Invisible Boy

by Cornelia Read

  Despite my abhorrence of all mushy bivalves residing in flat oblong tins, I resisted the urge to suggest that we order a couple of pizzas.

  “We just happen to have a few of these fancy new citrus things,” I said, gesturing with my cast toward a bowl of fruit next to the dish strainer. “I’m told they’re called lemons.”

  “Wonderful,” said Mom.

  She pulled a quart Mason jar of straw-yellow liquid out of her purse and unscrewed its lid. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

  “Thanks, Mom, but I’m still on antibiotics.”

  “Everybody think like me, everybody want my squaw,” she said, filling a glass with ice cubes before pouring the vino in.

  Mom lifted her drink in my direction. “To the revolution, wherever it may be.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why the hell not.”

  “Oh! I almost forgot!” She put down her glass on the counter.

  Reaching into her bag again, she produced a pair of flat wooden implements and handed them to me.

  The things were squarish with tapered handles, made of unfinished blond wood and grooved on one side, tied together with a jaunty bow.

  They resembled ill-conceived salad tongs, or possibly something with which Aztecs might once have played Ping-Pong.

  “Um, wow,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “They’re butter paddles,” she said.

  “In case your dairy products, like, misbehave?”

  “To make butter balls with. For dinner parties.”

  “Butter balls,” I said.

  “You take hunks of butter and roll them around between these, then put them in a bowl of ice water. The grooves make a pattern.”

  She seemed so disappointed by my lack of enthusiasm that I said, “You’re very thoughtful to have brought them. Why don’t we try them out tonight?”

  She was thoughtful, not just for bringing them, but for driving down to look after me in the first place.

  It was just that she had a sort of archaeological fondness for the culinary implements of her youth: potato ricers and sturdy meat grinders that clamped to the edges of tables, rust-speckled eggbeaters with red-painted wooden handles, matte-black picnic Thermoses lined in spidery silver glass and stoppered with actual corks under their dented tin cups.

  She’d find them at rummage sales and church bazaars and then give them to us for Christmas and birthdays, or just present them excitedly when she came to visit. Despite the general inutility of these items, not to mention the microscopic dimensions of our urban galley kitchen, we never had the heart to dispose of her artifacts.

  That Mom had most often seen such objects wielded by her family’s cook perhaps deepened the perfume of nostalgia they held for her, but I still found it touching that she wanted so powerfully to outfit us with all the modern conveniences of the World War Two gourmet.

  If nothing else, it served as a reminder that I was not the sole person in our bloodline to be plagued by memory.

  I laid down the paddles on the counter and opened the icebox door. “We’re out of butter. I can call Pagan and ask her to pick some up on the way home from work.”

  “We don’t have to use them tonight. I just thought you’d find them amusing.”

  “I do. I think they’re wonderful.”

  Mom filled a large stockpot with water and lifted it onto the stove to cook the pasta in. “Dean’s out of town?”

  “Louisiana, until Saturday.”

  “So just the four of us for dinner. When do Sue and Pagan get home?”

  I looked up at the Elvis clock nailed above the doorway. “Another hour, probably.”

  Here the two of us were again, in a tiny kitchen, me by the sink and Mom at the stove.

  I watched her put the lid on the pot and crank up the rear burner’s flame beneath it.

  “Are you lonely when Dean goes away, or do you like having a little space?” she asked.

  “Both, I think.”

  If I wanted to confront her about Pierce I knew that this next hour would be the time to do it, but everything was so twisted up with my obligation and her generosity and all the thousand-tendriled vines of nuance that snaked around and between us.

  It would be so much easier just to go for the kind of light chatter she liked best—ask her about Larry and why she’d decided to get married a fourth time all of a sudden, and maybe joke around about how long the line of her initials would be now for any sort of monogram.

  We’d all been through this “Mom’s new guy” shit before. She’d be lost to us for at least a year, busied with stroking some male ego, pretending she couldn’t open jars for herself and that she’d never held a political opinion. Or maybe not even pretending, but actually not remembering.

