Drowning in Gruel

by George Singleton

  I shifted to Andy's crack and looked. "Yeah, that's it. That's what she wears. I swear to God she looks almost naked if you squint your eyes enough."

  We must've stared at her limp one-piece for fifteen minutes in silence. Andy said, "She doesn't walk out here naked and put it on, does she?"

  "No," I said. "No. I've never seen her even walk past the pool. She just lies out in the sun, and turns over. That's it."

  Andy said, "Hey, I got this idea." He stood up. "You're sure she's blind, right?"

  I said, "Uh-huh."

  "Watch this," he said, and took off out of the side gate. I looked through the crack in the fence and saw him tiptoe into Mrs. Swift's backyard. He didn't turn and look at her house until he reached the clothesline. Then, slowly, he uneased the wooden clothespins to her bathing suit, draped it across his left forearm, and began running back over. I watched the sliding glass door most of the last part of this escapade, certain that Mrs. Swift would regain her eyesight and nab him.

  I took off running for the inside of my own house, as a matter of fact. When Andy Agardy came in, he laughed and said, "Maybe she'll go out there and accidentally put on one of those T-shirts, and be naked down on the bottom." He sniffed her one-piece, then placed it on my parents' kitchen table, where we ate our chicken Buenos Roches!

  I said, "You have to take it back. This is too mean. She's a blind woman."

  Andy shook his head. "You have to take it back. I got it, Louis. If you want to be in the club, you take it back. Hey, do y'all have a camera? We should take pictures of us doing crazy things like this. That'll be funny. I could take a picture of you putting it back."

  I didn't ask what club. And I had a camera of my own that my father won for saving his company something like a million dollars with an idea he had for saving the company money. The previous year, he got a pocket watch, but he gave that to my mother.

  I don't think he won that set of Magic Markers, but for some reason I found it necessary to go unearth the cardboard box in which they came, bring them to the kitchen table, and draw perfectly circular brown nipples and V-shaped black pubic hair on Mrs. Swift's flesh-colored one-piece bathing suit.

  I did. And when I was done I said to Andy Agardy, "Oh, I'm in the club. Let's see what you can do to top that."

  I don't think he ever closed his mouth. He shook his head, and didn't blink. "You're going to hell, Louis," he said. "I won't tell anyone. Unless they ask." And then he took off running for home.

  If I'd've thought things through I would've gotten on my bicycle with Mrs. Swift's bathing suit and thrown it in a Dempsey Dumpster behind the Quik-Way convenience store. Or I would've buried it in the woods back behind our subdivision. But I panicked. Before my Magic Marker pornography had time to dry well I carried it back over to the Swifts' house, and stuck it back on the line. I averted my eyes from their back porch. If caught, I planned on saying how our dog must've drug it over. We didn't have a dog at the time, but I figured that Mrs. Swift wouldn't know the difference.

  It wouldn't be long before I howled at night anyway.

  The few times I've told this story—outside of when I had to explain it to my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Swift, and this overeager child psychologist—every damn person thought I would be stupid enough to take photographs of blind Mrs. Swift, fake nude, then run the roll of film over to a Jack Rabbit, Eckerd's One Hour, or wherever. Then, upon development, the processor there would call the authorities, and when I came in to get my three-by-five glossies a cop would jump out from behind the counter and arrest me. I wasn't stupid. I went to the library and checked out a number of books on photography and so on. I planned on making straight As in eighth grade, then asking my parents for film trays, chemicals, an enlarger, and paper. I planned on promising my father straight As and a washed car weekly for the rest of my life if he would convert our basement into a personal darkroom. Meanwhile I stored the completed rolls in my hollowed-out O. Henry book.

  Mrs. Swift, indeed, went outside and gathered her dry clothes that first day. She went back inside and returned wearing her graffitied one-piece, and looked as naked as any celebrity photographed from afar on a French nude beach. I took pictures through the crack in the fence for a while. Then I got out my father's stepladder, stood on the last step before the DANGER! sign, and took unobstructed shots. I turned the camera sideways, then off-kilter. I changed the shutter speed to get ghostly effects. I saved up my allowance, and bought both color and black-and-white rolls of 35 millimeter film.

