Maybe I'll Call Anna

by William Browning Spencer

  “Father,” Richard said. “Please.”

  “Just show Hiller who’s boss. Just shout him on about his business, just—”

  The dog was jumping and twisting around, confused now. It lunged, and Richard threw up his arms and fell backwards, head thumping against the concrete, body screaming with hysterical messages. The dog was on him; it smelled bad, like a dumpster on a hot day. Spittle flew from its mouth. The creature had a terrible, fanatic’s strength, as though its bones were steel beneath the smooth black hide. Richard tried to push it away, but his hands thumped futilely against its furious body. It meant to kill him. “Hey!” Parrish Senior shouted, and he raced down the stairs. Richard was screaming, and the metal pipe rolled across the concrete. Parrish kicked the dog. Hiller yelped, skidded sideways and raced off. Parrish helped his son to his feet. “All right, now,” he said, patting his son’s shoulder. “Let’s get on out of here.” He reached in his pocket for the keys and unlocked the door.

  On the way back home, Parrish elaborated on the necessity of self-control. Richard said nothing. “Well, no harm done and you’ve learned a valuable lesson,” his father said.

  Richard went up to his room and took off his pants. He studied his bloody thigh and washed the blood off with a sponge, watched it well back up, and rinsed it again. Finally the bleeding stopped but he still didn’t like to look at the black pits in his flesh that sank to a hideous depth. Looking at the wound made him feel odd, weightless and insubstantial, as though he could easily and without warning fall into pieces, bloom with dark holes, sprout death like an old potato under the kitchen sink.

  The next two weeks were hell. Richard had heard the schoolyard tales of rabies. These stories were particularly gruesome, having gotten mixed, somehow, with stories of werewolves and the undead. At night, he lay in bed waiting to go mad, body and mind both knotting into cruel contortions. Sometimes, breathing in shallow gasps, he was convinced the disease had him. Then it would go away and he would lie there thinking about his father, thinking, actually, about his father’s back as his father unlocked the door to the warehouse and let him out. Those were bad weeks and that’s when he began keeping the diary. His first sentence was: “I hate my father, and I wish he were dead.” The first pages, written in a desperate flurry, were later transferred to notebooks, organized.

  The diary became Richard’s religion, his confessional. It helped to keep the ugliness away. He began to write in it every day, and he was superstitious about missing a day. Here he didn’t have to be in control; here he was safe.

  The diary was survival.

  One day he wrote, “The old man’s dying. Hooray!”

  Richard was there when one of the doctors explained to Grace how the cancer had spread, virulently, though the lymph system. It made Richard feel itchy inside, thinking about it, and he wanted to run from the room—where he was invisible to the adults in any event—and he thought of the cancer as busy ants, hollowing his father. There was an operation, and then a second operation. The second operation did something to his father, but no one, not even Grace, remarked on it. After the first operation, Richard Parrish Senior complained and roared. After the second, the old man (really old now) lay paralyzed, unable to speak or move. You’d think that that would be a change worth noting, but no one said a thing. Grace and Richard, dressed as though for Sunday church (and there was something austere and church-like in the hospital, the whiteness and ritual, the solemnity and silence), came to see the old man. Grace would talk about friends, the weather, politics, anything, her voice ringing out with terrible brightness, and Richard’s father, supported by pillows, would blink his watery eyes while his mouth hung open.

  “Kiss your father goodby,” Grace would say when these long visits finally came to an end, and Richard would dutifully go and kiss the dry, pale cheek and smile and say, “See you later, Dad.” He had never called his father “Dad,” but he found he liked the sound of it. “Get well, Dad,” he would say, and he would leave with Grace.

  Richard’s father died less than a month after being admitted to the hospital, and Richard went to the funeral with Grace. The funeral was held on a viciously hot day at the end of the summer, and Richard thought he might faint. He thought of the ants, busy in his father’s body, and he wanted to throw up. He dreamed a terrible dream that night in which he came down to breakfast to find his father sitting at the breakfast table drinking a cup of coffee. Something wasn’t right, Richard knew, but he couldn’t remember what. Then he noticed that his father’s beard seemed to be moving, and instantly he saw that it wasn’t hair at all but a thick, busy horde of black ants. Richard saw a trail of ants coming from his father’s mouth.

