The Whole Stupid Way We Are

by N. Griffin

  “I don’t feed him sugar. It makes him spacier than he already is.”

  Punching.

  “K. T.?” says Skint. “We enjoyed having you.”

  “We enjoyed having you very much,” Dinah says earnestly. “You are great at thinking up playing.”

  “Did you hear a word I said?” says Mr. Vaar, leaning toward Skint. “No idiot kid is going to undermine what I do with my son.”

  Skint looks at him steadily. “Even if what’s done with him is idiotic?” he asks.

  Mr. Vaar narrows his eyes. “You want to talk like that to me again?”

  Skint says nothing. Mr. Vaar stares at him some more.

  Then he snorts. “Skinny little shit,” he says. “Come on, K. T. We’re leaving. Right now.”

  “Good-bye, honey,” says Dinah, her stomach and fists knotted. K. T. is blinking and winking and red. She moves to hug him good-bye but Mr. Vaar grabs his arm by the elbow and pulls him toward the door. K. T.’s ball slips out of his hand and bounces across the floor.

  “My space guy!” cries K. T.

  “Maybe that’ll help you remember to stay where I tell you. You stay away from kids like him,” says his dad, nodding toward Skint. “And you,” he looks at Skint, “stay away from my son.”

  He hustles the little boy out.

  The church door slams shut with a bang. Through the pantry window, Skint and Dinah watch Mr. Vaar pull K. T. across the parking lot, K. T.’s legs scissoring too quickly as he tries to keep up. K. T.’s dad thrusts him into the car. They drive away.

  “I hate him!” Dinah picks up K. T.’s Pop-Tart pieces and holds them in her palm. His Super Ball is wedged underneath the baseboard.

  “Who wouldn’t.”

  “How can a jerk like that have such a wonderful kid?”

  “I don’t know.” Skint shakes his head. Then: “What the hell! A kid like K. T. should be protected, not name-called and yelled at. What is wrong with that guy?”

  “I couldn’t think what to say,” Dinah says helplessly. “I was all riled and I couldn’t think what to say! You were great, though.”

  “Oh, I was phenomenal,” says Skint. “Especially that part at the end where I couldn’t think how to respond. I made a huge difference.”

  “At least you talked back to him. That was good. Though you probably shouldn’t have.”

  Skint snorts. “If I didn’t say anything, wouldn’t that make K. T. believe we agree with his dad? That we think it’s okay for him to be treated like that? That we think his dad is right to be such a tool?” Skint turns and grabs the boxes of breakfast foods with names beginning with A and shoves them, hard, onto a shelf. “What is wrong with people? Why have kids if all you’re going to do is bash at them and needle them and make fun? Add the Vole in the mix, and there’s a recipe for a great little life.” Skint sorts and stacks and shoves. “I am beyond sick of human assiness.”

  Dinah cannot bear it. Imagine Beagie stuck in a house like the Vaar house, with two testosterone jerks at the helm. “At least his mom sounds nice. It sounds like he likes his mom.”

  “Who cares? They’re divorced and he lives with Mr. Charmface there.” Skint slaps at the labels on the cans. “The A foods are done, here’s B’s and C’s. No fucking D’s.”

  “Yes, D’s. Those Dairy Dream bars.”

  “I was counting those as a snack.” But he slams them into place.

  Stormy-eyed Skint, mouth lines tight. Dinah’s brain is churning like sixty. Phone call to Mr. Vaar, pretending to be the police? Poison pen letters to scare him?

  “We could send K. T. a parcel of treats,” she offers at last. “Cookies, games, some books.”

  Skint looks at her.

  “Sure,” he says. “That’ll turn things around. Dorketta.”

  He lifts her coat from the countertop and takes the leftover Pop-Tart from the foil.

  “We are not truly nice people,” he says, giving her half. “If we were, we would feel bad for the Vole, too, and want to make him a parcel of treats as well. And yet, I only wish him ill.”

  “He would just beat us up with the parcel.”

  “Not if we tied it up with a pretty yellow bow, just so.”

  “The only thing I will tie up with a bow for him is punches.”

  “That’s a parcel I can get behind. I’m telling you,” Skint says, chewing. “When we start our new planet, we’re stealing all the kids who are stuck with people like that and taking them with us.”

