by Matt Stewart
Esmerelda placed her hand over her mouth and looked up at the ceiling. She counted the chandeliers, then the crystals in the chandeliers, the cuts in the crystals, the scratches in the cuts, most of this imagined, her eyesight not that good. She haronked into the tablecloth and began gathering her allotment of knives and forks for a direct facial attack.
Then the door chime jingled, footsteps cantered their way. A crash, a child’s lethargic whine, and finally the appearance of a four-year-old black girl wearing a formal pink dress and a bow in her hair, carrying a carton of Parliament Menthols poorly wrapped in the newspaper funnies.
“Grandma!” Robespierre placed the cigs beside Fanny’s tea-cup and hugged her leg, just like they’d practiced. “I’m so happy to meet you! You’re even prettier than Mom said!” Robespierre’s eyes fell shivery and teary, and she buried her nose in her grandmother’s jeans. With song ringing in her chest, Fanny enacted a policy decision on the spot: she was done voting Republican down the line, so long as she could write in her granddaughter instead.
A yelp echoed from points unseen, and a boy dressed in corduroys and fire truck suspenders came tromping around the corner, gripping a handle of Beefeater with both hands.
“Gramma!” The Beefeater hit the floor and Marat plowed into Fanny’s lap, his teeth sticking to her knotted sweater.
“And who is this?” Fanny asked, a bit shocked by the boy’s sudden proximity to her skin but adequately charmed by the warmth of human contact.
“Marrraaaa,” the boy blubbed.
“That’s the team,” Esmerelda summed up. “Good kids, obviously, and I’m on the comeback trail. Plus we brought presents. C’mon, Ma, whaddya say?” She held out her hand like a dying flower.
Fanny slipped into analytic mode, tamping down the flight in her throat and the heat on her lap for a long-range assessment of the situation: the odds that Esmerelda would ever actually fulfill the real estate investment portion of her contract were a stretch; these children were initially quite attractive and friendly, but in the end they were children and would require decades of fussing and income and house policing to shove into adulthood.
A black tar oozed through her head, dropping her internal temperature, a sad and sticky weight. She closed her eyes and waited for the gloom to pass, creating a firm and stationary foundation which enabled the kid in her lap to squirm up into standing and wrap her wool sweater in a tight toddler embrace. She tried to ignore it, still aiming for a dispassionate decision, but then the kid kissed her heavy cheek and mumbled that he loved her and it was pretty much over. Fanny hugged back hard, both hands across his back and her mouth full of his hair, solid in knowing that despite all the uncomfortable parts of cohabitation these kids were here, alive, committed—hers.
The restaurant greeter slid into view, rustling his hands in his pockets. He was a skinny, olive-skinned kid, peach-fuzz mustache and eyes shaped like small envelopes. “How’s your meal?” he asked.
“Fine,” Robespierre said.
“Go away,” added Esmerelda, igniting a fierce smile on Fanny’s face.
“Good, good. Listen.” His head cranking sideways, both hands up and out in a surrendering calm. “As a parent, you know, family, we have an obligation to tell you something.” Two sniffs, then, gravely: “about your boy.”
“What boy?” Fanny barked as Marat’s legs flutter-kicked air.
With a nonchalant Latino nod he said: “We have reports your boy was consuming alcohol on the premises.”
“Excuse me?” Esmerelda woofed, but Fanny had already scooped up a table knife and started hollering:
“What on earth do you think you are doing accusing my handsome grandson of such a thing? What a bunch of baloney—he is only a child! Cease these fabrications, and while you are at it, get your vision checked!” She dipped into her lap and yanked Marat free, then slammed a pile of cash on the table for a tip just north of thirty cents. “Come on, kids. We are going home.”
Holding back giggles, the rest of the family followed Fanny through the main dining room and out the door to the idling Town Car.
“Ma, Slippy Sanders,” Esmerelda peeped. “My boss.”
“Hello.” Slippy nodded warily, ticked he was missing his tee time, only doing this because Esmerelda had threatened to set up her traveling circus in the CopySmart lunchroom otherwise.
“Yes,” Fanny agreed.
