gods with a little g

by Tupelo Hassman

  And I lie.

  “Fine,” I say. I pour the milk. The milk is still in the same old plastic container as usual, but it won’t be long until Iris has it in some kind of glass carafe or something … and then my stomach kind of twists. Hating Iris is making me sick. She’s never, ever done anything to me but try to make my dad happy and keep my cereal fresh. I reach out to the plastic container of flakes and kind of pet it. “Fine,” I say.

  And then I start to cry.

  My lie is not very convincing because of this.

  And Dad doesn’t say anything, at least he doesn’t say the wrong thing. What he does next is right, biblical and otherwise. He takes my hand. And Iris, who has been quiet this whole time, taking out glasses and pouring juice and all the things she is always doing between the counter and table, she takes his hand. And then Bird comes in and doesn’t even notice anything is going on but sits and joins hands like we always do, without a word, because we usually rush through this part to get to the cereal, so we can get to the next part, where we leave the house.

  Dad says, “Our Father, we thank You this morning for our food but also for the food of the soul with which You sustain us always, the gift of real and lasting friendship.” And he squeezes my hand. Not harder than usual, but warmer, if that makes any sense, and the pause before we start eating is filled with this warmth too, all across the table where God’s tablecloth was pulled away, warming our cold cereal, warming all our cold parts, and then Dad says, “Amen,” and we all say, “Amen,” and when I drop Bird’s hand, I hold on to Dad’s. Just for a second longer.

  OH FACE

  I hear Iris shut their bedroom door. This, after listening to her open and pause and then shut Bird’s bedroom door on her way down the hall, like she has every single night since they moved in, like I suppose she has done every single night of her mothering years. I get out of bed. The first step in another midnight trip down the hallway to Bird’s room. The first step to make him follow me back the other way, to get into my bed. God might have made an appearance this morning, but he bailed by the afternoon, and I have all night ahead of me.

  I ease open my door without making a sound.

  I step heel-toe heel-toe down the hallway, keeping to the right side, where the floor doesn’t creak, being careful not to knock down my embarrassing school photos.

  I open Bird’s door. I’m hit with that smell I still can’t get used to, heavy and sweaty and warm.

  And I stop.

  Bird isn’t waiting for me. He’s out cold. He isn’t lighting up the dark room with his sleepy, sneaky smile, ready to go. He doesn’t bounce right up so he can come climb into my bed. He doesn’t move at all.

  He’s wearing boxers and a tank top and the blankets are pushed down around his feet. His arms are loose around his head, a knee bent up and to one side. It’s like he’s been thrown back by an explosion.

  Like he’s fallen from a plane, from that plane that’s always flying over Rosary.

  Like he’s frozen in the middle of a fistfight, all ecstasy and abandon.

  Like a child.

  Like he’s someone’s child.

  And I close the door quietly. The slowest release of the latch, because if there is anything I don’t want to be caught doing, it is this. I pause before going back down the hall to let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, to breathe in all I have just seen. What I have finally let myself see. Then I take the quietest steps ever taken in this house, because I don’t want to get caught now, not in the middle of this act that I can’t explain or even understand. I’ve caught myself in the middle of loving Bird.

  Like a brother. Like a friend.

  WAYS TO OPEN A PRAYER

  God.

  This is Your frenemy Helen Dedleder. You might remember me from such powerful hits as, “Please make Mommy stop crying,” and “I will do anything, just please don’t take my mom away.” You might remember me from all those times I reached out to You when I was a kid and You were busy dismantling my mom a piece at a time.

  I was the one You ignored.

  I was the one You taught that what I want doesn’t matter. That what I do doesn’t matter. That I don’t. Yes, that Helen Dedleder. Created in Your sight. Congratulations.

  I’m here to report the sin of hypocrisy. Apparently, the whole time I was on Dad’s case for being dead to the world, I was missing the fact that I was too. Until Winthrop Epsworthy rolled into town. And then, just like the zombie I accused Dad of being, I woke up, and before You know it, there I was, a brain-dead maniac consuming human flesh.

  Human flesh, in the form of Bird. In my bed.

  Remember Your old pal Paul who had that big moment on the road to Damascus? Remember how You showed up for him and he got to hear You and see You, and then he stopped his nasty ways? Well, this is Helen reporting from my personal Walk of Shame, and You are nowhere to be found, as usual, but I am seeing the light. A light. A little light my mom left shining for me. I guess You missed a spot.

  Yea, though I fall on my face on the carpet in the hallway between my bedroom and Bird’s and not on some dusty New Testament road, I am still blinded by how dumb I have been to think that I don’t matter. That my choices don’t matter.

  Yea, though I don’t forgive You for Your shit choices, O God of my misunderstanding, I do forgive myself. One of us needs to start making some sensible decisions around here.

  ROUGH TRADE

  I go and sit in Fast Eddie’s office. He is leaned back in his chair, a beer on the desk in front of him. He doesn’t seem to notice me when I come in, and even after I sit down in the greasy rolling chair across the desk from him, he’s still kind of staring off at the closed blinds, the streetlight slanting through them.