  Of course it wouldn’t be as bad as when we were kids. We wouldn’t have to live with the guy, first of all. We wouldn’t have to shift places around our own dinner table—again—to accommodate his preferred mealtime location, or eat whatever fucked-up health food he was into, or learn which seemingly innocuous conversational topics would end up bringing on scattered showers of Y-chromosome petulance this time.

  And we wouldn’t have to watch our mother’s loyalty grow paler with every challenge, withering with atrophy like my arm in its cast. At least not every day.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said, “you want to come sit in the living room for a minute?”

  38

  I sat with my back against one arm of the sofa, cast resting on a pillow in my lap, cross-legged and barefoot.

  Mom was perched at the other end. “Would you like me to put on a little music?”

  “I want to ask you about something,” I said.

  Her right hand gripped the wineglass, half-empty now. “Maybe a bit of opera? Or that nice classical station?”

  “How ’bout The Weavers at Carnegie Hall?” I said, needing some cozy old McCarthy-can-kiss-my-blacklisted-pinko-ass solidarity.

  Mom’s left thumb sneaked beneath her middle and index fingers to fiddle with the new engagement ring. “Wonderful.”

  “It should be in that pile of CDs,” I said. “Next to the stereo.”

  “What’s your opinion of Larry?” she asked.

  “He’s pro-nuke and thinks a forest without Boise Cascade is like a day without sunshine. Mazel tov.”

  “He’s very kind,” said Mom. “Do I just press Eject?”

  “Push Power first,” I said. “Hey, the man obviously adores you. And it was lovely of him to spring for the big shpendy lunch.”

  She nodded. “He was nervous about making a good impression.”

  “Refreshing and much appreciated. I give it six months.”

  “Six months until what?”

  “You’re bored enough to bolt or he turns out to be a flaming

  asshole.”

  Mom sat back down.

  “Pagan says you won’t make Thanksgiving, by the way,” I continued. “Though of course if it’s ‘B: asshole,’ we both give it five years.”

  “Well, after five years I’ve heard all their stories,” she said.

  “We know.”

  She stood up. “That water’s probably boiling by now.”

  “Angel hair takes three minutes.”

  “So should I go start it now?”

  “Turn off the stove and come back.”

  Mom stopped fiddling with her ring and clutched a fistful of sweater, rubbing the side of her thumb back and forth against the wool.

  We figured this tic had been spawned when her parents endorsed a brief 1939 fad for encasing babies’ elbows in tiny plaster casts to deny them the comfort of thumb-sucking.

  “I’m tired of sitting,” she said. “I’ve been in the car all day.”

  “We need to talk,” I said. “About Pierce.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Madeline, why do you always want to drag up old shit?”

  “This is actually new shit. At least to me.”

  “Over and done with.”

  “It isn’t, Mom.”


  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Look,” I said, “I didn’t know he’d molested Pagan. She told me last week. Because of the little boy I found.”

  Mom’s thumb moved faster, almost a blur.

  “She also told me that you don’t believe her,” I said.

  “I asked Pierce about it.”

  “Oh, gee, let me guess what he said—why did you even bother?”

  “It was only fair to hear both sides.”

  “No, Mom,” I said, “it’s only fair to believe your daughter.”

  “I’m sure the truth is somewhere between their two versions.”

  “We’ll just say Pagan’s partially lying about having been dry-humped repeatedly by your sack-of-shit boyfriend back when she was ten years old?”

  Mom’s mouth went grim and tight, giving her an uncanny resemblance to her dead father.

  “Which I guess would mean you’re only partially betraying her,” I said. “I mean, at the very least, ask yourself, why would she make it up if it didn’t happen? What possible purpose could that serve?”

  “I am not betraying Pagan. Or anyone.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s why you can’t wait to tell us what a good time you’ve had seeing Pierce every time you go back to California.”

