling on an uncertain line of questioning.
“We went to a store once,” Feldon said.
“A fishing store?”
“I want to go to the Tilt-the-World!” Lily cried.
Stan looked where she was pointing. Across the street at the Longworth Mall, a lone groaning silver ride glinted and whirled in a fenced-off section of parking lot. A few kids screamed, but most of the swinging arms of the mechanical beast were empty.
“It’s probably not safe in the rain,” Stan said. “Mom would never let you.”
“You couldn’t afford to take us anyway!” Lily said. She poked Feldon on the shoulder. “Nobody has any money. Not in our family!”
“My mommy has money,” Feldon said.
Stan grabbed Lily’s wrist and pulled both kids across an intersection.
“She’s going to come get me,” Feldon said.
“Does she even know where you are?” Stan asked.
“Why wouldn’t she know?” Lily demanded. She was allowing herself to be led.
“We play secrets a lot,” Feldon said.
“What kind of secrets?” Stan pressed.
Feldon started to hum a little tune, then flattened his lips together like he would not talk no matter what happened.
The river was only a few blocks away. Stan steered the kids around a deep puddle.
He stopped and kneeled down to look Feldon in the eye.
“This is important. Does your mom know where you are?”
Feldon shook his head and stared down at his shoes. But what he said was, “My mom knows everything.”
—
Lily cast into the trees, into the weeds, into a bush beside Feldon’s head, and Stan took the fishing rod from her so she ran onto a log by the river’s edge where faeries hid and talked to them for quite a while on her belly with the ties from her raincoat dragging into the edge of the water.
Feldon opened and closed the tackle box, opened and closed it, and took out each colorful, prickly lure, his little fingers wonderful at avoiding every barb. He lined up the spinners and the leaders and the big hooks and the bobbers, the lead weights, the rubber worms and the spoons. They were like an army in the grass, or a specialized audience come to watch while Stan cast out beyond the shallows and slowly reeled in, cast out and reeled in.
So much was happening, and yet it was not long before he was thinking again of Janine. What did she do after the kiss, when she got back to the dance with Leona?
Did she kiss Leona the way she kissed him?
Why hadn’t she told him it was a cancer dance? She was a good talker. Why did he have to get there to find out?
Why didn’t she tell him about . . . the girl thing? Everyone knew anyway. Even Jason Biggs.
What else didn’t Stan know about her?
“Lily!” Stan called out. She was leaning out to the water, her foot planted in mud.
“I have to get the ship back!” she said.
Stan grabbed her arm just as she was slipping. The “ship” was a pine cone spinning in the current out of reach.
Stan picked up another one and handed it to her.
“That’s not the ark of Ignola!” she said. She threw it in the water.
“The ark of Igwash,” Stan muttered.
“What are you talking about?” Lily said. “You don’t know anything!”
He did know some things. He knew, whatever it was with Janine, that kiss was real. A person could run away from it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t important.
A kiss like that changed lives. You didn’t just give up on it.
“I hate
fishing!” Lily said, splashing her hand in the water. “Why did we ever come?”
“It helps you think,” Stan said.
18
It was canned bean soup for dinner but Stan didn’t care. He was so hungry he shoveled the brown mush into his mouth and washed it down with water. Prison rations, practically. But the biscuits were fresh-bought not frozen, and his mother had warmed them.
They were all sitting together in what just two days ago would have seemed an impossible scene: his mother and father at the same table, drinking wine — Gary’s from the other night — with three children now instead of two, everyone eating in thick silence. Stan felt like he was in one of those parallel science-fiction universes where characters suddenly found that elements in their lives had become subtly altered, perhaps for evil reasons.
His father had a beard and was eating bean soup.
They always had meat and potatoes when he lived with them.
Feldon, his new brother, was leaning both skinny elbows on the table.
His real father would have straightened him up.
His mother had not thrown Ron and Feldon out of the house yet. Instead she had put on a nice blouse and Gary wasn’t even around. Gary had been replaced by Ron.