  I feel this prickle on my skin, all through me, the kind Aunt Bev says means it is time to clock in for work. The feeling is not like a shiver. I’m not cold. It is more like I suddenly have eyes everywhere, all over my body, and these eyes have just opened themselves up and are looking hard. Right at Fast Eddie.

  He starts talking.

  “My high school sweetheart.”

  If I wasn’t paying attention, I mean, really paying attention with all of my many eyeballs, I would leave the room right now. But I know when he says this, he doesn’t mean me.

  “She wanted to leave.” Fast Eddie takes sips of his beer while he’s talking. These sips interrupt his sentences, make new sentences, make lines to read between.

  “Rosary. But I wanted to do what was easy.” Sip of beer. “As usual. She said she didn’t like the way it was going. Didn’t feel safe. After the crusaders dug in.”

  As he talks about his wife’s fears, I feel crushed. Like my lungs have shriveled up and disappeared.

  “She couldn’t breathe here,” he says.

  I want to gasp, to raise my head higher, like I’m underwater, to rise up to where all the oxygen must be.

  “Her exact words, ‘I can’t breathe here.’ At first I decided she meant the crusaders were too much for her. Her mom was from Venezuela. She had some trouble. I told her things would settle down. And I forgot to…” Fast Eddie’s eyes close. His jaw trembles. He reaches out a hand to his beer and the gold ring on his pinkie makes a quiet tap against the can. “Listen. I forgot to listen. I never thought.” He finally looks at me now. Right at me. Like he has eyeballs everywhere too. “You know.”

  I take a giant breath, a gulping breath. What a small yet wonderful thing to be able to do.

  I nod at him. I know. Everyone knows, whether they admit it or not. Once science was a matter of opinion, corporations like Rosario Oil could really have their way with the air and the water, with the land and everything on it. It was a free-for-all. Like Mother Nature was a cheerleader passed out at a frat party, cancer falling all around her like confetti.

  Of course, I know more than most about this. And this is what Fast Eddie is saying without actually saying, in a surprising moment of sensitivity. But what he doesn’t know is that I refu
se to associate Rosario Oil with my mom. Because fuck them. Because Mom made her own decisions and she wanted to stay here, wanted to live this vision of what could be with that version of my dad who made all of her sacrifices worthwhile.

  If I start blaming, where would it stop? I can blame Mom for not going when she had the chance, I can blame Aunt Bev for not making her go, and I sure can blame Dad for everything. Then I’ll go right to the top and blame God for making Mom fall in love with Dad and wasting the last of her health on having me. And I’ll end up alone in some filthy office every night groping teenagers to prove to myself I’m still alive.

  No thanks.

  And I am not going to blame Rosario Oil. I will not give those people an invitation to my grief, to my heart, or wherever it is that Mom lives in me now. This is one thing they cannot buy. This is one place they will not pollute.

  Fast Eddie empties his beer. He crushes the can between his hands, then he drops it into the wastebasket and stares in at it, in a daze again. It’s like he’s seeing something down in there, finding meaning in the ways the empty cans have fallen, the shapes they make. Misfortune-telling.

  “I went to see your aunt once. Did you know that?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “To have my fortune told. Not for the other.” This is a detail I had already presumed based on his poor performance in the LeSabre. But that doesn’t matter anymore. Or it matters more and in a different way, how broken he is.

  “Your aunt Beverly,” and he is suddenly outraged here, on this night, as he must have been on that visit to the shoppe. “She said that people hold grief in their lungs. If that’s true, here’s what I want to know.”

  And he’s looking at me. And I’m looking at him.

  “What am I still doing here?”

  He kind of beats his chest with his fist, strikes at his healthy, working lungs hard enough that I hear the dull thud. “What am I doing here, Helen?”

  My psychic eyeballs are blinking back tears for this man who would wish cancer on himself so he can be with the person he loves. For this man who deserves an answer. But I’ve got nothing. What are any of us doing here, besides waiting?

  AIRBORNE

  I’m late leaving the tire yard, late walking past the shoppe. Aunt Bev’s lights are all out, even the red bulb by the front door. The shoppe is gray. The sky is gray. The pavement under my shoes is gray. There’s a weird warm breeze that gusts and stops and gusts and stops and I walk down the white line in the middle of the road in the gray night trying not to stumble, pretending I am a very sober plane ready for takeoff with the next gust of wind.

  And then a big gray shape blows past me, across the road, toward the fence that borders the freeway.

  And there’s Cy, and he’s running after it.

  And I’m running too. Even though the tent is going to stop at the fence and there is nothing I can do, really, nothing I can offer, to help with the weather, or with Cy being stuck here, or with there being nowhere to go from here anyway, nowhere far enough from ourselves, even if the wind lifts us up for a minute and makes us pretend.

  We arrive at the tent at the same time, just as it reaches the fence, and before it can snag on any of the frayed metal poking out from it. I help Cy carry it back to the center of the angel in the lot, to where I’m just now realizing would be the angel’s heart.