  “Yes,” Dinah agrees. She crumbles her half of the Pop-Tart. “Only not the Vole. He can stay stuck.”

  “Fine,” says Skint. “He’ll miss me, though. Coveting my manly form the way he does.” He slumps. “Jesus Christ. I don’t know what we can do.”

  Sardines on toast is a marvelous thing, Beagan Beach,” says Mr. Beach as he totes his son across the parking lot. It’s windy out here, with enormous clouds scuttling across the sky, but Beagan isn’t paying attention to them.

  He has just discovered something so wonderful he almost can’t breathe.

  When he moves his foot, like this, the sunshine ripples across the front of his father’s shirt and the icy surface of the ground.

  See—there:

  ripple ripple sun

  Beagie can make the sunshine dance. His feet are magic.

  Oh, he better tell his dad. Beagie squirms and bounces but before he can squawk at his father, it happens again: He wiggles his feet and there goes that sun.

  Beagan crows with joy. He forgets about his dad. He waves his foot to make the sun dance and laughs and laughs when it does.

  “What’s so funny, sweetheart?”

  Beagie screeches and laughs and points.

  “Yes, that’s your foot,” his father agrees. “And what a fine one it is.”

  That’s not it at all. But Beagie can’t make his father understand, no matter how much he yells and points. His dad only opens the car door and lowers Beagan into his car seat.

  Beagie weeps with rage. He kicks his feet as hard as he can but this time the sun doesn’t dance or help him. He’s captive under all these straps with a father who has no idea that Beagie, out of this car seat, is the boss of the sun.

  What a long Saturday it’s been already, with cleaning and Bernadine and K. T. and everything else. Dinah sits in the window seat in her living room, her forehead pressed against the glass. Snowing again out there, the yard and woods already blanketed blue. It’ll be a chilly walk to the Girls’ Friendly meeting later. Over in the Harps’ yard next door stands their horse, perfectly still, his neck bowed and his mane speckled with white. Beagie loves that horse, but he is napping. Dinah is in here alone.

  “Dinah.” Mr. Beach stands in the doorway. Dinah’s stomach jumps. “A can of hash is missing from the food pantry, as well as a box of Pop-Tarts.”

  What? Dinah sits up straight. Mr. Beach is on the job at the level of the Pop-Tart!

  “Do you know anything about it?” asks Mr. Beach.

  “What makes you think they’re missing?”

  “Because Bernadine just phoned. She’s upset.”

  “Because you fired her?”

  “No, Dinah, because food is missing!”

  “When will you fire her, then?”

  “Dinah Christine.” Mr. Beach is grim. Dinah is skating on very thin ice. She subsides back against the window.

  Ghastly Bernadine. Even when you tell on her and reorganize her cans, she comes out on top. Skint shouldn’t have alphabetized. Too easy to check against the Inventory.

  “Well, Dinah?”

  “K. T. Vaar visited us while his dad was with you,” Dinah says at last. “He was hungry. So I . . . gave him a snack.”

  “You gave him hash, Dinah?” says her dad.

  Dinah shrugs and turns back to the window. “He wanted it.”

  “You are the oddest child.” Mr. Beach beetles his brows. “And you know better. That food is the property of the people who need it.”

  Really? Like the tur
keys? But she knows her father will explode if she says it out loud and all at once she’s exhausted, too brain-weary and thrown by the half-sort-of-lie she told to cover for Skint to figure out how to take up the whole turkey thing again. Too much already today and Dinah is old-feeling and cold to the bone.

  “Well, Dinah?”

  “I’ll buy more hash,” says Dinah. Dinah the cheater, cheater, hard-topic shirker. “I’ll replace the Pop-Tarts as well. Only, I don’t have any money. But if you advance me some, I’ll babysit it off.”

  “Fine,” says her dad. “And you better apologize to Bernadine. Don’t be so hasty all the time, Dinah.” Her father waits for a minute, but she says nothing, and he leaves the room.

  Apologize? Apologize?

  The window glass is cool. That horse must be cold. Someone please give him a blanket.

