Social Blunders

by Tim Sandlin

  She talked as she transferred her load to Hank. “Periodically while we’re in Canada I shall be mailing manifestos for you to release to the media. Don’t let those twits at Newsweek edit my copy.”

  “I thought you were disappearing on the reservation.”

  Lydia glared at Hank, who hung his head, shy dog-style. “Somebody’s got a big mouth,” she said, which may be the least true statement anyone ever made about Hank Elkrunner. “Tell the Secret Service we’re in Mexico. Don’t mention Canada until they break out the persuasion devices.”

  “Persuasion devices?”

  Hank fit the lamp and boots into the back end like pieces into a jigsaw puzzle. He said, “I’ll walk to Zion’s Grocery and pick up some food for the road. You two can finish loading.”

  A look of dismay flitted across Lydia’s narrow face. “You’re leaving me alone with him on purpose, aren’t you?” Hank gave his near smile.

  Lydia said, “Rat.”

  Hank walked up the street, toward what passed for downtown GroVont. Lydia and I stood next to the truck, watching Hank’s back as an alternative to looking at each other.

  I said, “Don’t you think making Hank into a fugitive is a lot to ask?”

  Lydia turned, her hands on her hips, thumbs forward, fingers back. “Hank believes in loyalty—unlike other members of my immediate family.”

  “What’s the chances of us having this discussion without snide sarcasm?”

  Her hands dropped to her sides, and for one fleeting moment, Lydia looked profoundly depressed. “Slim. Or none.”

  Her first unguarded statement since I don’t remember when—I took it as a good sign.

  She looked at the truck and sighed. “Men have forced women to fall back on whatever weapons they have, and I’m afraid I’m down to sarcasm. Come on in and warm up. You may as well be of some use while you’re here.”

  Whenever the television screen shows long lines of refugees running from a natural or manmade disaster, it’s always interesting to see what possessions they deem important enough to flee with on short notice. Cooking utensils and bedding seem to head the list, followed by edible animals. Lydia hadn’t packed any of that stuff. Instead, she went into hiding with her Oothoon Press files, most of her Ann Coe art collection, and a suitcase full of Danskins. A pile of political books. An exercise trampoline.

  While Lydia finished packing, I wandered the house, taking in cracks in the logs and stains in the kitchen sink. When you grow up in a house, each square foot of wall and floor carries a memory, or not so much a memory as the emotion of one. I couldn’t recall what event caused my strange stirrings at standing in my former closet, but I felt the strange stirrings just the same, as if the past had turned into its own shadow.

  Lydia found me standing in the closet and told me to disconnect the VCR in her bedroom and take it to the truck, but to leave the TV. I guess wherever she and Hank planned to hide out already had a television.

  As I walked down the hall with the VCR in my hands, I passed the open bathroom door and looked in to see Lydia staring at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Maybe it was a dimple in the mirror, or maybe leaving home after twenty years got to her, but I thought I saw a tear hanging off her lower eyelid. I thought her lip trembled. When she saw me in the doorway behind her, she focused her eyes on mine. Finally we were eye to eye, even if her back was to me.

  “Remember when we moved in here?” she said. “That doctor Caspar rented from had dead animals on every wall.”

  “You slept on the couch for three months.”

  “Until Hank got me into bed.”

  “Why the lie, Lydia?”

  She blinked once and whipped open the medicine cabinet. One hand held a paper bag while the other hand scooped in pill bottles, aspirin tins, and boxes of Q-Tips. “You’re not going to let it drop, are you?”

  “I can’t.”

  A plastic jar of Mary Kay night cream missed the bag and hit the floor, where it rolled under the club-footed bathtub. Lydia’s back rose and fell, then she turned to face me.

  “Okay, shoot. Accuse me of child abuse.”

  I sat on the side of the tub with the VCR in my lap. Lydia closed the toilet lid and sat on it. The déjà vu element was amazing. We could have been mother and son in 1965, settling in for one of our sink-side bull sessions.