“Save the hugs and handshakes for later,” Esmerelda said, flinging herself out of the wheelchair and waddling toward the car like a huge frightened penguin. “A little help?”
A blast of energy and they were all inside, Esmerelda splayed across the backseat and the Gargantuan strapped to the trunk, the doors slamming shut, the sedan gliding at low speed down the hill to Fanny’s house, saccharin saxophone solos swimming out the windows. It wasn’t until evening, after the children were settled in at Fanny’s place and Slippy and Esmerelda had returned to the Presidio for the rest of their belongings, that Fanny broke open the Parliaments and Beefeater and found the seal on the gin broken and a gulp missing. Strange, she thought, casting a sideways glance at the children working on puzzles on the floor, Robespierre finishing up a two-hundred-piece jigsaw and Marat stumped on a puzzle of the fixed-edge board variety, taking more of an interest in rolling on the floor, singing an original tune about dentists and jelly beans, twirling his pinky in his ear, and drooling puddles.
Strange, but not impossible.
She told Esmerelda after they hauled Ezzie’s steamer trunk into the house. “Unlikely,” Esmerelda remarked. “With all the hubbub, there’s probably a logical explanation. Maybe it broke. Maybe I took a swig and can’t remember.” She snorted. “Hell, so what if he did take a sip? He’s feeling his way out in life. It’s not a crime.”
“Actually, it is.” Fanny Wan Twinkle stirred her martini with a crooked fingernail and decided it was high time to invest in a secure home storage container.
Three generations of Van Twinkles under the same flat California roof, Fanny Van Twinkle the resident crackpot chieftain. She smoked two packs of menthols before lunch, watched eight hours of soap operas each day, chased her commercials with gin, and insisted on everything remaining exactly as she’d left it. She did not permit redecoration of Esmerelda’s room, or the guest rooms, or any room; not one article of clothing could be removed, no stuffed animal discarded. Fanny said no to low-flow toilets, diet soda, computers, and cable television; the driveway asphalt was crumbly and decayed; the laurel tree on the sidewalk drooped with dead limbs; the medicine cabinet was packed with pills decades past expiration; everything in boiled suspension since the morning of April 1, 1979, when Harold Van Twinkle last set out for the Farallones in his thirty-two-foot trawler, trailing his green nets for albacore and rockfish.
Rooting through her mother’s old bedroom, Robespierre discovered a broken Easy-Bake Oven, cardboard boxes filled with lace valentines and wilted homework assignments labeled with failing grades, a pile of singleton wide-heeled sandals, a bookshelf full of dog-eared typing manuals. She tabulated all the junk and substandard decorations with deep pride, because it was hers, finally, a room for herself and not her brother.
Esmerelda unpacked her muumuus in the den where she’d lived for six years up until her surprise pregnancy shook free the twins, where there was no staircase to the second floor to sweat over or shame her, no mirrors to reflect the unguent blob that constituted her body—just Esmerelda, a black-and-white television set from 1978, and the two king-sized mattresses jammed next to each other, covered by the most customer-friendly lifetime warranties Fanny Van Twinkle could find.
Marat lay on his bed in the dark as the world juddered around him, wishing that everything—the framed prints of floral still lifes, the rose-hued bedsheets, the closet full of leotards, a notebook full of boys’ names and sausage drawings, the newly decapitated dolls stuffed underneath the bed—was a bad dream he’d been swirling in since he sampled the bottle of smelly water in the Cliff House lobb
y.
Upstairs, Fanny worked at the gin and watched tapes of soap operas in her bedroom, her saliva-soaked butts smoldering in a hula girl ashtray, her martini glass resting on the notarized contract in which Esmerelda agreed to: 1) change nothing in Fanny’s home and 2) sleep in the house every single night unless she had Fanny’s written permission, which would be granted in perpetuity upon the purchase of a home within San Francisco city limits with a separate bedroom for each inhabitant, located within walking distance of a park, and furnished exclusively with antiques manufactured no later than 1979.
