Drowning in Gruel

by George Singleton

  Wanda picks up the shoe. Jerry shuffles the Chance cards, then the Community Chest cards. He sets them down, and picks up the dog. Wanda smiles, and takes off her sweater.

  At two o'clock in the morning, with the game at a standstill because, of course, Jerry owns two railroads, one utility, Park Place, and Tennessee Avenue—while Wanda owns Oriental Avenue, two railroads, Boardwalk, et cetera—Jerry says, "Let's go back and get our cars. Let's see what they look like parked beside one another in the driveway."

  They sit naked. At midnight Wanda suggested that if one player makes an offer and the other player refuses to sell or buy, then the refusee must take off an article of clothing. By a quarter past midnight they both sat naked on Paula Purgason's owners' claw-footed chairs. Wanda says, "I'm not walking down to the square naked. I'm willing to bet that there's a camera on that statue's head, scoping out the whole place."

  "No, we'll get dressed. Come on." Jerry takes the six empty bottles and lines them up on the kitchen counter. From in there he calls out, "I'm being forward. I'm sorry."

  Wanda walks in fully dressed. "Okay. As long as you admit it, I'll go get the cars. It might not be a great idea keeping them there overnight anyway. Who knows what hubcap-stealing gang members roam Gruel at night?"

  They leave 103 Old Old Greenville Road, and clutch each other. Jerry kisses the top of Wanda's head three times and says, "That theory about the game pieces. What would've been wrong?"

  "Car and dog. Car and shoe. Car and wheelbarrow. Car and iron are okay, but weird. Car and lighter's the perfect one, really."

  "There's no lighter. What're you talking about? There's no lighter."

  "And nothing's perfect," Wanda says.

  Two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon sit atop Jerry's hood. There's a note from Jeff the owner that reads, "We took bets. I say it's two in the morning. Let us know tomorrow. We open at ten. I cook more than hot dogs."

  Jerry says, "Wanda. I don't even know your last name."

  She gets in her car and turns the ignition. Wanda cranks her sunroof closed. She doesn't say, "It'll be McCrary one day." She says, "See if you can drive home with those beers on your hood. That'll be a sign, too. If you can, it'll be a good sign, you know. If you can't, then we'll change your flat tire together. I know how to change a flat tire. I know how to change a flat tire."

  Jerry looks at the cartons. He doesn't say, "This is a strange, strange love story that couldn't be filmed ever."

  When they drive back home—when they arrive with unbroken beer knowing that they'll stay another night not feigning prospective-buyer status so much—Jerry gets out of his car and says, "Do you ever listen to Tom Waits? I wish there was a stereo in this house."

  Wanda nods. She doesn't say, "There will be." Wanda doesn't say, "Oh, this isn't the time to get all maudlin, you drunk, drunk documentary filmmaker." Inside, she takes her sweater off again, goes to the Monopoly table, and asks if Jerry wants to sell off North Carolina.

  What doesn't matter is this: Jerry and Wanda go to bed at dawn, they don't make love, they only spoon, they don't hear Paula Purgason let herself in to check on them. What doesn't matter is that Gruel BBQ_holds a three-for-one special on Saturday wherein any person can get enough chopped barbecue to feed a family of four for eight dollars, slaw, buns, and potato salad included. It doesn't matter that Victor Dees gets in an allotment of World War II canteens Saturday morning via Federal Express at his army-navy store on the square that, later, he would have to donate to the three boys left in Gruel's only Boy Scout troop.

  It doesn't matter, ultimately, that dogwood blossoms finally bloom at 103 Old Old Greenville Road, that azaleas emerge, that potholes in the gravel driveway dry up.

  Jerry and Wanda awake at noon and both of them realize that they don't need to brush their teeth. They aren't hungry, either. They walk around the house naked as chicklings and shade their eyes in sun-filled rooms. "We might be dead," Wanda says. "This is something I've never felt in my life."

  Jerry says, "Last night I had a dream. You were in it. You could jump over everything. We were standing on a curb, and these cars kept flying by, and you'd jump over them. My boy Henry was always on the other side, holding on to this freckled pig"

  Wanda puts on her panties and brassiere. She steps into her blue jeans and fingers her front teeth. "Man. Man. I had a dream that my daughter kept running toward a dog that ran away from her. But she had to stop and tie her shoes. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you could see yourself? I could see myself pointing at Flannery, telling her where to go."