  “You’re dead!” Richard screamed, pushing away from the table, knocking his chair over.

  His father mumbled something, then repeated it, “Willpower, my boy. I choose not to be dead. A man can do what he pleases if he has the will.”

  Then Richard’s father coughed. The cough ignited a series of coughs, and ants spewed onto the tablecloth. Gouts of ants flew from Parrish Senior’s mouth, and, as Richard sat transfixed with horror, his father shrank, deflated like a balloon. One limp, ragged hand, like a flattened glove, reached out to touch Richard’s cheek, and the awfulness of it woke Richard, sat him straight up in bed.

  3

  Grace and Richard continued to live in the big house until all the money was gone. Richard once heard his mother tell their lawyer, “I don’t like to think about money. It makes my head ache.” And so, she didn’t think about it until it was gone, and then she married Paul Baynard.

  Grace was frank about it. “I married your stepfather for his money,” she told her son. “And a good thing I did too, before some heartless bitch came along. I’ll make him happy.”

  Paul Baynard, Richard’s new stepfather, was a decent, unambitious man who had been born into a family which, for generations, had accrued wealth compulsively. The old man, Claude Baynard, was still at the helm, still diversifying and cutting throats with piratical zeal.

  Paul Baynard was a quiet, vague man who went to clubs and offices, always goaded by duty, always pursued by an obligation. Richard liked him, and rarely saw him.

  Richard did not like high school. It was too noisy and raw. He wasn’t interested in sports or the companionship of other boys. He preferred being at home with Grace, going up to his room and writing in his diary. Why bother with other people when he could confide everything to the ever-attentive, secret ear of his diary? The crowd of loud, obscene schoolboys could never understand the adventure that unfolded in his diary, the mystery that was revealed to him. It was exhilarating, a clandestine, private world. He was filled with a sense of daring experimentation.

  He had nothing but disdain for the public, sniggering lives of his schoolmates. The girls attracted him, but it was the attraction that interested him, that he took back to his room and studied as though it were a multifaceted jewel, a gift for his diary. He never thought seriously of doing anything about these girls. They were the inspiration for fantasies, but they were not attainable.

  Then Vivian Decker entered his life. She was a cheerleader, but no mere shrieking girl bouncing in blind ecstasy for a lot of moronic football gladiators. Vivian ennobled the sport. She was studying ballet, and she had a grace, a way of floating off the ground that was exuberant but dignified. The way the stadium lights winked in her eyes, the way her round, ripe mouth shaped the words, “Push ’em back. Waaaaaay back!” suggested a certain bemused distance, an adult indulging children.

  Nonetheless, Richard wouldn’t have thought much about her if she hadn’t actively pursued him. Later she told him, “At first I thought you might be a fairy or something. Sometimes really good-looking guys are fairies, like this guy Marlene dated. You just didn’t seem interested, you know. You were always acting like the whole world was this television show you were watching, some crappy, dull game show or something.”

  Richard had laughed, embarrassed, a littl
e uncomfortable that anyone could know him well enough to say something like that.

  But it was okay, because Richard loved Viv. This love was not unmixed with gratitude. He had thought he was just fine, with his diary and his solitude. He had been ignorant of everything. He had been locked in a dank, airless room, and Viv had saved him from a desolate existence, from a life of growing every day more crooked. It was something he had discussed with his diary. “Sometimes I hate how the world is out there and I am in here,” he had written.

  Now he had Viv. She had introduced him to sex, untraumatically, in a laughing, roughhouse fashion, and she had chided him out of his crookedness, for she was able to match his inherited disdain for the world at large with her own enthusiasm. “Come on, we’re going skating. Come on, we’re going dancing. Come on, you fish, we’re going bowling with Ralph and Marlene.” She made a joke of his reserve, and he gratefully joined in the laughter.

