Interior Design

by Philip Graham

  *

  Bradley stood beside Lisa under the church eaves and pretended, because it was raining, that his parents would be picking him up too. He wanted to ask Lisa why she kept coming to class if she didn’t appreciate the Father, but she stood away from him and offered no opening for his curiosity.

  Jonah and the whale, that’s what we talked about, Lisa thought, watching the station wagon pull up to the curb and stop. The dim figure of her mother leaned over in the car and the window slowly slid down. “Hurry up, dear, you’ll get wet,” she called. Lisa’s fingers scraped at her skirt. Finally, she walked to the car slowly, still not sure how long Jonah had been in that whale’s stomach.

  “I want to hear all about your class, sweetie,” Bradley heard, and he envied such attentiveness. Then the glass rose up and the car pulled away. He remained at the church entrance and waited. His parents were probably home from work by now, and maybe one of them might actually be on the way. But the wet street was empty.

  He held his school satchel over his head and walked quickly, imagining that the rain fell through his angel hovering alongside him. If only he had a bicycle. Remembering the Father’s words, he tried to express himself clearly and calmly, so his angel would listen longer than usual to his unangel-like thoughts, and slowly enumerated all the special features he wanted: ten-speeds, orange-and-black trim, a bell and adjustable seat. But he wanted this bicycle only if his parents gave it to him—this would be a sign that his angel had heard.

  Opening the front door, Bradley could smell dinner cooking and he walked to the kitchen. There were his parents, leaning over the stove, his father stirring a wooden spoon in the pot, his mother shaking salt into the rising steam. They stood so closely together that Bradley couldn’t imagine a space for himself.

  “Mom, Dad.”

  Jill and Bud turned to see their son standing in the doorway, holding his catechism. “Hello dear,” his mother said, bending down and offering her cheek for his kiss. She rested her hand on his damp shirtsleeve. “Oh, is it raining?”

  “Just a little.”

  Unsettled that her son had walked in the rain, Jill decided to offer Bradley his daily treat early. “Have you been a good boy today?” she asked.

  Bradley nodded.

  “Then here’s your potato chip,” she said, reaching for the counter, and she placed the chip in his waiting mouth. Her son stood still with his mouth closed, for he wasn’t allowed to chew. This was their own home-grown communion: if Bradley was becoming religious, Jill couldn’t see why she shouldn’t exchange a greasy wafer for some quiet.

  Bud said, “Well, Brad ol’ boy, dinner is on the way, so why don’t you take in some TV?” Bradley turned and walked down the hall to the den. Bud watched him disappear. His son’s recent piety was yet another example of the inexplicability of childhood. He was pleased he could restrain himself from criticizing this latest addition to Bradley’s recent manias: handwriting analysis, when his son searched the desk drawers for even the shortest note, and then that oatmeal box telephone system, with strings leading from room to room. It was so hard to be a good father in the face of such perplexing enthusiasms.

  In the den, Bradley settled himself into a chair. The television was already on and waiting for him, busy with laughter and applause. Even with his eyes closed he could barely make out the indistinct murmur of his parents’ voices. He wondered if their angels spoke to each other, revealing secrets about his parents that he would never know. Then he felt a salty twinge, and he concentrated on the potato chip dissolving on his tongue. Angels don’t like to eat, he remembered Father Gregory once saying, because the thought of mixing food with their angelic form upsets them. But they like for us to eat, and they try to imagine taste, they try not to think of digestion. In an effort to endear himself, Bradley decided to describe his experience for his angel. First it’s very salty, he thought, your tongue wants to curl up, and it’s hard not to chew. When the chip starts to go mushy, you can press it—very softly—against the roof of your mouth with your tongue, and then little pieces break away. They melt very, very slowly.

  Jill called her son to dinner; when he didn’t answer she entered the room quietly. She regarded her son’s small body, framed by the upholstered arms of the chair. His eyes were closed, and his obedient silence in front of the blaring TV was so total that he seemed about to disappear. She couldn’t stop watching him, and she remembered his alarming cries as an infant, his tiny arms raised, pleading to be held.