  If I didn't get the darkroom I wanted, I figured, I could hold off until my junior year in high school, where I could volunteer for the yearbook, and get free use of the tiny art department's darkroom. Then I could go in there after hours, develop Mrs. Swift, and somehow get a commendation for the hardest working yearbook staff member of all time.

  I never thought about how Mrs. Swift might go check the mailbox. What blind person worries over mail? I never thought about how she might wander into the front yard, and how every housewife up and down Calhoun Lane might look out their front windows daily—either expecting or dreading salesmen and Jehovah's Witnesses—and see her fake naked self slowly edging down the driveway. I'm sure that, being tolerant folks that surrounded us, they gave her three chances before finally calling the sheriff's department to report indecent exposure from a blind woman. And I'm sure the sheriff's deputies gave Mrs. Swift about three times, and that they, too, took photographs for evidence.

  Listen, if you put dark glasses on Eve herself, then took away the fig leaf—that's how beautiful Mrs. Swift looked. I don't want to brag any about the drawn-on figures on her suit, but it proved that I deserved that A in art class, plus another in geometry.

  "Our neighbor got arrested today," my mother said to my father right before the Fourth of July. "June Chandler called me up at work to see if I left the iron on. She said that fire trucks and county cops came by"

  My father took off his clip-on tie. "Which neighbor? That peckerhead who runs the sand and gravel joint?"

  "His wife," my mother said. "His blind wife. She was walking around naked in the front yard, from what I heard. June Chandler said that she was drunk, and not wearing a stitch of clothes. Word is she's been senile for more than a few years. Word is she might be the youngest woman in the history of medicine to go senile, and that Hollywood's thinking about doing a movie about her life, just like The Three Faces of Eve. And she was doing cartwheels."

  My father went to the cupboard and pulled down a bottle of Jim Beam. He said, "Why would a blind woman do cartwheels? Turn on Walter Cronkite, Louis. Maybe scientists have found a cure for blindness." I raised my shoulders high to see if my hair touched them yet. I raised my eyebrows.

  I said, "I didn't see anything. I don't know anything about Mrs. Swift walking around her backyard naked. Y'all know her better than I do. I don't know anything about it." I felt like I might cry, and I could feel my face turn red—a sure sign of when I lied to my parents.

  My father looked out the den window and said, "I thought you said she was in the front yard. Hey, why is the ladder set up against the fence?"

  I wouldn't have known exactly how things turned out with the Graywood County sheriff's department deputies had my father not, finally, gone over to Mr. Swift's house to say that he had a good lawyer friend in case the Swifts needed one. I'm not sure what conversation took place between those two men, but the next thing you know here come the Swifts over for cocktails. These people had been living behind us without either party ever making an attempt to act neighborly. Now, because of me, my mother got out her fancy crystal glasses and a blender. She made up some concoction called tequila Buenos Noches!, which involved limes, salt, and everything else required for what most sane people called a plain margarita.

  Mrs. Swift came over wearing a backless sundress. She didn't have her cane with her, and relied solely on her husband's elbow. He wore a bow tie.

  I watched all of this from the cracked hallway door. I'd told my pare
nts that I needed to work on a model airplane that night because my tube of glue was about to expire. A half hour into their visit I heard Mr. Swift say, "It was the damnedest thing, Lou," to my father. "Evidently I left a pen in my pocket from work, and the way the ink washed out in the machine it came out looking just like nipples and pubic hair. How could Evelyn know? She's blind as a bat."

  My father, who never cussed in the house, said, "Shit. Damn it to hell. Nipples and a wedge."

  "I'm so sorry that we didn't meet earlier," Mrs. Swift said. "I've just found that I make people too uncomfortable. No one knows how to act around the blind. When I go into town I can hear people in wheelchairs trying to roll away from me." She laughed in two short spurts, like a tugboat leaving the harbor.

  My father and Mr. Swift went out in the backyard to smoke cigars. My mother said, "You know, I guess if we could educate people at an early age, they wouldn't be scared of people with limitations. Louis! Louis, come in here, please, and meet Mrs. Swift."