  Five-year-old Dinah holds her great-grandma’s hand in front of her nose. Granny’s fingernails peek over the tops of her fingers like brims of hats. Dinah plays that the fingers are people. Behind her and over her head is Granny’s singing that sounds like buzzing.

  “Lay up nearer, brother, nearer . . .”

  Big-knuckled Granny does buzzy singing all the time, shape note songs from her big blue book. Walking outside, sitting in the window seat, during Friendly meetings too.

  The singing breaks off.

  “Come on up my lap,” Granny says to Dinah. “Come up and help me remember this song.” And she pulls Dinah up onto her thighs and starts singing again above her head.

  I am going, brother, going,

  But my hope in God is strong.

  I am willing, brother, knowing

  That he doeth nothing wrong.

  Dinah knows most of the words, but when she tries to sing like Granny, it comes out more like honking.

  “That’s fine, little goose. That’s just how this song should sound,” Granny says and they keep singing. When Dinah forgets the words she leans back against Granny and breathes in the smell of Granny’s pear-scented talc and hums along instead.

  There’s a half-eaten bag of chips on the coffee table and Skint decides they’ll do for a late lunch before the Friendly meeting.

  “Chew!” Ellen’s voice comes from the kitchen. “For God’s sake, take smaller bites.”

  Skint’s father doesn’t answer.

  Across from where Skint sits with his chips on the couch is the little table his mother uses for holiday displays. Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but she hasn’t yet changed the arrangement. A box of candy. Two red carnations. A plush toy, two frogs intertwined, that she brought home from the drugstore. The boy frog is bigger than the girl and his foreleg is slung around her shoulders. The girl frog snuggles up into his armpit and her eyes are in the shape of hearts. HOP SPRINGS ETERNAL! her T-shirt exclaims. WANNA COME OVER TO MY PAD? his T-shirt says back. I’M IN YOUR CORNER FOREVER!

  The longing and wish in the hand that picked out those frogs is enough to kill Skint, slay him, mow him down dead. His head is in his hands.

  His dad coughs and stops. He coughs again, louder. It sounds like he’s hacking up a lung.

  “That’s what I’m talking about! You have to fucking chew!”

  His dad coughs one more time, and stops.

  The hair on the back of Skint’s neck stands on end, his hand stilled inside the bag. He is tight, taut. He wishes he were less rational because he would really love to put someone through a wall right now.

  Skint gets up because he has to go in there, has to check, just in case.

  His dad is at the table, eyes full of tears. Skint glances sharply at Ellen. She is red, tense.

  “Go,” Skint tells her. “Go.”

  “You do it,” she hisses at him. “You do the coaxing all day, every day—twenty minutes with the cereal and fifteen with the pants and another twenty to get him to remember how to sign his own name. You try to explain to him what we have to do at that bank on Monday. You do it.”

  “I do. I do do it.”

  “Oh, I know. You’re a bastion of patience. A regular saint of a kid.”

  Skint crouches at his father’s feet. He puts his arms around his father’s knees.

  “Dad,” he whispers. “Dad.”

  Ellen gets up and leaves.

  “Who will help them?” His father sobs. “Who will help those people? No water, shelter, not enough food. Empty promises. No hope.”

  Later, his dad asleep on the couch and his mother in her room, Skint grabs his bike and goes. He stands on the pedals and rockets down the dirt road between the trees. It’s icy and full of stones but that’s the way he likes it—every moment a decision, any fraction of a steer the possibility of broken bones or blood or death. Impossible to be anywhere but in this particular second, in this particular plan to not crash.

  Careen—rocket—dirt—stone. Tree to tree to tree to tree. No need to think about the fabric of the whole; no need to think about anything but taut body, breathe, and lean.

  Too soon Skint comes out onto the paved road, one maintained more thoroughly by the town plows and also by the heat of exhaust from the cars on its surface. No perils here, only salt and wet dirt splashing onto the legs of his jeans. Past the post office, the mini-mart and the start of the long curving road up to the high school; past the stores and houses, more and more of them, crowding up to the edge of the road.

  “Effing people,” Skint mutters to himself. All of these houses and all of them crowded full of us. Why do people keep making more? All we do is kill each other, rape; cut each other for blood and make each other’s life a hell.