  The hardest part, Bradley thought, is to let the last piece melt instead of swallowing it. He was able to restrain himself, and soon the last bit of chip disappeared. It was terrifically difficult, he felt, to pay such close attention, and he wondered how angels could do this every instant. Suddenly his mother was before him, repeating again and again how she was going to take him to the old amusement park before it closed down. Bradley stared up at her, amazed: this wasn’t a bicycle, but it was good enough.

  *

  Alone in the Ferris wheel, Bradley felt weightless circling so high up. He still didn’t quite believe he was here, and the rust and the loud groans of the ancient rides couldn’t spoil his pleasure. He picked at the chipped paint in his cabin, watched the little flecks flutter down, and he tried to make out his parents in the crowds below.

  Jill and Bud waited below while their son spun above them. Though they had intended to come alone, Jill had managed to convince Bud to bring Bradley along. Better bumper cars and greasy food, she said, than genuflection, genuflection, genuflection. They had first met here while standing in some long line, and it was so romantic now, holding hands in this amusement park for one last time before it closed forever at the end of the season. Jill could remember Bud smiling at her in the extraordinary heat and then holding his jacket over her for a little shade.

  All afternoon Bradley rode on the Loop-A-Loop, Tumble Buckets, and The Space Twister. On the boardwalk he aimed ineffectually at stacked wooden bottles, he was drawn to the pervasive promise of pizza and hot dogs wafting from the open stalls. He especially loved the sticky sweetness of cotton candy, the way it clung to the edges of his mouth and stuck to his fingers when he touched his cheek. He closed his eyes, about to describe this to his angel as a way of thanks, but then his mother bent down to wash the glistening smudges from his face.

  As Bradley watched her scrape the last bit away, he heard the happy screams from the nearby roller coaster ride. He looked up at the cars making such swift, tight turns above them. Jill watched too, remembering how she’d clutched Bud’s jacket on that ride so long ago.

  Bud bought the tickets and fingered them with pleasure. But when they approached the seats he and Jill hesitated—the rundown roller coaster didn’t fit their memories. Finally they sat together in one of the last cars, and Bradley could see that there was no room for him, although his mother patted the bit of cushion beside her. “That’s okay,” he said and he settled in the car behind them. The leather seat was cracked with age, and he picked at the tiny, pliable pieces while the conductor collected tickets.

  The roller coaster slowly ascended the sharp rise of track with a ratchety, metallic groan. Regretting that he had ever entertained the slightest desire to be on this ride, Bradley imagined his angel was beside him. Rather than recount how the people on the ground began to shrink, however, he simply wished he had squeezed in with his parents. Bradley rattled his safety bar and hoped one of them would look back just once.

  The first cars rushed down the steep slope with a curling roar and the howls of passengers. Even his parents screamed and Bradley joined in as the roller coaster hurtled to the bottom of the slope, and at each curve of track it twisted improbably one way, then another. Bradley was sure the cars would lurch from the tracks and he tightened his grip on the clattering bar. But another steep rise suddenly appeared and the roller coaster swiftly rose and fell and spurted toward another sharp turn. It tilted precipitously again, and Bradley heard a loud snap.

  His pa
rents were in the air in awkward disarray, hands clutching at their broken safety bar. They swiftly fell from sight and the roller coaster rushed down the next slope. Unable to believe what he had seen, Bradley struggled to stand in his seat, hoping his parents were somehow still in the car before him. His body trembled with the shuddering roller coaster, the wind rushed against his face and filled his open mouth, and his howls continued well past the final screeching halt at the end of the ride.

  *

  Bradley’s aunt and uncle had no children after too many years of trying and they were secretly, guiltily happy to take in their favorite nephew. They fed him little treats, hoping cookies layered with tempting jams would defeat his sadness. They always made room for him on the couch, allowing any channel change he requested, and they avoided any topic concerning his mother and father.