  I repeated, “Why the lie?”

  She blinked twice more. “I couldn’t very well tell the truth.”

  “You didn’t have to tell me anything.”

  She did the maneuver where she blew air straight up, lifting her bangs off her forehead. It translated as Give me a break.

  “You kept hounding me for information, and then you found those pictures in my panty box. What were you doing in my panty box in the first place?”

  Typical ploy—shift the defensiveness to me. “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Times like this I would give anything to still smoke.”

  The stall technique. I said, “Lydia.”

  She crossed the right ankle over her left shin. “Sooner or later I had to come up with a story.”

  “But gang rape?”

  She dropped her eyes to the floor. Her voice was small. “That’s the story I told myself. After you tell yourself something a thousand times, you forget it’s not true.” She seemed to be drifting back in time, growing younger as I watched. “When you called to ask if their names matched Shannon’s list, I didn’t remember at first what really happened.” She looked up, willing me to believe her. “I was scared to death. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “The truth might have worked.”

  She uncrossed her legs. “I thought the truth would make you hate me. You may not believe it, but I don’t want you to hate me.”

  I’d come prepared for anger and screams and gotten what I least expected—sincerity from my mother. Maybe. When you’ve grown up with the queen of manipulation, you learn to distrust anything that seems straightforward. My great fear was that someday Lydia would break down and speak the truth and I’d be too suspicious to listen.

  She must have seen the doubt in my face. “What do you want from me, Sam?”

  I stared at the VCR. “Remorse. Some indication that you’re sorry you screwed up my life.”

  “One social blunder of mine did not screw up your life.”

  “It’s not just the lie. You were never a mother. From the time we left your daddy’s house, I cooked all the meals, did the laundry, tucked you in at night.”

  “You volunteered to cook and clean.”

  “You never once told me to do my homework or pick up my socks. I was the only kid in seventh grade who could stay out all night without calling home.”

  “Some boys would like that.”

  “No, they wouldn’t.”

  She snapped. “Okay. I’m sorry. Are you satisfied now?”

  The vein in Lydia’s forehead beat a blue rhythm. She couldn’t help who she was. You can no more force your parents to change than you can teach a cat to stop killing songbirds.

  I said, “There’s a big gap between apology and condescending glibness.”

  Lydia almost fired off an angry retort, but something changed her mind, and she slipped back into sadness. She pouted. “I’m not the type for guilt.”

  “I know.” My reflection in the VCR control panel was distorted by knobs and switches. If I moved my head a bit to the side, my nose looked like a pig’s snout. “I wonder why I’m nothing but a huge glob of guilt.”

  “It must skip generations.”

  What did that mean for Shannon? Lydia leaned forward on the toilet seat and laced her fingers into a web. She spoke to her palms. “I had you right after I turned fifteen, the poor little rich girl who’d never made a decision in her life. Pregnancy doesn’t give you instant maturity. It just makes you fat.”
>
  She raised her hands to her face, thumbs on cheekbones, and looked at me through the web. “I’m sorry I did such a shitty job raising you.”

  Maybe she meant it. Maybe not. I like to think she did. Either way, I’d gotten what I came for.

  “I’m sorry I lied about the rape. I’m sorry I didn’t bake cookies and sing lullabies to you in your crib. I’m sorry you did the laundry. I’m sorry I let you stay out all night—what was the other thing?”

  “Homework.”

  “I’m sorry I never made you do homework.” She dropped her hands. “Anything else?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Can you get on with your life now?”

  “Yes, I can get on with my life.”

  “’Bout damn time.”

  ***

  We celebrated with a conciliatory cup of coffee at the kitchen table. It’s a wonderful old table Lydia found at the estate sale of an old dude ranch where Owen Wister was supposed to have written The Virginian. I liked to imagine Owen writing, “When you call me that, smile!” then spilling his whiskey on this very wood. As soon as Lydia went underground and left me in charge of the house, I planned to steal the table and take it back to Carolina.