  Jerry says, "I'm glad we didn't have sex last night." He thinks, That might sound like I'm an idiot. He says, "We might as well stay one more night. We could start that Monopoly game over. And over. And over."

  It doesn't matter that half of Gruel knows about their tryst, that they want new people moving in just so they have something to talk about. It doesn't matter that Jeff the owner plans on offering his version of self-esteem lectures for men who can't play eight ball. It doesn't matter that, even now a day early, so many men think about how they only have twenty-four hours to take their sons or daughters back to Gruel.

  Wanda says, "I have about two hundred English 101 papers to grade. Would you mind? If you can talk the real estate woman into believing that we really want to buy this place, maybe we can stay." She approaches Jerry and kisses his lower chin. "We can do that, can't we?"

  What matters is this: Jerry doesn't say, "You know, my camcorder's in the trunk. Let me make a short-short involving you running out of red ink." He says, "Wanda, Wanda, Wanda. Have you always been this beautiful and smart? I mean it. I mean it. I mean it, I swear to God. Do you believe me? Do you believe me? Please say that you believe me."

  Jerry and Wanda wait in two separate cars for their respective ex-spouses to show up at Gruel BBQ, They're parked two spots away from each other. Jerry tries to find an NPR station on his radio; Wanda looks into the backseat for a book. Terry shows up first, parks to Jerry's right, and Henry leaves the car carrying his slight duffel bag. He drops it and runs toward the pigsty/petting zoo.

  "Everything okay?" Jerry says to his ex-wife.

  She slides a pair of sunglasses above her forehead. "Henry got to see a giraffe birth a foal. He might have nightmares. How're you? How's the porn industry?"

  Jerry rolls up his window and looks peripherally toward Wanda. "There's a difference between talking to those people and filming them in the act. Could you please get over it? That's Not My Finger won best documentary at the Western Delaware Film Festival."

  Henry reaches over the wooden fence and tries to pick up a piglet. He yells back to his parents, "I bet it's easier falling from a pig than it is falling out of a giraffe."

  Wanda starts her car.

  "I've fallen in love with a man," Terry says. "I hope you can take it if I show up with another man. Henry met him and he loves him. It shouldn't be that big a thing." She squints. "Are you wearing the same clothes you wore on Friday?"

  Wanda's husband drives up in his car and lets Flannery out. He parks between Jerry and Wanda. Jerry rolls his window back down. Although he looks at his ex-wife, his attention's toward Wanda. He hears Wanda's ex-husband say, "I promise. I promise. I swear to God. Say that you believe me. Say that you believe me, Wanda. I'm a changed man."

  Jerry says to his ex-wife, "That's good. I'm sure Henry will be fine," though he's not listening. Terry goes on and on about how her new boyfriend used to work at zoos in Cincinnati, San Diego, and Nashville. He has degrees from North Carolina State and Cornell. Jerry sticks his head out the car window and yells to Wanda, "I wrote out an earnest money check to Paula Purgason, by the way. That's how much I'm a changed man, Wanda."

  Jerry isn't sure if he really hears Wanda say to her ex-husband, "Don't tell this guy about what we like to do on weekends. He'll want to make a movie about it."

  Henry gets in the backseat of Jerry's car. Other cars and trucks turn into Gruel BBQ_, the ex-spouses ready to d
eliver or pick up. Terry looks over at Wanda's ex-husband's car, eyes Wanda. She says, "You're wearing the same outfit as on Friday, too. Hey. I notice what everyone wears around here. I've seen things and remembered them." Back down to Jerry, Terry says, "Maybe you rubbed off on me. Filmmakers can only watch and remember, right?"

  When Wanda drives off with Flannery, her ex-husband follows, but not in a threatening way. More than likely they'll both drive to Highway 25 before splitting off, Jerry thinks. He turns to his son and says, "You saw a giraffe get born? Was it gross?" Henry nods, squinches his nose.

  Terry gets in her car and says, "I'll see you next weekend," then leaves.