  Under the dimmed overhead lights of the dining room, Bradley watched Aunt Lena pass the cucumber salad to Uncle George while they talked of common memories that he didn’t share, of neighbors he didn’t know. When his uncle sipped ice water and squinted from the cold, Bradley recalled his father’s features, and sometimes even his aunt’s crisp footsteps to the refrigerator reminded him of his mother. Bradley stared past the chicken cutlets and wondered if his parents ever thought of him in heaven. Were their angels still with them? Bradley hated the thought that those angels, with all their memories of his parents, might be hovering next to strangers. Or did angels forget? Bradley almost envied the idea.

  Though Bradley’s aunt and uncle weren’t religious, they remembered his parents’ complaints and so they took him to church. But now he disliked having to stand and kneel all the time, and why hadn’t his angel somehow warned him and his parents away from the roller coaster? While the thin priest—so unlike Father Gregory—droned the Mass, Bradley tried to recall what he could of the Father’s confiding words: how angels envelop us with rapt attention; how they only want to experience us, not protect us. Bradley pictured his parents smashed on the ground, their angels hovering over them without sadness, simply satisfying their curiosity about death, while his own angel calmly examined his terrible grief.

  Bradley squirmed in the pew and imagined he was falling through the air while his parents were safe in the roller coaster. Then, his body twisted on the pavement, dead but somehow still aware, he watched the roller coaster speed to the end. His mother and father left the ride undisturbed and walked over his body as if he weren’t lying broken beneath them. They seemed like giants, and this image of his mother and father, resurrected and enormous, their indifference implacable, followed him out the church and back to his new home.

  That evening he sat on the couch with his aunt and uncle in front of the television. “Tonight it’s your Aunt Lena’s night to choose the programs,” his uncle announced with a wink. “What do you say, hon?”

  She patted her nephew’s knee. “I think I’m in the mood for Bradley’s favorite show.”

  Bradley smiled up at her, sure that his angel would enjoy a description of the one-liners, even the commercial breaks, though when he turned to the television Bradley found himself once again imagining that he lay sprawled on the fairgrounds after tumbling through the sky. But this time, at his parents’ approach he forced himself to rise up despite the great pain in his shattered bones. They stopped, then fled. Bradley watched their figures growing smaller and smaller, yet he felt oddly happy, for they had seen him. He repeated his fall, and when his parents arrived again he reached up and held their wrists. Their faces strangely impassive, they struggled until they broke away and fled again.

  With each battle his parents became less substantial, and Bradley remembered that his angel must be hovering nearby, watching. Why won’t it help me? he thought. Then shimmering fingers burst out of nothing and his angel reached out: slowly it loosened his grip on his straining parents until they were able to tear away. Stunned, Bradley crumpled back to the ground. His angel was a jealous angel and wanted no rivals.

  Bradley rose from the couch, surprised to see his aunt and uncle laughing at the blaring television. “Sweetie?” his aunt began.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, almost running away. He locked himself inside. It was the smallest room in the house, so small that his angel couldn’t escape. “Keep away, keep away from me!” Bradley shouted, and he swung his arms wildly, hoping he struck through his angel’s shape, bursting apart its invisible presence. Yet he suspected that, unlike him, it could easily heal itself, so he spun his arms about him even more and he screamed until his throat ached, his anger beyond words. His aunt and uncle pounded on the door, but he didn’t let them in until he was dizzy and exhausted.

  Aunt Lena held him, unable to hush his wailing, and Uncle George, alarmed at such unhappiness, reached out and awkwardly stroked his nephew’s hair. “Hey, Brad ol’ boy, hey Brad,” he murmured.

  Bradley listened to his uncle’s voice, so similar to his father’s, and he eased into his aunt’s anxious grip. They wanted to comfort him, even if his angel didn’t. What Father Gregory had said was true: his angel wanted only to observe him and his thoughts. Suddenly he wanted to protect his aunt and uncle from this same fearsome angel that had kept him from his parents. Remembering the intense calm he had felt when detailing the potato chip, Bradley hoped that more such careful communications might appease his angel. Slowly pushing his aunt away, he began to silently describe the crinkled look of hurt on her face.

