The Porcupine of Truth

by Bill Konigsberg

  “We’re out of Greek yogurt,” she says to me when she hears my footsteps. When I don’t answer right away, she turns around.

  “Oh,” she says, seeing Aisha and fiddling with her robe to make sure it’s closed, which it is. “You’ve brought a friend. How lovely.”

  “Sorry, I should have called,” I say. “This is my new friend Aisha.”

  They both say hi, and then we stand there, awkwardly.

  “Would you like something to eat?” my mother asks.

  “Do you have any Greek yogurt?” Aisha asks, and it’s spot on, because my mother, who isn’t always about the quirky humor, smiles.

  “As a matter of fact, we don’t,” she says. She then pulls out a Tupperware container. “Strawberries?”

  Aisha says she’d love some, and I realize she probably hasn’t been eating well. I pour some out on a plate, and I ask my mother if she and I can talk in the other room for a second. As Aisha sits at our kitchen table and gobbles berries, I follow my mom into the living room. My brain spins through all of the arguments I’ve come up with.

  “What do you need, honey?” my mother asks. There’s an edge to her voice, and I hear it as, I can’t take one more thing, Carson. Not one more thing. She’s been here with Dad all day, which has probably not been great. The bags under her eyes look dark and heavy, like fruit scales at the supermarket.

  “Aisha’s a lesbian and she got kicked out by her dad,” I say.

  “Oh,” my mother says, and I realize the counselor in her will totally get this.

  “It’s really bad. She’s been sleeping outside, and she’s an amazing person. You have to talk to her. She’s just so cool.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  It’s obviously a rhetorical question, since I have to have met her either Monday, yesterday, or today.

  “We met at the zoo.”

  “I see,” my mother says.

  I stare at the ground and tap my foot a few times. “I’m just trying to figure out the right thing to do,” I say. “I mean, obviously, what would be best for her isn’t possible, probably, because, even though she’s a lesbian, she’s still a girl and all. So obviously she can’t stay here, right?” I lower my head and peer at her face.

  My mother sighs. I don’t know what it feels like to have her tell me no, because I don’t ask for a lot, usually. I just sort of take what I need, and I’m pretty self-sufficient. But I think I’m about to find out what no sounds like. When she doesn’t say anything, I add, “She’s looking for work, so it’s not like she’ll be here except for at night.”

  My mother sighs again. “If it’s okay with your dad, it’s fine,” she says. “Do what you feel is right, honey.”

  I admit I’m a little shocked. Because even though it’s what I want, it just seems like, Wow. That was really, really easy.

  I knock on my dad’s door. He opens it up, and it’s the first time I’ve seen him since our first meeting. His eyes are glassy, and I don’t know if he’s drunk or not.

  I tell him the situation, and amazingly, he asks more questions than my mom did.

  “You sure you’re not just saying she’s a lesbian so you can get some?” he asks, smirking.

  I shake my head. I have no idea if he’s kidding or not. “No. She’s an actual lesbian.”

  “Are you gay?” he asks.

  “No, Dad. I’m not gay. Thanks for asking, though.”

  He laughs. “So there is a part of you that digs this girl, right?”

  I shrug and keep my calm. “It’s not gonna happen. She’s cool, though.”

  He continues to smirk at me. “Attaboy. And just so you know, I would’ve been fine with you being gay too. I’m not like that and all.”

  “Duly noted,” I say, and he laughs again.

  “A lesbian in the basement. I like it,” he says. “I dig it.”

  “Nineteen seventy-something wants its word back,” I reply, and my dad’s smile gets a little wider before he retreats back into his cave and shuts the door.

  “He’s fine with it,” I say to my mom as I pass her, and she nods her head. I can’t quite tell, but it looks like her jaw is really tight.

  I walk back into the kitchen. “Welcome home, I guess,” I say, and Aisha gives me an animated look of shock.

  Once settled in the basement with me, Aisha heads off to the shower, saying it’s her first home shower in a few days, since she had been limited to showers at the Billings Athletic Club. I can hear the spray of the water from my room, and my heart starts beating fast. All I can do is think about what excuses I could come up with to go into the bathroom and somehow sneak a peek inside the shower curtain.

  “Oh hey, I was just making sure there was enough soap…. Do you need me to hand you — oops! Sorry.”

  “Oh hey, do you like music while you shower? I’m just going to put my iPhone dock in here — oops! Sorry.”

  But I do none of these things. Instead, I count to 84 by sevens, and then 232 by eights. She comes out of the bathroom in one of my shirts and a pair of clean-ish shorts and puts her dirty clothes in the washer. I take her out for dinner at Wendy’s because frankly I’d rather shave my head than subject Aisha to dinner with my parents. After, we hang out in my room for hours and watch clips from YouTube on my laptop. I let her sit on the slowly sinking air mattress I had the pleasure of sleeping on the first two nights here, since she’s going to sleep there, and I sit on the carpet, aka my new bed, and lean up against the mattress.

  After a while, she asks, “So aside from watching fascinating YouTube videos, what do you like to do?”