  I waited for what would be a normal time for me to get from my bedroom to the hallway door, then entered. Mrs. Swift had her naked back to me. She wore those big sunglasses. I said, "Yes ma'am?" to my mom.

  Mrs. Swift held up her left hand. "I've already met your son indirectly," she said. My mother looked at Mrs. Swift, then back to me. It took seventy-five minutes for all of this to occur, it seemed. "In the afternoons when I take my sun, I am always aware of a cologne coming across the breeze. I believe it's British Sterling. One time I was at Belk's walking through the men's cologne section, and I smelled this particular brand and asked the saleslady what it was. British Sterling."

  I didn't shave yet, of course. But I was known to fog up a room with British Sterling, Brut, and/or Old Spice. Aqua Velva. Williams Lectric Shave. I said, "Hello."

  My mother made the proper introductions. Mrs. Swift said, "Yes, that's the smell. Have you been spying on me when I take sun, Louis? If you have, I must commend you on your stealth. Usually I can hear the slightest movement within a hundred yards." She cocked her head. "Did you hear that ladybug fly by just now over on the other side of our lot?"

  I looked out the window, like an idiot. This time my mother joined Mrs. Swift in two short pulls from their tugboat-horn laughs. Seals from the zoo in Columbia probably perked up. Geese probably U-turned going north.

  My father and Mr. Swift came inside. "This is my boy, Louis," my father said. He pointed at me. "Louis, shake hands with Mr. Swift."

  I started to do so—and was glad that the subject got changed—when Mrs. Swift said, "On weekends I smell that cigar wafting over our way, too."

  The doorbell rang, my mother went to get it, and then Andy Agardy came slumping in as if he'd carried a bag of rocks over. He said, "Hey, Louis, you want to go catch some bats tonight?" He looked over at Mrs. Swift and pulled the tendons in his neck tight. My mother, I think, started making introductions again, I don't know.

  Maybe I had seen too many Candid Camera episodes as a child. That program can make an entire nation wary, I'll go on record as saying. With the Swifts over all of a sudden, and Andy showing up—with Mrs. Swift recognizing my aftershave and my father's brand of cigar—I knew that a giant practical joke was being played on me. So I went ahead and blurted out, "You didn't have an ink pen go through the washing machine. I painted those things on Mrs. Swift's bathing suit, and y'all know it. Y'all know I know it, and I know y'all know it. So the joke's on you. Ha-ha." I did a good impression of Mrs. Swift's laugh. "Ha-ha.

  Andy Agardy left when my father said it was time for him to go home. Mr. Swift stared at me in a way that could make wet cement flow back up a truck's trough. My mother went into the kitchen, and Mrs. Swift said, "I bet I know what Louis was doing on the other side of that fence every afternoon. That'll make you go blind, you know."

  I didn't laugh. A noise came out of my throat, but it could never have been taken for laughter.

  My second wife doesn't believe this entire story. She says that a book came out about that same time wherein parents were encouraged to test their children, to out-and-out play tricks on them. "It was called What If We Leave?, Louis. My parents had the same book. They used to fake splitting up all the time. The next day, they'd be giving each other shoulder rubs and asking me which babysitter I liked most so they could go out on a date."

  Claudia and I sat in Tryon's new Korean restaurant, waiting for our friends, Drayton and Louise. Dray and I used to work together for a fund-raising organization. He quit when he got diagnosed with diabetes, and when he couldn't get workmen's comp. Dray felt sure that he'd contracted the disease as a result of eating too many pecan logs, World Famous Chocolate bars, and Blow Pops that we sold to high school glee clubs, pep clubs, PTAs, church youth groups, and Shriners.

  I said to Claudia, "This kimchi stuff isn't so bad with the right beer. What is it again?"

  The eighteen-year-old white waitress had brought it out and said, "Now this is kind of like salsa in a Mexican restaurant, but you don't eat it with chips." She leaned down and said, "From what I understand, this is really the only real Korean food here. It's complimentary." She put down tear-apart chopsticks. "So are the fortune cookies."

  "Pickled cabbage," my wife said. "I don't think you want to eat much anymore. It'll kill you."