  Dinah’s scowling face and her tangle of dark hair; Dinah, furious and punching.

  Okay.

  One good one.

  Doesn’t outweigh the ass stupidity of the whole.

  House, house, house.

  Pole, pole, pole.

  Another small square house and a little boy standing at the curb in front of it.

  “Hi!” cries the boy, and Skint is well past before he realizes it was K. T. The little guy is probably waiting for his mom to pick him up.

  He turns around to wave back, but K. T. is looking at the ground now and doesn’t see that he has been acknowledged.

  Dinah and Skint bash their way through the snow, down the shortcut path in the woods between Skint’s house and town. They’re on the way to the Girls’ Friendly meeting. It’s late afternoon but already dark out. The Friendly always meets on Saturday and today is the day they will vote on projects for the spring. Neither Dinah nor Skint feels like it’s a normal Girls’ Friendly day, not after the turkey debacle (their second in as many days, if you count Turliff) and nothing being changed and now they are going to have to see Bernadine herself in person. But they can’t not go to the meeting. Heck, maybe Mr. Beach did do something without telling them and Bernadine’s spirit will be quashed. Maybe she will welcome Skint warmly and beg him for his thoughts.

  Sure, Dinah. And maybe she will greet them in a suit made of owls, too.

  Theoretically, Dinah and Skint like to walk and rarely accept the offer of a ride. Dinah, particularly, has always loved stalking about in the snow with her boots. But it’s different now, with Skint and this no-coat thing. She better start asking her mother to drive them more often, even though Mrs. Beach hates the production of organizing Beagie into the car when she is only going to have to bundle him right back out again.

  But for now they are walking. The snowy dirt path finally turns onto the paved road, and their boots clunk onto its surface. Past the Rural Routes’ house; the Rural Routes themselves are not out this late in the day, of course. No lights on, either, but a plume of smoke, spare and gray, curls out the chimney.

  “That smoke plume looks like words, doesn’t it?” Dinah says. “Like it could be the Rural Routes’ singing, floating out of the house and up.”

  Skint glances at her, hands in his pockets, uncoated shoulders hunched. His skin is stiff-looking, cold and smooth as granite.

  “
It’s a pretty thin smoke plume,” he says.

  “Yes,” says Dinah patiently. “That’s why I think it looks like their singing would look, thin-voiced and kind of nasal.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  What?

  “It is,” Skint says, hunching his shoulders. “It’s such a thin curl of smoke. Doesn’t that worry you?”

  What does he mean, worry her? “Do you mean they might not have the flue open enough?”

  “I mean it’s cold and that doesn’t seem like smoke from a fire big enough to warm a house.”

  “They probably have the heat on, too, dork.”

  Skint shakes his head. “I bet they don’t. No lights on. Them so thin.”

  What’s he on about? “You’re thin, too. What does that have to do with smoke being singing?”

  “Jesus,” says Skint. “Don’t you see? Maybe they can’t afford to pay their electric bill. Maybe they can’t afford enough heat. It’s hard for me to get behind some stupid singing idea when they might be actually cold in there.”

  Stupid? Dinah stomps ahead. But the wind blows snow from the branches onto her head, and she stops stomping and turns around. Whether or not Skint is a jerk, it is cold to the bone out here, and Skint’s voice is as stiff as his cheeks.

  “Speaking of cold,” she says, “if you are worried about people being cold, why won’t you wear a coat? Why are you treating yourself like a side of beef the whole time?”

  “I am like a side of beef. So are you. What’s flesh but meat?”

  “Well, you are mean meat.”

  They walk. Dinah thinks of the Rural Routes, thin, waving from the porch. That knit cap on the lady Rural Route’s head. Maybe it isn’t the lady Rural Route’s particular aesthetic, as Dinah has always assumed. Maybe it really is freezing in there.

  Dinah and her smoke singing. Her willful positivity drives Skint insane sometimes. And that damned skirt she has on and those silly striped leggings. For the first time Dinah’s clothes irritate him beyond belief.

  “You can’t run around acting like things aren’t real, Dinah,” he says. “Like people aren’t real. Making up stuff so you don’t see what’s real. For fuck’s sake, that’s childish and absurd.”