No one was saying anything about it.
Or about the new toilet, which was in place but not to be flushed, apparently.
“So how were the fish biting, Stanley?” his father asked.
Lily sneezed prodigiously all over everybody’s food.
“I don’t think they caught anything but colds,” Stan’s mother said.
Stan wiped his bowl clean with a last bit of biscuit. Was there more? He felt like Oliver Twist.
One wrong word and the whole fishbowl was going to explode.
“Can I bring Feldon to school tomorrow and show him to my friends?” Lily asked in her sweetest voice. Mucus hung from her nostril.
“Wipe your nose, please,” his mother said. “Feldon is not anybody’s show and tell. Your father and Feldon will be moving on. Maybe tomorrow?” She eyed Ron, but he kept eating.
He was not sitting at the head of the table. He seemed a lot smaller than he used to.
“Your father called Kelly-Ann this afternoon,” Stan’s mother announced in an all-is-under-control voice. She passed around a salad that no one wanted. The leafy greens were a bit black on the edges. Ron moved it aside. “Everything’s straight. Isn’t it, Ron?” she said.
Ron seemed fascinated with his last crust of biscuit.
“You figure you’ll be heading home in the next couple of days.” Stan’s mother hardened her eyes toward Ron.
“Or sooner,” Ron said brightly. He was not a bright man — Stan could see that now. When a dim man suddenly became bright, something was wrong.
A car passed in the street with headlights blazing, and the parallel universe held. Lily finally wiped her nose with a napkin and Feldon blew little bubbles onto his spoon.
The phone rang then and Stan wished it was Janine. Maybe she was calling to say she’d been thinking about him all day, really thinking, and had decided she wasn’t a lesbian after all.
Nobody moved at the table. The phone rang, rang.
“Why do people phone during the dinner hour?” Stan’s mother said.
Stan heard his own voice from the answering machine in the kitchen inviting the caller to say a few words after the beep.
Beep.
No words.
“Telemarketers,” Stan’s mother said.
Maybe. But why were they the last family in civilization not to have call display?
Money. That was why.
Lesbians didn’t just decide to not be lesbians anymore. Did they? Stan felt foggy on the subject. Some people were bi. Did they know at this age?
Maybe Janine was just trying him out. Her first boy.
Maybe she ran away after the kiss because she was confused.
Maybe she was waiting by the phone, wondering if he would call.
He’d never called her. Maybe that’s what she wanted now.
Feldon studied his spoon. He had hardly eaten anything.
Then Ron looked at everyone with his droopy eyes and said, “I just wanted to tell you how much it means to me to be here. We’re all family. I know it’s hard to deal with sometimes, but in the end it’s all we’ve got. I really believe that.”
Feldon dropped his spoon, and brown mush soup oozed onto the floor. Nobody moved. Stan’s mother was looking at her husband — at her ex-husband
— with such . . . what?
Like he’d just boiled the children in the bath water.
“You are so full of —” She threw down her utensils and bolted. Clump, clump, clump went her heavy feet on the stairs. The walls shuddered with the slamming of the bedroom door.
Ron finished his biscuit carefully. Stan had the sense he wasn’t exactly sure where his next meal might be coming from.
—
The telephone in the kitchen beckoned, but there were too many bodies in the little house, not enough space to make a private call. Then Gary called — on the home line, not on Stan’s mother’s cell — and he and Stan’s mother talked and talked while Ron made up the bed in the den and settled Feldon.
One call, that’s all Stan wanted. Two minutes to ask Janine a simple question. Why did you run away?
Stan was getting his room back. Ron and Feldon would sleep on the wretched pull-out that ensured guests didn’t stay too long.
“If he’s not gone tomorrow you’re going to be reading about us in the newspapers,” Stan’s mother said on the phone to Gary, over and over, with slight variations, for forty-three minutes. Ron couldn’t help but overhear. He kept tucking in the sheets and re-tucking and adjusting the blankets and testing the springs, like a man determined to make making the bed last as long as possible.