  Lydia held the cup with both hands and blew steam from the surface. Ever since I can remember, Lydia’s held her coffee cup with both hands. She said, “Did you ever wonder what I did that pissed Caspar off so much he sent us west?”

  “Only twice a day for twenty years.”

  Lydia glanced at me, then back at her coffee. “Right after you turned twelve, I started seeing Skip.”

  “Seeing?”

  Her lips flattened in disgust at my stupid question. “Okay, fucking.”

  Someday I meant to price lie detector tests. “Funny he didn’t mention it,” I said.

  “Skip didn’t know who I was. We had to sneak around on account of his bitchy little wife and my father, so Skip never saw the house. He’d forgotten my name by then, if he ever knew it.”

  Lydia with Skip and me with Skip’s wife made for a number of abstract equations.

  “Whoever invented the term Southern peckerhead must have been thinking of Skip,” I said.

  “Don’t I know it. I only saw him to upset Caspar.” Lydia smiled into her cup. “Upsetting Daddy was the prime directive of my childhood. I can’t tell you how many jerks I did nasty with trying to get his attention.”

  “Caspar knew about my fathers?”

  “I told him the rape story first, but he threatened to cane them in public, so I had to come clean.”

  “You told your father the truth, but not me?”

  “I already said that, Sam. Repeating it won’t change the facts.”

  When I was young I had this strange feeling everyone around me knew something I didn’t know. Turns out I was right.

  “So you screwed Skip, again, and Caspar found out—”

  “Caspar always found out.”

  “And he shipped us as far away as he could imagine.”

  She nodded. “This house. Now that I’m leaving, I think I’ll miss it.”

  “C’mon, Lydia. The bureaucrat in charge of dog gifts will open the FedEx packet, throw the toy in the trash, and that will be the end of it.”

  Lydia looked dubious. Outside, a truck door slammed. Lydia clicked down her cup.

  “Hank’s back,” she said. “Are we done with accusations and recriminations, because I have to hit the trail?”

  “I guess so. Shouldn’t we break some glass or scream at each other first? That’s how I was brought up.”

  Lydia carried her coffee dregs to the sink. “I’m tired of breaking glass. Cleaning up afterward is undignified.”

  “Is this literal or metaphoric?”

  Lydia looked at me a long time, then she sighed. “Sam, all your life I’ve never been able to decide if you walk around with your head in the clouds or up your ass.”

  ***

  Hank balanced on the truck’s back bumper to strap a blue tarp over the amassed possessions. Even though Lydia’s saddle purse and bottle of water were already in place in the front seat, ready to take to the highway, this driving into the sunset thing still didn’t seem real to me, I guess because it’s hard to conceive of your mother as a fugitive from justice.

  “Wait a day so you don’t miss Pete’s funeral,” I said.

  Lydia had found a blue-and-yellow necktie left over from her Annie Hall phase. She held the folded tie up to my neck to check the color coordination between it and my skin. “I never was much for funerals,” she said. “Tell Maurey and Chet we’re sorry we couldn’t be there.”

  I appealed to Hank. “What’s a day going to matter?”

  Hank grunted from the strain of tightening the rope around the tarp.

  Lydia said, “Women’s prisons are grossly underfunded. They must be avoided at all costs.” She stuffed the necktie into my coat pocket. “Have Maurey tie it, you’ll botch the job if you do it yourself.”

  This was happening too fast. It seemed wrong to have finally made up with my mother, sort of, anyway, and fifteen minutes later lose her for God knows how long. We should be bonding or interfacing or whatever being nice is called these days.

  She said, “Leaving you in charge of the house doesn’t mean some woman can waltz in here and change everything. I want the walls where I left them.”

  “I’m done with women.”

  “I’ll believe that when moose fly.”