  Jerry wonders if he should ask his son if he'd like to leave Atlanta and move here. Should I promise him his own pet piglet? Should they drive home via Athens, in hopes of finding Wanda stopped at a convenience store in Elberton, the granite capital of the world? Jerry says, "Let's you and me go get a hot dog and shoot some pool. You're about old enough to learn how to play pool. I was about six years old when my father taught me how to hold a cue stick."

  On the way back into downtown Gruel, Jerry remembers that it wasn't pool. No, his father taught him how to bluff in straight poker. Striking balls took an understanding of angles, of geometry. No one ever taught him that game, officially. In five days he'll park elsewhere in the barbecue joint's parking lot intentionally, as a test.

  What If We Leave?

  IT WOULD BE EASIER to explain past Breathalyzer tests, and littering, and obstructing justice charges to the local television station than it would be for me to admit what we did to sad, blind—though beautiful and tanned—Mrs. Swift. I wouldn't even tell a therapist, the first time around. Mrs. Swift lived behind my parents' house, and thus my house, in the late 1970s, and she and her childless husband built a swimming pool back there. Every afternoon, between about one and five o'clock from mid-March until late October, she toddled her long white cane out to one of those green woven and aluminum lounge chairs, stretched out, and sunbathed. She wore those extra-large sunglasses, like regular blind people always sport. What blind person cared about a suntan? I thought even back then at the age of thirteen. Who told her that a white woman needed to have some color to her skin in order to stand out at a dinner party? Wasn't being blind enough? Mrs. Swift, I'm sure, stood out from everyone else when she showed up clanking her cane against end tables and lamp stands, half of her face covered in a way that suggested ophthalmological dilation, or the rare afternoon of witnessing a solar eclipse.

  Mrs. Swift didn't keep a windup alarm clock beside her chair. More than once, though, I took note of when she flipped over from stomach to back, then back to stomach. She had one of those internal clocks, I guessed, that told her when thirty minutes was up. Not that I was ever a perfectionist, but I used a stopwatch to make sure that she, indeed, turned better than barbecued rôtisserie chicken at the local Piggly Wiggly.

  Anyway, I watched her endlessly through the largest crack in our cedar plank fence. Later on I figured that my father kicked himself for going to such an expense for privacy, only to have a blind woman move in behind us. Mrs. Swift stood five-ten at least, wore a pink rubber bathing cap at all times outdoors, and had the body of one of those large-chested beauties on Hee-Haw. My father never talked about her, but more than once I noticed how, on Saturdays and Sundays, he found ways to slowly pull crabgrass and weeds back there at the base of our fence. Me, I possessed Mrs. Swift all summer long while my mother and father worked their respective first-shift jobs—Mom at the hospital as a nurse and Dad at Graywood Mills trying to come up with new and better fabrics.

  She wore a flesh-colored one-piece bathing suit every day. I wondered if Mr. Swift knew how naked she could appear from a half acre away, viewed through a one-inch crack between eight-foot-high one-by-sixes. He wasn't blind at all. He was a barrel-chested man who owned a sand and gravel company. Word was that he used to own a lye-making factory, that Mrs. Swift worked for him, and that's where she got blinded. Word also was she got her tits stuck in a steering wheel one time, and wrecked, and that windshield glass punctured her eyeballs in a way that made her a walking kaleidoscope.

  "We're trying to come up with a fabric that'll never stretch or shrink at all, and we're trying to come up with a cotton fiber that'll easily expand or contract up to six sizes on men's pants," my father said at one time or another during every dinner conversation. "It's a lot harder than it sounds. Rubber—if we made rubber fabric—we could do that. But what would rubber clothes do to a normal human being, I ask you."

  My mother never looked up from her chicken Buenos Noches!, a dish that she made up herself and served about five nights a week. She always said, "For women, it would give them yeast infections. For scuba divers it'd be perfect."

  "You goddamn right," my father would say. "And not everyone's a woman or a scuba diver. Or lady scuba diver."