  *

  Bradley’s aunt and uncle grew accustomed to the sight of him fingering the ridges of a lampshade, the interior of a mailbox, and since he rarely spoke they were puzzled by his almost constant paging through the dictionary. Aunt Lena ached for the sound of his voice, and whenever she touched Bradley his hesitant, endearing hug turned into a sudden breaking away, and she was left alone in a hall, the kitchen.

  One afternoon as Bradley tried to sneak outside, his aunt called from the living room, “Where are you off to, Bradley?” He pretended not to hear, but when he pushed open the creaking screen door she said, “Would you like a little snack first?”

  “No thanks,” he managed, though he was hungry.

  Standing outside, he knew from the directions of the subtle, shifting winds that a storm was approaching. All those grasping branches above him shook and his hair swept across his forehead like the softest of touches. He bent down and thrust his hand into one of the last small piles of late snow. Its crystals were larger and harder than he expected. Then he squeezed some in his fist and felt the cold throb against his warmer skin. After the bit of snow dissolved, Bradley slowly swept his tongue over the lines of his palm, silently describing each ticklish ripple. The rain began to fall. Bradley stood there as it soaked his hair and drained down his face, its taste vaguely metallic against his parted lips, and he recorded scrupulously how his increasingly wet clothes matted against him, how an oddly pleasurable chill spread over his body.

  Aunt Lena dropped the cauliflower she was washing in the sink when she glanced out the window and saw Bradley standing drenched in the middle of the backyard, his face turned up into the rain. She ran outside, wailing his name.

  That night Lena and her husband sat beside Bradley’s bed, alarmed at their feverish nephew’s smile while he touched his forehead carefully with his fingers, as if for the first time. When Bradley recovered three days later, Uncle George bought him a bicycle. They sat together in the driveway and attached baseball cards to the spokes for an intricate, ratchety sound, and Uncle George patiently ignored those unnerving moments when his nephew sat still, his eyes distant, his hands working at nothing.

  But Bradley was rarely at home. Instead he ranged through the neighborhood, discovering the patterned silences between birdcalls, the new green shoots and their clusters of buds within buds. Dizzy and oppressed by the seemingly endless supply of the world, he doubted he could ever chronicle it all for his angel, and one evening, while listening to his uncle’s faraway voice calling him, Bradley stood transfixed
beneath an evergreen tree lit by a street lamp. In the odd light its needles were an unearthly green. Detailing the ascending, branched pattern of the thin needles, which resembled an odd spiral staircase, he realized that the convoluted spaces between the branches were passages for the wind. But he could only see these spaces by looking at the branches, which in turn held no pattern without the surrounding emptiness, and Bradley was reminded of his own invisible, complementary presence.

  *

  After years of plumbing the hidden corners of dictionaries, words had become for Bradley exquisite bearers of comfort, yet by high school the frequent sight of boys and girls necking furtively in the school hallways filled him with a strange longing for which there were no words. He found brief solace in gym class, deftly kicking a soccer ball that seemed to float endlessly in the air before suddenly eluding the goalie, or exulting in a basketball’s intricate, rhythmic music as he sped down the court.

  Despite his sometimes unnerving solitude a few girls thought he was cute; Debby Wickers, who seemed to always appear by his hall locker, adjusting the pile of books under her arm, thought he was handsome. But after so often standing nearby with nothing to say or do, Debby was almost ready to give up on Bradley ever acknowledging her.

  One day Bradley pressed his hands against the side of his locker door and mutely described the touch of metal and how its edges are almost sharp enough to cut—anything to avoid facing the girl who always stood so close to him, to suppress his curiosity about her constancy. But when he heard the sound of her patient sigh, there was something final in it that made Bradley turn and look at her steady dark eyes, her thick brown hair. “What’s your name?” he asked, so quietly, and Debby felt he was staring at her face as if he were trying to memorize it.