One simple question for Janine.
“I don’t care what happens at work tomorrow! The whole office can sink into the ocean. If Ron has gone, I’ll be the happiest woman on the planet!”
Ron adjusted and readjusted the window blinds, then started over again.
Finally Stan’s mother got off the phone and immediately called to Stan to please help his sister with her math. Lily was still making up her own rules for addition and subtraction. An hour later she had to be stick-handled into pajamas and teethbrushing. She told him an elaborate story of the river faeries who enchanted all the fish to walk upright and wear long gowns and tuxedos.
One brief, private conversation on the phone. If Janine liked girls the most he could accept that. He just wanted to hear it from her.
It wasn’t long before Stan’s mother sequestered herself in her bedroom. Ron and Feldon slept downstairs, Lily snuffled in her usual fitful state, and Stan lay in bed. Janine’s damp clothes were still balled on the floor. They smelled of her. He realized he still had his father’s phone. He could call her on that and yet he didn’t.
It didn’t feel right anymore.
He closed his eyes and in his head it was morning. Morning in a parallel universe. They were older. She was sleeping — it was the most natural thing in the world. Her black hair was a storm on the pillow. One bare breast poked above the blanket.
A line just popped into his head.
One bare breast above the blanket.
And the next line came pulling along.
One soft sigh on the shadowed wall.
It was sounding . . . like a poem. An entire poem just fell out, pre-formed.
. . . and dreamy early-morning breathing,
eyelids drawn, face so fair,
as real as real though you’re not there.
Stan could see it all, this parallel morning with Janine beside him in some other version of his life. As if it would be completely natural to wake up beside a naked, beautiful person.
An ordinary miracle, somehow.
—
Stan said the poem to himself — it was just a verse, really, it would need more
— over and over while the black of night turned to shades of gray. It was in his head now. No need even to scratch it in his notebook. He really ought to undress, to slide under the covers, surrender to sleep. But he’d slept most of the day and had failed to phone Janine.
Why?
It didn’t feel right. He was operating on feel.
Why did he feel now as if the exact right perfect thing to do would be to get up and step away in the night and go to her? This was the moment. What had to happen between them had to be private. He felt that knowledge in his body the way he could feel the perfect jump shot starting from the ground, the rotation of the ball as it arced toward the basket.
She was waiting for him. Until now she’d done all the chasing. Now she’d run, and it was his turn to go after her.
Stan got out of bed and dressed. It was crazy, crazy. He gathered his runners from the front hall closet, kneeled and pulled them on, then slipped on a jacket. It was going to be cold.
And there on the front porch were Ron and
Feldon.
“What are you doing here?” Stan and his father said at the same time.
Stan backed down first. He was still the kid. Ron probably outweighed him by fifty pounds.
“Nothing,” Stan said, as if he had to explain himself to this deadbeat. Then, “I’m going out.”
“To see a girl,” Ron said.
Feldon was bundled on the front porch bench in his jacket, clutching Mr. Strawberry, his eyes closed, head about to droop.
No way Lily would knowingly give up Mr. Strawberry, not even to a half-brother. She was going to be furious.
“If you’re going out it’s to see a girl,” Ron pressed.
The battered brown suitcase they’d arrived with was leaning against the front porch.
“And you’re running away like you always do,” Stan heard himself say. “That’s all you ever know to do.”
Ron looked to the darkened driveway. What was he waiting for?
“I bet you didn’t call Kelly-Ann,” Stan said. “I bet you lied about that.”
“I told you. She’s a certified lunatic,” Ron said. “Like most women.”
He was an old gray bearded man making pronouncements. Was this the same guy who drove Stan to the dock all those years ago?
He was waiting for a taxi.
“Look around you. What do women really want? To get their nails in you. Nails in flesh. Either you’re running at midnight chasing some scent, or you’re breaking their grip, trying to get your flesh free.”