  Then we'd look back down. I'd drink my milk and pretend that spicy food didn't bother my esophagus. I was an only child who spent his day thinking up what excuses I could use when my father or mother asked how I spent my day. As far as they were concerned, I pretty much read all of O. Henry's stories before I went to eighth grade, and kept a collection of model airplanes hidden beneath my bed. My best friend Andy Agardy—the only Hungarian in Graywood County, and of course in tiny Gruel—and I spent all day perfecting our chess acumen, from what my parents knew.

  "We can't seem to get a decent phlebotomist from the technical college," my mother said inevitably. "I'm having to show girls veins once, twice an hour. It's as if the only thing they're teaching in schools these days is sponge baths."

  Sometimes at dinner I would think that I felt a splinter stuck in my eyebrow from staring at Mrs. Swift so long. Sometimes when a twitch took off in my eyelid I daydreamed about winking at Mrs. Swift, and that she winked back even though she couldn't see.

  "Next year you need to go get a job," my father said this particular summer toward the end of every meal. "I don't know what the legal age is for Social Security cards, but it's time. Fourteen's when I got my first job. Well, hell, actually I was five when I got my first job, but it wasn't for real, you know. My father had me out there selling his cantaloupes and watermelons. We went door-to-door down to the rich people in Columbia, people who didn't have to keep gardens or know directions to the farmers market."

  Chicken Buenos Noches! wasn't anything more than boiled breasts, thighs, and legs slathered with paprika and jalapenos. It went well, my mother always contended, with rice, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, turnip greens, brussels sprouts, beets, stewed tomatoes, or—on special occasions—jellied cranberry sauce. I always said that I thought so, too.

  "I shouldn't complain," my father ended every dinner conversation. "If no one lost or gained weight they wouldn't have to go buy new clothes to cover their bodies. At least I'm not trying to work up new fabric out there in those nudist colony places. Hell, the only thing those people would need would be flesh-colored, I guess."

  At this point I should've told myself, "Uh-oh. Get that thought out of your head, get that thought out of your head." It was as if my father wanted me to think up a trick on Mrs. Swift.

  Dad wore a crew cut his entire life. He wore seersucker shirts and khaki pants when we went on vacations to Myrtle Beach. Both of my parents believed that anything in the house out of place might tilt the Earth one way or the other. My mother's spice shelf always stayed in alphabetical order, as did my father's tools. Melvil Dewey himself would've been ashamed of his decimal system had he met my folks.

  Unfortunately, I'm now able to admit, they never took the time to make sure I hadn't misplaced any of the various Magic Markers that they bought me as a set, after I made an A in seventh-grade art class. I don't want to sound the victim, but I'm sure that if my parents cataloged my possessions and kept track of what I actually did with them, I wouldn't be the mean, guilt-ridden, ex-pervert that I am today.

  Andy Agardy came over one mid-June day
at five after nine in the morning. My mother and father had left for work thirty minutes earlier, as had Mr. Swift. I had already taken to my spot in the backyard, even though it would be another four hours before Mrs. Swift appeared. This occurred daily for the rest of the summer. It seemed logically possible to me that, for some unknown reason, she might decide to change her routine, and I didn't want to miss it. What did she do in the mornings anyway? I wondered. What could be so important? Maybe she painted her toenails, or listened to the TV set. Maybe she had Braille books in her house, and read about skin cancer.

  "Hey, Louis," Andy Agardy said after he snuck up. "What're you doing out here?"

  I jumped. I hadn't told Andy about Mrs. Swift's routine, and up until this point in the summer had told him that I couldn't leave the house from one until five because my parents expected some phone calls. "Keep it down," I said, and stuck my index finger to my lips.

  Andy looked through the second-best crack in the fencing. He said, "What're you looking at?" I sat down on the ground and told him everything about Mrs. Swift's daily sunbath. Andy said, "Word is she lost her eyesight when she found her first husband doing it to her own sister. This was back when she lived in California. She used to work as a stewardess, after she quit being a movie star."

  I looked back through my crack and said, "That's not the truth. She was never a movie star. When she lived in California she worked for Walt Disney himself, as some kind of adviser."

  Andy looked through his crack and said, "Is that the bathing suit she wears?" He pointed. I'd been so enamored with the sliding glass door from which she always appeared that I'd not noticed the clothesline, and that her bathing suit dried there amid blouses, Mr. Swift's blue pants, and some T-shirts.