  Then Lydia did something completely uncharacteristic. She hugged me. I felt her head on my shoulder and her arms on my back. She was thinner than I’d imagined, and she smelled a bit like ink.

  “Take care of yourself out there in the underground,” I said.

  She leaned back with her hands on my elbows and looked into my face. “I’ll be fine. The government’s not big enough to touch women like me. You take care of my granddaughter.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise me you won’t raise her the way I raised you.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  After Lydia got into the truck, Hank came around and hugged me too. It didn’t feel a bit weird.

  “Feed the horses while I’m gone,” he said.

  “Maurey’s not going to be happy,” I said.

  “You’ll have to take my place.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Hank grinned. “Nach-ki-tach-sa-po-auach-kach-pinna.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Blackfoot for ‘Keep your nose clean.’”

  I stood in the snow, watching Hank’s truck slowly drive away. Just before he turned west onto the Yellowstone Highway, an arm came from the passenger’s window, fingers fluttered a good-bye wave, then they were gone.

  6

  Maurey was more than unhappy over Hank going underground with Lydia.

  “We’re talking last straw,” she said.

  I stood there, hands at my sides, wondering how I could save her. These crises are the times I’m supposed to take command.

  Anger flashed in her eyes. “Who’s going to run the ranch?”

  “It could be worse. I’ve lost my mother. Temporarily anyway.”

  “I need Hank a lot more than you need a mother.”

  That was true. At my age, a mother is more symbolic than nurturing, not that mine ever was nurturing. “I can help with the ranch.”

  Maurey made a nasal sound indicating minor disgust. “Sam, this is a horse ranch; you’re afraid of horses.”

  I hate it when people say that. “The ranch isn’t only a horse ranch. I can fix fence, and I’ve always wanted to learn irrigation. Moving water where it’s needed seems like a satisfying way to spend your time.”

  Maurey sat in her stuffed rocking chair and stared at a spot in the air several feet in front of and slig
htly below her face. She said, “I have to call my sponsor.”

  “Your sponsor?”

  “Go find Pud. He needs your help in the hay shed.”

  “Are you turning to God?” I asked.

  “I’m turning to the telephone. You go help Pud and don’t come back for a couple of hours.”

  Here’s my problem with Pud: Today, he seems nice enough and Maurey loves him and she’s past that stage women go through where they fall in love with creeps, so he must be okay, but way back when Pud was seven or eight his mother told him to drown a litter of kittens. As an alternative to drowning, Pud decided to let his God-ugly dog kill them. Maurey and I came upon the gory scene, there was a fight, the dog bit me, I bit the dog, and in the end we saved one kitten. That kitten was Alice, my closest pal for the next eighteen years.

  Okay. Pud had excuses. He was only a child and his family was a bunch of ignorant yahoos, and back then everyone thought Pud was retarded so they treated him cruelly. I understand the excuses; but the fact is I can’t forget he once fed kittens to a dog. That was the same winter Lydia told me the rape story. People who can’t forget lead fetid lives.

  I found Pud in the barn, grooming the stud.

  “Molly’s in the hay,” Pud said. “We fed her three Marches ago when the snow was nose deep and the elk were starving, and now she thinks we owe her lunch all winter.”

  “She’s a welfare chiseler elk,” I said.

  “There’s a lesson to be learned, I guess.”

  As Pud and I walked in silence up the sled track to the shed, it dawned on me for the hundredth time that I owed it to Maurey to be friends with him. Or, at least, friendly. They’d been together six years and Pud and I had yet to carry on a conversation between just the two of us.

  I wasn’t certain where to begin. “Pud,” I said, “how’d you come to get into the satellite dish repair business?”

  He was as surprised to hear me ask as I was to be asking. He kind of slid the corners of his eyes at me to see if I was putting him on. “Maurey and I were up the Ramshorn one July, delivering horses to the Bar Double R, and they had a dish. I didn’t even know what it was.”

  “And that’s how you decided on a career?”