Each child had a private bathroom, a personal closet filled with clothing, assigned seats on opposite ends of the dinner table and the slick vinyl sofa. The situation had a certain appeal, particularly for Robespierre, as her room was stocked with clothing from Esmerelda’s childhood: baby-doll dresses and Minnie Mouse sweat suits and jelly shoes, vintage lunchboxes filled with mismatched barrettes and trippy bead necklaces and hundreds of hair bands in every imaginable shade of pink. The decorations were consistent with the general themes of fuchsia or doilies, with chintzy posters of kittens and kissing children and angels, a huge slice of sappy cheesecake, the former setting of dozens of annoying all-girl sleepover gossipfests.
Marat’s bedroom was nearly identical, a guestroom designed to cater to Esmerelda’s all-female cousins, with fewer angel paintings and a subtler tone of pink on the sheets, but mostly the same stuff. His dresser held the less girly items from young Esmerelda’s wardrobe: no dresses or skirts, but the full allotment of frilly blouses and candy-cane sneakers, a drawer packed with rolled pink tights, an old Wonder Woman Halloween costume, a musty training bra. He found a couple of adult-sized San Francisco Giants replica jerseys balled up in the corner of the closet and wore them to pieces, but on wash day he had to slip on something purple or pink and wait next to the dryer for his shirts to finish up. The underwear selection consisted of thirty-seven panties stenciled with cartoon seahorses and blooming daisies and two pairs of aging long underwear. So Marat wore the long johns, every single day, wearing a pair the usual way, then inside-out, then taking care to launder them before the other pair was soiled. He cut a pathetic profile—large faded jersey hanging over him like a nightgown; thick, hardy legs; natty yellowed fabric peeking out from under his cuffs. On the ten truly hot days of summer and on excursions inland or to the beach, the weird sight of shorts over long underwear, mummy legs trapped in parchment, knees and shins darned with scrap fabric. Attached to those Egyptian legs: obsidian eyes sagging with sadness.
And always, between brother and sister, the smell of mothballs.
Though Fanny never volunteered for babysitting, hadn’t the slightest desire to do it, was over and done with minding children, after Esmerelda caught the van to work in the morning it was just her and the two kids running their mouths and vandalizing priceless pre-1979 furniture unless she figured out something to do with them. Before school they walked over the Great Highway to the beach, where the children kicked up sea foam and ran at flocks of birds and hypothesized about the origins of waves. Fanny monitored them from atop a dune, chain-smoking and spitting. For lunches Fanny worked off her old stores of macaroni and cheese, which she made every night and packaged in ancient semifunctional Tupperware containers that she sealed with duct tape, forcing the kids to borrow the lunch lady’s scissors to access their meal. Sometimes when they got home from school Fanny took them on a walk around the block to pick up candy bars and a bottle of discount-bin booze from the corner store, but usually the kids were quarantined in the backyard, flopping in overgrown grass while Fanny snoozed inside. She was usually up and moving by the time Esmerelda got home, but her hangover was at its worst, a radon steam bath, and the stress came through in her indelicate dinners.
This stasis held for years, unbroken circular motion, a pacing path three feet deep. Fanny fell dull and dazed, beaten back by centripetal force; the kids sensed her resentment and responded in kind. Windows for détente opened rarely and closed quickly: the positive feelings of breakfast in bed erased by dropping the hot frying pan on Fanny’s lap; Fanny’s attempt at making brownies for a school bake sale engendering a month-long stomach virus shootout across the school district. Still, in her sober moments Fanny recognized that these kids were all that was left of her family, and—this admission came only after the most moving soap opera episodes, featuring devastated marriages and operating-room accidents—the only hope she had to feel loved again.
On Sunday mornings, after nobody took her up on her invitation to go to church or head out for a relaxing walk down the beach or—and this one hurt like a hammer on an exposed toenail—accompany her on an all-expenses-paid visit to the brunch eatery of their choice, topped off with a trip to the movies, she sometimes took the Muni train down to Union Square. The department stores pulled her in with their glamorous displays, a wonder of color and luxury that she knew she could never attain: skirts cut well above the knees and blouses fashioned from silk and lace like the Queen’s wardrobe and shiny leather pocketbooks that cost a month’s worth of Social Security. Staff in formal uniforms upgraded her measure of America with tasteful overpoliteness and hair gel, patiently explaining the variations between perfume samples and offering directions to the ladies’ room and tactfully slipping her tissues when she broke down at the discount suit rack, the simple gray polyester outfits requiring only a beaten silver bolo tie and homemade fish-hook cuff links to be exact replicas of Harold’s wedding day ensemble.