  He had taken Viv to meet his parents, and his stepfather had been all graciousness, smiling and listening attentively, genuinely pleased to be meeting Richard’s girl. Viv was wearing a baby-blue sweater, a pink skirt, high socks, and she looked sweet. Although she later told Richard she was so nervous she thought she would puke, she told some hilarious stories about going to camp where her father, a high school teacher, was an instructor in the summer.

  Richard’s mother was not so gracious. Grace’s smile was a grimace of genteel revulsion. She sat upright in the plush sofa, and although she said almost nothing, she managed, by the force of her considerable character, to portray a mother who has been deeply wronged by an errant son.

  “I know you don’t like Vivian, Mother,” Richard said that evening, “but I do.”

  “Well, of course you do,” Mrs. Parrish-Baynard said. She then winked, a gesture that really wasn’t in her physical vocabulary and failed to convey any kind of bawdy camaraderie, and said, “She’s a sweet young thing.”

  “You think she’s trash,” Richard said.

  “Of course I don’t. She’s a well-groomed, well-spoken girl. There is no doubt in my mind that her parents are decent, hard-working folks.”

  Richard turned and started to walk up the stairs to his room.

  “It’s just that she’s common,” his mother said. “She’s so common.”

  Richard turned. He was shocked. His mother sat on the sofa, her mouth open, as though she had shocked herself by speaking so bluntly. Then she shrugged. Richard glared at her and turned away.

  “Viv.” They were lying in bed in her room. It was afternoon and both her parents were at work. Richard loved this room, with its teddy bears and dressing table cluttered with cosmetics.

  “Hmmmmm,” she said, turning over and smiling out of lazy eyes, then reaching to touch his cheek.

  “Let’s get married.”

  “That’s my dream, you know,” Viv said, drowsy-voiced.

  “Well, I mean it, Viv. Why not?”

  Vivian Decker woke up and blinked. “Richard! You are serious! Oh, Richard!” She hugged him and covered him with kisses. “Let’s get married right away.”

  “I think we should wait until we’ve both finished high school. That’s not so far away.”

  Vivian was silent, thinking. “I guess not, Richard. I mean, it seems a million miles away, but I guess it really isn’t, and I love you.”

  They were going to get married as soon as they both graduated from high school. They got married earlier, however. It was an old story. Vivian was pregnant.

  Richard had a car by then, a new cream-colored Plymouth, and they drove to a town in South Carolina, got married and then drove home. Richard dropped Viv at her parents and promised to call after breaking the news to Grace and his stepfather.

  “You fool!” his mother shrieked. He had never seen her in such a rage. “You fool!” She was having a hard time talking. Anger had robbed her of speech. She waved a hand. “Get.”

  Her husband, a peacemaker, said, “Grace, the boy—”

  “No,” she said, waving him away. She walked to the window and looked down on the sweeping backyard, groomed to green perfection, a crystal blue swimming pool, a yellow guest cottage that sparkled in the late afternoon sun.

  She turned and looked at Richard, honest confusion drawing her face into an older, almost senile version of herself. He could see her come to some conclusion. She walked over to an end table, picked up her purse and fished through it, frantically pulling out sheaves of bills. She counted the money, her lips working. “Two hundred and fifty dollars,” she said. She walked to Richard and thrust the money into his hand. “I want you to have this. Lord knows, you’ll need it.”

  She marched back to the window and Richard was left holding the clump of bills. “Mother?”

  She said nothing.

  “Mother!”

  She whirled around and screamed. “Now get out of here. Paul! Nothing out of you! Don’t say a word! This is my son. Get out of here, Richard. That’s your wedding present, and that’s the last you’ll get from us. I mean it. You chose your road without consulting us; you can choose your future in the same manner. Goodby.”

  “I left. There’s no arguing with my mother,” Richard told Viv, recounting the story.

  “What will we do?” Viv said. She was stunned, sick. She had been feeling rotten recently anyway, but the doctor said that was normal. But it didn’t feel normal and the doctor was a man so that “normal” business was pretty goddam glib anyway, and now what was she hearing?