  We'd been there a good hour. Claudia asked to change seats right away so she could look out of the plate glass window to see if Dray and Louise passed the restaurant by accident. She said, "Sometimes with diabetes in the advanced stages, a person will lose his eyesight." That's what got the whole Mrs. Swift-and-her-special-bathing-suit story started. Claudia and I hadn't been married six months yet. We had both thrown up our hands and gone to a justice of the peace before knowing each other, more than likely, as well as we should've. Claudia's first husband left her one day when he decided that he wanted to live off of the land. On a houseboat with his secretary I'd been divorced for six years. Claudia worked as a cheerleading coach at Polk County High, they needed giant lollipops, I came in at lunch time, and we married four months later.

  The waitress came up and said, "Y'all still waiting on your friends?" She wore a high school graduation ring on her index finger and another one on a chain around her neck.

  I said, "They'll be here." We sat at a four-top and, because it was a new restaurant, prospective diners waited in the small, Pier 1 Imports—inspired lobby.

  "Would y'all like to order an appetizer? We got boneless spare ribs on special. We got crab rangoons and shrimp toast."

  I pointed at the kimchi and said, "I like this slimy stuff. Bring us more of this cabbage. I'll tip you well, I promise."

  My wife closed her eyes, and I thought about how, in most real-life stories, the Swifts would have never come back to our house. And they wouldn't offer any invitations to theirs, either. They would either move out of town presently or construct a privacy fence of their own—maybe out of brick, or cement block, and eight feet high. Maybe my parents and they decided to go from conservative, upstanding members of the community to free-for-all, live-and-let-live swinger types in the matter of one evening's batch of tequila Buenos Roches! I know this: No one ever brought up the incident again directly. The Swifts and my parents took to visiting one another once or twice a week. My mother called Mrs. Swift almost nightly, and took her to doctor's appointments, grocery shopping, and the movies. My father and Mr. Swift went fishing and bowling. They played poker with some other men twice a month.

  One time Mrs. Swift said to me, "Hey, Louis. Come on over here and feel my face. I don't have one wrinkle. Do you know why?" I walked over and stuck my hand on her forehead. "Because I don't squint, and I don't laugh or smile very often. Now quit looking down my shirt. Ha-ha."

  Claudia said, "Drayton and Louise are having marital trouble. I can feel it. That's why they're late. Why wouldn't they call? They have your cell number, don't they?"

  I said, "It affected me, sure. You can count on that, believe me. No one involved acted like anything wa
s wrong—not my parents, and not even Mrs. Swift. She got to where she'd tap on over to our house in the middle of the day when she knew my parents were at work. And she'd say how she just wanted to know how I was doing. Nothing else. I wouldn't ask her if she wanted to sit down or have some iced tea or whatever, but she'd just come right on in and get her own iced tea and sit down."

  Claudia kept her eyes closed. "Did you tell this story to your first wife? What did Patti think about all this?"

  I picked up my chopsticks by the wrong end, pretended to know what I was doing, and pulled more kimchi from the white ceramic bowl. "Andy Agardy quit coming over to my house altogether. I can't even remember his talking to me again all the way until we graduated from high school."

  "He might've been in on the trick. Maybe your parents paid him money to prod you toward drawing those nipples and pubic hair. I'm promising you that these kinds of tricks and guises are in that book I mentioned. That book my parents had. I finished it, too. I'm thinking about making it required summer reading for my cheerleaders."

  When I graduated from high school Mr. and Mrs. Swift gave me a check for a hundred dollars and told me that I had to use the money to buy books in college. Mrs. Swift handed over a horrendously wrapped box and said, "This might help you out in college, too. With the coeds." When I opened the package—it was a pair of fake X-ray glasses, like the kind ordered out of a comic book—Mrs. Swift laughed and laughed and said she had no idea if they worked or not. "I don't know if they're as good as my X-ray glasses," she said. "I hope so."

  The waitress came back. "Our manager said y'all need to probably go ahead and order. We have some reservations for people coming in later." She set down two margaritas and said, "These are from some people over there." She pointed at the bar. I looked, expecting to see Dray and Louise. Hell, I imagined to see Mr. and Mrs. Swift, even though I knew that they still lived in Graywood, that they had retired, that they spent most of their time down on Kiawah Island.