Later, when she dribbled back to the Muni station, harelipped teenagers accosted her at intersections, asking for change and twitching erratically and keenly eyeing her great wool bag. She pushed out her elbows and flapped past their grimy roadblocks, noting their smell of overflowing toilets and recording their wheezy grunts like a dying Volkswagen and, from the farthest corner of her peripheral vision, spotting their haunting appearances—shoes stapled together; frayed, threadbare hoodies; mud-streaked sweatpants riddled with holes from crotch to ankle—that appeared alarmingly close to her own grandson’s daily dress.
“Marat,” she announced at dinner after returning from Union Square ten days before the twins’ eighth Christmas, “how is everything going at school?”
“Fine,” he shoved out through four scoops of green beans.
“I’ve been selected for gifted and talented classes,” Robespierre chimed in. “We’re dissecting a cow’s heart next week.”
“We are well aware of your success,” Fanny interjected, “this question was in regard to your brother. It can be quite a challenge to succeed in your shadow.”
“Actually, I try to help him with his homework every day,” Robespierre pointed out. “But he doesn’t really care.”
Marat dropped his fork on his plate and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, a hideous piss-and-shit stained brown fabric that was once, allegedly, the top half of a long underwear set. “Has there been a problem with the washing machine?” Fanny wondered.
“All the appliances suck,” Esmerelda griped, “they’re about a thousand years old and haven’t been repaired ever. Our clothes are turning yellow.”
“They are classic machines paired with vintage clothing,” Fanny clarified, “which I allow you to use free of charge. Now, are there any problems with that arrangement?”
“Yeah, lots,” Esmerelda said. “We look retarded with a side of pigsty.”
“I like all the clothes,” Robespierre smiled broadly, her teeth appearing to Fanny like perfect rows of chipped ice. “I have a new outfit every day!”
The admission is wonderful, roaring crowds beneath the palace window, a regal vindication. “Well then. And you, Marat? How does your wardrobe make you feel?”
Marat lifts his shirt over his nose for a bank-robber look, two bleak eyes topping off a gray-fuzzed and splitting San Francisco Giants jersey. “Fine,” he mumbled.
“Fine,” Fanny repeated, wanting to believe it but not quite able to. “Would you perhaps be interested in a w
ider array of clothing, perhaps for the holidays?”
“Sure,” he said from beneath his gunslinger mask, and along the rim of his weighty eye sockets she thought she caught the slight uptick of a grin.
A week later, Fanny was unpacking a dusty box of Christmas decorations from the hall closet when a police cruiser rolled onto the sidewalk in front of the house. “Excuse me!” she called from the door. “Plenty of street parking around here, officer. Consider my azaleas.”
“Ma’am,” the officer said. “Got a boy who belongs to you. Says his name’s Marat.”
“What about him? He is at school.”
“We had a call from a dollar store this morning. Nabbed him stealing a package of tighty whiteys.”
“Impossible—I escorted him to school this morning myself. He has always been perfectly behaved, and besides, committing a crime at his age is unthinkable—” and Fanny remembered how Harold had been out on the fishing boats a lifetime’s worth, and still the one squall had ushered in the impossible, transubstantiating his body into green nets and freezing her in the 4 AM black. Severity paled her face.
“The video camera doesn’t lie. I can show you if you want, but they’re not pressing charges. Though I’d recommend some corrective action.” The cop opened the back door of the cruiser, and Marat darted out. “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Van Twinkle.”
She nodded and he left. But there it was again: the word “missus,” the word that went with Harold and his torn hands and his arthritic back and the songs he sang for her and Esmerelda at night when he fried up his catch of the day, fishermen ditties about mermaids and wind gods and bathtubs and liquor that never had much direction or rhythm. She looked at Marat, vacant as usual, kicking a plastic bag and mashing his nose with his palm.