  “Pierce is my friend. So is his wife.”

  “And does his wife have any daughters, Mom?”

  “One.”

  “How old?”

  Mom shrugged. “She’s a troublemaker. They sent her to live with the father a couple of years ago.”

  “How old?”

  “I don’t know… thirteen? Why the hell does it possibly matter?”

  I covered my eyes with my left hand.

  “You are such a fucking idiot,” I said. “Jesus Christ.”

  Mom was silent for a long beat.

  When she spoke again, her voice was appallingly perky: “I’m going to cook dinner now. Before all that water boils away.”

  Just after Mom left the next day, I discovered two more vintage gifts arranged sweetly atop my bed: an embroidered cashmere cardigan and a Luneville luncheon plate.

  She’d folded the sweater’s arms inward at each elbow, to look as though some shyly invisible two-dimensional friend were offering up the French-porcelain artifact, hoping for my approval.

  I stared down at the bed. This was no hastily assembled peace offering, but something my mother had thought up well ahead of her long drive down from Maine: sweater a perfect fit and the exact green of my eyes, plate’s cottage-nosegay motif my favorite since early childhood.

  Having too little money for last-minute extravagance, Mom kept us ever in mind, scouting out small treasures to bestow on each of her children, sweetening our way through the world.

  Nothing between us was simple, or ever had been.

  Two days later I got my stitches out. Then they rebroke my arm.

  39

  I made Pagan pay me the hundred bucks on Thanksgiving Day. It’s not like she could really argue.

  We were in Maine, after all, at Larry’s house.

  Taped to his icebox was a group shot Mom had cut out of the Carmel Pine Cone, the newspaper we’d grown up with in California.

  Mom was standing between Pierce and his wife at a party, and all three of them were laughing.

  40

  What do you mean, wives can’t come to the Christmas party?” I asked.

  It was a Sunday in mid-December and Dean and I were out in New Jersey, ostensibly taking care of some paperwork in his office.

  I’d been surprised by the building Christoph housed his business in. It was right next to a weed-choked set of railroad tracks, your basic bad-sixties plantation homage: cheap fake bricks with a pair of two-story white columns framing the entrance: Gone With Bad Taste.

  “ Spouses aren’t invited,” said Dean. “Don’t ask me why.”

  I perched on the edge of his desk. “Why?”

  He ignored me, raising his thousand-page Xerox of an incompre-

  hensibly Swiss-German biological-oxygen-demand-quantification-device-

  thingie repair manual higher between us.

  I nudged the pages with my still-plaster-encased arm. “Like, so your colleagues can get all the secretaries drunk enough to fuck out in the parking lot?”

  A choking sound emanated from behind my husband’s Teutonic-pulp rampart.

  “Duh,” I said.

  No response.

  I swung my legs, making syncopated heel-thuds against the kettle drum of his file drawer.

  “Will there be tons of coke,” I continued, “or just grain alcohol in the punch?”

  “Bunny, I have to finish this.”

  “So maybe I’ll crash it. With Astrid. I should have this thing off my arm by then.”

  More choking.

  “We could jump out of a giant cake wearing fishnets or something,” I continued. “Freak the shit out of everyone.”

  Dean lowered his reading matter. “If I buy you lunch will you stop talking?”

  “Briefly,” I said, leaning over to stroke his hair, left-handed.

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “All what girls?” asked a man’s voice from behind me, husky and debauch-battered.

  I turned to find Captain Kangaroo’s evil twin lounging against the door frame: thick-wristed, broken-nosed, and in no kind of hurry to raise his eyes from my tits despite the sling and cast that framed them.

  My pectoral equipage rated a slow nod of approval. He loosened the knot of his tie, tongue-tip sliding across his front teeth in pink salute.

  I got the feeling he’d been standing there long enough to have overheard my drunk-secretarial-parking-lot-sex comment. And that he was less a drunk-secretarial-sex-in-the-parking-lot than a drunk-secretarial-blowjob-in-the-men’s-room-stall kind of guy.