  “I don’t care,” Richard said.

  Vivian licked her lips. She didn’t want to get upset. “She will change her mind, don’t you think?”

  Richard laughed. “Grace change her mind? I don’t think she can. I think she has a one-way mind, like a minnow trap. An opinion can go in but it can’t go out.”

  Vivian frowned. “This isn’t funny. Why didn’t you tell me that your mother hated my guts? I thought you said she liked me.”

  “My mother is an awful woman. I don’t care what she thinks of you. I love you.”

  “Well, this is awful,” Vivian said, and she sat down in a kitchen chair.

  Richard felt a panicky moment as, arms folded, she scowled. His new bride looked, for a moment, fat, unlovely, and full of wrath.

  “I’ll get a job,” he said. He hadn’t had time to think about that, but now, having said it, it seemed a strong, sensible solution, and he leaned forward and put his arm around Viv’s shoulders and said, “We’ll be all right, you’ll see.”

  Viv began to cry. “What kind of job can you get?” she sobbed. “You don’t know anything.”

  Richard’s stepfather, in a fit of renegade bravery—for his wife would have been hard to live with had she known—talked to the president of Coleridge Savings and Loan, and quietly secured a position for Richard. The job was dull, but it allowed Richard and Viv to move into a two-room apartment and buy groceries and pay the more pressing bills.

  Richard hated the job, but he also felt a sense of freedom, of living in the real world. He was a genuine participant in his life. Vivian didn’t understand the delight Richard felt in self-sufficiency.

  One night, right after they moved into the apartment, they celebrated with two bottles of wine, and Vivian had got squeaky drunk, outrageous and toy-doll cute. Richard didn’t much like it, and she picked up on his displeasure and glared back at him.

  “Little Richie’s unhappy,” she squeaked. “Too bad. Baby’s on the way and the money’s all dried up. All dried up.” She laughed ruefully, mindlessly. She looked at Richard, and he knew she was going to say something cruel. She did. “It’s a laugh, you know. You think I got this baby because it’s like the wages of sin or something? You think Jesus sends down angels to put holes in rubbers so bad people, messing around, get caught?”

  Richard was a little drunk himself, and he wasn’t following this speech although he could feel the anger, like heat from an open oven. “Huh?”

  “I wanted this baby. I wanted a rich
boy’s baby, bounce him on my knee in a big house while his big-shot grandparents chuck him under the chin. Joke’s on me. Joke’s on you, too, Richie. You didn’t tell me your mom hated me. You didn’t tell me you were gonna be poor.”

  “You married me because my parents have money?” It was a thought he truly couldn’t comprehend. He would never have married for money.

  He loved her.

  That was the first time he hit her, one open-palmed blow across her cheek. They made up that night, and in the morning Viv couldn’t apologize enough. “I shouldn’t drink,” she said. “It’s not me talking when I drink. It’s someone who gets inside me and says awful things.” Richard believed this and said he was sorry that he had hit her.

  At work, his immediate supervisor suggested he work a few hours in the evening without pay. “You want to get ahead, you have to make sacrifices. You want to learn this business, you have to get cracking, my boy.”

  Richard began to feel tired all the time. The apartment was shabby and smelled of burnt fish. The next-door neighbors, an obese middle-aged couple with an obese child, fought loudly and incessantly. Often when Richard got home, Viv, bulging with her baby, would already be in bed, watching Perry Mason, eyes goggling, eating crackers. “The little accountant guy did it,” she would tell Richard. “What do you want to bet?”

  He didn’t want to bet anything. Vivian Decker was a stranger who had moved into his life. “I don’t know where she came from,” he told his diary. “I can hardly remember how she got into my life.”

  Vivian’s parents would sometimes come by and sit for an hour and talk about nothing and pretend that they didn’t feel the tension in the room. Her mother had a forced heartiness that would not have fooled an autistic child, and Viv’s father rolled on about sports in spite of Richard’s obvious indifference. Richard’s mother never called, and his stepfather would make rare, check-in calls that were dismally furtive.