All My Relations
Page 19
Preparing dinner that night, she kept repeating to herself, “It’s too pitiful that we’ve come to this.” She pivoted awkwardly and the refrigerator’s butter compartment knocked the salad dressing from her hand. She watched the cruet’s descent to the tiles, where it burst, spattering her feet. She grabbed the catsup and let it drop, then the mustard, salsa, mayonnaise, fruit juices. Marco, running, saw his mother ankle deep in brilliant fluids and thought she had cut her feet off.
The incident of the refrigerator was decisive for Ella. She became parent representative for Marco’s fifth-grade class and took him to Broncos games, fearfully expensive. She divided chores sensibly and enforced the schedule. For the first time she could remember, he told her, “I love you, Mom,” and her heart was too full for her to sleep.
As she had done since leaving Arizona, Ella cleaned and laundered for Harry. She saw this as balancing the ledger. “You look lovely vacuuming,” he said, tears in his eyes.
Ella concealed her weight loss under roomy clothing. Politely she discouraged the interest of a Department of Transportation engineer who brought her snapshots from his scuba diving in Mexico. While the house had failed the Terry family, she understood what it had given her—a stiffening, as from cartilage to bone, that she would not casually let go.
Dominic crashed with Harry. No longer shielded by the success of his family, he submitted to his father’s view of him as quaint and hapless. Harry unwound halting reminiscences of Bernice in which neither Dominic nor his brothers and sister were mentioned. When presented with the wrong order by pizza delivery, Dominic stammered his complaint so unintelligibly that he paid up and ate pineapple-olive.
“I’ll make more money this year than the President,” Dominic told his father. He imposed evening game shows on Harry, pounding him in Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Occasionally both men nodded off during The Tonight Show, waking in grayness, stiff.
Leaving for work one morning, he imagined his father drowning, blue face gasping beneath the surface, and Dominic’s own arm shooting down, his palm on Harry’s fibrous hair, pushing, the face receding in a stream of bubbles. Shoving the door closed, Dominic practically ran to his car, but the image bobbed up derisively in front of him.
Hating his father seemed to undermine the last meaning in Dominic’s life. Yet there was excitement, too. He called Ella. “My parents were pathologically selfish,” he said.
“You could knock me over with a feather,” Ella said.
“Don’t you see? That explodes everything. Even the house—I was building it as much against Harry as for us.”
“Dom, I’m just about full up with the subject of your personal development.” Her tone softened. “It is strange, not being able to talk things through together. But we’ll have to do without it.”
She did give permission for Marco to visit him on weekends. Dominic rented a cottage with a spare bedroom. The first night alone he didn’t sleep or move until the alarm rang. For eight hours, his job would enclose him in the bubble of his talent, converting technical esoterica into market-plan increments. When he stepped out, pain waited for him with his overcoat. He never had conceived of hurting so much. The hurt was Ella, he knew, but it was too primitive to be named. It was simply a grinding against every moment. He tried to startle the hurt away by shouting, turning suddenly, but it was constant, unvarying. Opening a can of tuna made interesting ripples in it.
An anniversary passed: a year ago he had rushed home to Tucson and his stricken father, usurped house, unforgiving son, and alienated wife. That time now seemed an unattainable happiness.
At first he and Marco didn’t know how to be together. Their closeness always had come from doing rather than talking, but Marco no longer enjoyed imaginary play. He needed answers for the loss of their family. Together they sought definitive responsibilities, lessons to be salvaged. Dominic wasn’t satisfied assuming total blame. Nor could he entirely penetrate the dull, miserable fog surrounding Ella and Harry. He resorted to the house itself, as an implacable force of nature. “Like a boulder dropping on a frog,” Marco proposed, grateful his father wasn’t accusing him.
“Or maybe an MRI,” Dominic said. “Maybe all it did was diagnose what was wrong with us.”
They were leaving a movie, Marco’s hands in the pockets of his gray coat. His face crumpled. “I wish it hadn’t happened,” he said, clinging to Dominic’s waist. They dragged each other along the sidewalk.
Out of duty Dominic continued to wait on Harry. Disregard for his father allowed him to see a disarmed, feeble old man, for whom he could feel simple sadness. Prodded by Dominic into regular walks, Harry perfected a downcast shuffle, but his color improved, and he began combing his hair.
Occasionally Ella would encounter Dominic there, coming or going. She was enraged with longing at his attendance on Harry. Never, she thought, had she risked the disfiguring shapelessness of loving the unworthy. Her son and until recently her husband were unchallengingly lovable. Her love seemed sleekly validating, like the vagina closing around the penis.
Eventually, the morning came when Dominic woke for work neither numb nor agonized. Despite the cold, he decided to walk. His legs drove against the snow, heels punching through the crust. He counted on their momentum to carry him where he needed to go, and he knew he could exist without Ella. Rather than detouring around a patch of ice, Dominic launched himself across it, skating on the soles of his shoes.
In the midst of his exultation he realized that Ella was the only woman he would want. He imagined her swatting his airplane from the sky with a big length of Sheetrock, and laughed, even though she sat astride Harry’s shoulders, thighs clamped around the old man’s head. For the other’s sake, each of them had become the worst possible self, Dominic thought, he abstract, Ella corrupt. It had never occurred to him to define love that way, and he was shaken by the discovery. He could think of only one person with whom he could share it.
His watch showed time enough before Ella took Marco to school.
When Dominic appeared at the door, ruddy from the wind, Ella saw in his face what had happened. She had reasons and grievance on her side, but they buckled under love and she let him in.
They exchanged pleasantries, Dominic complimenting Ella on her swirling caftan, ignoring the gauntness it was intended to hide. “Aren’t you going to kiss?” Marco demanded. They smiled at him.
“We’re having hot chocolate,” Ella invited.
“Take it outside,” Dominic said. “The morning is so new and beautiful.”
Bundled in down coats, they planted lawn furniture on the white covering. The bare limbs of the elm bounced in the wind. Once the three had imagined themselves as a house on a hill, dug into stone with the tenacity of a lion. Now they sat tensely in canvas-backed chairs stretched like slingshots. They talked cautiously, with encouragement, hoping for the return of pleasure.
Christopher Mcllroy teaches English part-time at the University of Arizona. A cofounder of the nonprofit corporation ArtsReach, which conducts fiction and poetry workshops in Native American communities, he is also a consultant to the Indian Education Unit of the Arizona Department of Education. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories of 1986, The Picador Book of Contemporary American Fiction, Missouri Review, Fiction, Story Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, TriQuarterly, Magazine, and Sonora Review.
Previous winners of the Flannery O’Connor
Award for Short Fiction
David Walton, Evening Out
Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up
Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups
Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight
Mary Hood, How Far She Went
François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Molly Giles, Rough Translations
Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes
Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner
Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News
Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst
Mel
issa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures
Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats
Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order
Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts
Antonya Nelson, The Expendables
Nancy Zafris, The People I Know
Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble
Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps
T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft
Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure
Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire
Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket
Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America