  “You must be Mrs. Bauer,” he said, his voice a wooden spoon dragged through pea-gravel.

  “It’s Dare, actually.” I slid off the desk and stepped toward him, left hand stuck out in front of me. “Madeline.”

  Captain K had one of those slow, crawly handshakes—like he was asking Helen Keller if she knew the one about the salesman and the farmer’s daughter.

  He shot my husband a smirk, not letting me go. “Jesus, Dean, you married a feminazi?”

  I smiled sweetly. “Beats a Republicunt.”

  He dropped my hand and I smiled wider.

  Dick.

  “Got a hell of a mouth on her,” he said, squinting back at me.

  Dean shrugged. “You know these debutantes…”

  “Oh, right. She’s Astrid’s friend.”

  “Bunny,” said Dean, “this is Vincent Taliaferro. My boss.”

  “Bunny?” That rated another smirk.

  “So, Vinnie,” I said, “you had lunch yet?”

  Right when Taliaferro was locking up out front, Christoph drove into the office parking lot, Astrid riding shotgun beside him.

  Because the patriarchy didn’t already suck enough.

  From across the restaurant table Taliaferro pointed his butter-smeared knife at me.

  “Why the hell do you care what a bunch of moolies get up to?” he said through a mouthful of dinner roll.

  Dean had brought up the investigation despite my shin-kick of

  under-the-table admonition.

  I draped my napkin across my lap. Taliaferro’s spilled down wide from his collar, a waterfall of snowy bib.

  He took another big bite of roll, chewed once, and knocked it back with a slug of ice water. “You even know what a moolie is, Madeline?”

  I gave him a curt nod. Sure I did: slang abbreviation of the Italian for “eggplant.”

  “Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Look around this restaurant.”

  It was a dark green room with a Burger-King solarium tacked on: lots of framed one-red-rose-on-a-piano-keyboard posters, two big ESPN-tuned TVs hanging above the b
ar.

  Taliaferro brandished the knife. “Nice place, am I right?”

  “Lovely,” I replied.

  He put down the knife, handle-tip at rest on the tablecloth, blade balanced against his butter plate’s edge. “You wanna know why?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Taliaferro rubbed the pad of a thumb to and fro against the thin skin on the back of his other hand. “Because it’s all one color, that’s why.”

  Christoph smiled. Astrid was still on Planet Chanel behind her

  sunglasses.

  Dean reached into the bread basket, handily avoiding having to look me in the eye.

  I leaned forward, mashing my cast against the edge of the table. “A little kid got beaten to death, Vinnie. I found his bones. It has literally nothing to do with skin color.”

  Taliaferro reached past the oil-and-vinegar cruets to pat my free wrist, his face screwed up with a sympathy I wanted no part of.

  “Fucking animals, hon,” he said. “Look what they did to Newark.”

  Christoph nodded. “I find these conversations so helpful because I must admit to being still confused by certain aspects of your national culture.”

  “Really?” I said. “Which ones?”

  “More wine?” asked Dean.

  Christoph waved a hand over his glass, declining.

  “Perhaps we can help,” I said, “by throwing light on any particularly troubling nuance of American life?”

  Dean stepped on my foot.

  I took a swallow of beer, then smiled across the table at Christoph and whacked the side-edge of my kneecap hard against my husband’s thigh.

  “Well, Madeline,” said Christoph, smiling back, “I must say that I find it astonishing, for instance, that you put up with all of these

  niggers.”

  I nearly choked on my Heineken. “ Excuse me?”

  “I mean, really,” he went on, “why don’t you just send them all back?”

  Jesus, maybe Astrid’s gift of Hitleriana really had been a cry for help.

  I looked to Dean, who appeared to have developed a sudden penchant for bird-watching out the restaurant window.

  “ Christoph,” I said.

  “Maddie?”