  “Thanks,” Cy says, after he’s pounded in the last stake with this rubber mallet thing that is just for tent-building.

  I surprise myself by asking if I can come in.

  His sleeping bag is already inside, and the pillow, but they weren’t enough to weigh the tent down. I guess his flashlight and things are in the backpack he pulls in after us with his mallet, but he doesn’t open it up.

  There is no beer and there are no magazines.

  There is only the wind against the tent, stopping and starting, like the angel is beating its wings all around us to carry us away.

  WAITING, A DRINKING GAME

  1. Swear you will not go to your local drinking establishment.

  2. Go.

  3. Every time you think of the person you miss, drink.

  4. Take two drinks for every time you think about not thinking about him.

  5. Pound a beer straight to your head if you are so much as tempted to ask anyone, especially that person you are missing’s sister, if she has heard from him and when he’s coming back.

  6. Take a shot if you do this anyway. Pour one for her too. Repeat.

  HOTHOUSE

  The orchid. The orchid Winthrop brought me on the night of the prom I didn’t go to. The one that he dropped in the driveway when he walked away. What do you think I did with that? Do you think I let it get run over by the tires on Iris’s Honda, the ones on Dad’s post office jeep? Do you think I kicked it under the porch, let it dry up and blow away? What would it mean if I picked it up, brought it inside, and found a safe place for it, this flower I didn’t have to make with my own hands? Is there such a thing as a safe place?

  DREGS

  I can fuck my stepbrother. I can jerk off like a teenager with a robotic arm. I can make love potions. What I can’t do is pour myself a cup of tea and look into it.

  Because that is terrifying.

  But these are desperate times. So, just like Aunt Bev does, I break the tea bag a little bit. Just enough for a few leaves to spill out while I’m drinking. It’s black and cheap and awful, what Iris favors, but it will still work. And that is the scary part.

  I take my time drinking it and when it’s almost gone I swirl what is left in three slow circles with my left hand. That’s one of the things that would freak a Thumper out, the kind who would pray for the soul of a kid who writes with her left hand. But it’s not like that. Using my left hand isn’t sinister. I’m right-handed. In order to get myself out of the way, to let go of the wheel, I have to stop blocking the light.

  I swirl the tea. And I look.

  * * *

  I want to see Winthrop, something, some sign that he’s all right. I want it so badly that I’m saying an un-fuck-you to this gift I supposedly have, giving it one more chance to be useful. To be kind.

  And what I see is a dark horse.

  * * *

  That can’t be good. Dark horse. Dark horses? It sounds like a bad omen. Wrong.

  * * *

  I make another cup. I go through all the steps. I try to clear my mind. I focus on Iris’s crystal salt and pepper shakers while I drink this one, to help me let go.

  And what I see is a bus stop.

  * * *

  He’s taking the bus home from Alaska? He’s waiting? Is he stuck? Is he on his way home? No. Now I’m just seeing what I want to see. Wrong.

  * * *

  A new cup. And what I see is a loaf of bread. A fucking baguette. And then all I can think of is Winthrop’s bad Frenchie impersonation and I miss him so much.

  * * *

  I don’t know what any of it means. I can’t. Because I’m too close, too full of want. I don’t have any practice at it anyway, separating myself, myselves. All afternoon I’ve been shaking myself up and down like I’m a Magic 8 Ball that’s refusing to give a good answer, and now my head hurts. But it worked after all.

  I saw something.

  I saw me, sitting here, doing the one thing I said I would never do again because what I feel for Winthrop is an awful lot like love. Whether or not loving him is in my future, this is still a truth revealed.

  FUTURE TENSE

  Aunt Bev likes to leave the front door open at night if there aren’t any customers in the shoppe and she is still awake. This is always in hopes of some stars appearing through the smog. Then she’ll read them, like tea leaves or coffee grounds. All that’s left when the day’s done, she says, we can either wash this away or look inside of it. Like we can with ourselves.

  It isn’t only about looking, it’s also about listening. So I try to listen. I hear Jake brakes on the freeway that never stops rushing on the other side of the chain link. The
Rosary air is almost sweet as I settle in to go through the receipts for the first time since the fire. There is a plastic sheet up over the front wall, where the new window is going in, stained glass of Saint Mary Magdalene. Instead of a jar of ointment or whatever she’s been lugging around through all of her portraits since year A.D. 1, this Magdalene holds a cup of tea, the steam curling up toward the soft, knowing smile on her face. At her feet, there are flowers made from what appears to be paper, paper that appears to have been ripped right from some sacred scripture, what with its tiny, busy print. If the giant palm from the last window pissed off the Thumpers, this display is really going to get their sacrificial goat.

  * * *

  The stack of receipts I’m recording are mostly the same, the standard $20 palm reading, one after another. The names are those of people largely unfamiliar to me. Except one. And the night air goes still. The traffic dies.

  Epsworthy. And this Epsworthy paid for more than a standard reading.