  My perverted mind comes up with a few ideas of what I wish she means by that, and then I swallow those thoughts down. I think about it and come up blank. What do I like to do? Nothing. I like to do nothing. What’s wrong with me, and is it fixable?

  “I don’t know,” I say. I click on a news video about this trend where kids sucker-punch strangers on the street. It’s a game called Knockout. We watch it, and I say, “Oh my God, people are stupid.” Aisha nods.

  I click on another clip, a news story about two drunk guys stealing a penguin in Australia. Aisha laughs as they show the losers being dragged away in handcuffs. She says, “I wonder how they did it. Is it like, if you want to steal a penguin, you have to think like a penguin? Or maybe they dressed up like penguins and were all, ‘Come with us, buddy.’ And the little guy just went along?”

  “So they dressed as fancy waiters?”

  She laughs again, and I sigh a bit as I see how her tongue flicks up against the back of her front teeth. I think, I made that happen. I did that. Making Aisha laugh is like the big win I’ve never had. It’s what I like to do. It makes my insides flutter and my shoulders relax and I am home.

  And then I think, Excellent, you are falling deeper in love with a lesbian.

  “That’s not even the hard part,” I say. “The really hard part is stealing a penguin’s identity.”

  Aisha leans back on her elbows. “What would you do with a penguin’s identity?”

  I allow my eyes a little glimpse of her flat stomach and then I look away. “Maybe you’d give felons a second chance? I mean, it’s hard to start again, find a job and such when you’ve robbed a bank.”

  “True.”

  “So you go up to this felon, and you hand them a document, and you say, ‘You are now officially known as Mitchell T. Penguin. You have not committed any felonies, and all you’ve done thus far is mate for life with Lucille J. Penguin.”

  “I think penguins are gay. I think I heard that somewhere,” she says.

  “You know, not everyone is gay,” I say, and she gives me the finger. “Well, probably not all penguins are gay. I mean, that would be not the smartest strategy from a Darwinian standpoint.”

  “You don’t know,” she says. “They could have surrogates.”

  “Oh yes, penguin surrogates,” I say. “I’ve often heard of them.”

  “You’re really weird,” she says. “
I like you.”

  “I like you too,” I answer, and I close the laptop. As the light in the room evaporates, I hear her exhale, and it sounds like the kind of breath you let out for the first time in a long time.

  “Thanks, Carson. Really. Thank you. You are a good person.”

  “No biggie,” I say, grinning widely because I know she cannot see me. “I simply saved your life.”

  She snorts. I wrap myself in the blanket and settle in for a night on the carpet. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel alone.

  I WAKE UP in the morning when I hear breathing in my ear. I open my eyes to find two eyes staring into mine from literally six inches away.

  I start to scream, and a hand covers my mouth. Aisha’s hand.

  “What the …?” I say into her palm.

  “I always wanted to do that to someone,” she says, a silly look on her face. “Looked like you were about to wake up, so I just … hurried that process up a bit.”

  I look around the still-dark room. “What time is it?”

  “It’s six thirty,” she says.

  “So yeah,” I mumble, turning over onto my stomach, a pale orange blanket the only thing between me and the carpet. “I probably wasn’t about to wake up.”

  She pounces on me and wrestles me onto my back, and my ribs press hard into the floor, knocking the wind out of me. I can tell she’s kidding around, but I tense my whole body and fight against her.

  It’s futile. She pins me on my back by holding my shoulders down with her hands, and she sits on my thighs. She looks down on me with this grin on her face, and I have to avoid her eyes. I’m in a pair of shorts, no shirt, with only a blanket over me, and she’s wearing just a T-shirt and panties. Girls don’t get it. They don’t get what they can do to us. It’s terrible and embarrassing.

  “What?” she says.

  “Leave me alone,” I mumble.

  “Oh, come on,” she says, and when I don’t look at her, she gets off me. “Sorry. I was just foolin’.”

  I sit up and curl my arms around my legs. I can feel the brooding coming on, but I don’t want to be that guy, so I shake it off. I yawn and stretch my arms out. “I’m not a morning guy. I am not a guy of the morning.”

  “We need to talk,” Aisha says. She is sitting up on her bed, which is to say she is sitting on a fully deflated air mattress.

  “Talk, woman,” I say.

  “At what age did you become a hoarder? Have you considered going on the TV show?”

  I raise an eyebrow, or at least I attempt to do Aisha’s one-eyebrow raise. I fail. “Huh?”

  She points across the room at the boxes piled atop each other against the far wall. I saw those the first time I came downstairs, but the truth is I haven’t thought of them since. I look back over at Aisha, whose tank top is loose in all the right places. It’s early and my brain is barely functioning, and I have to remind myself not to gawk.

  “Bring it up to the actual hoarder,” I say. “My dad.”

  She stands and stretches her legs. “We’re living down here, not him. Can we clean this crap up? I mean, the smell.” She pinches her nose.

  I sniff and I don’t really smell anything anymore. I must have gotten used to it. Is that a bad sign? Does that mean I smell too, and I don’t even notice anymore? I resist the urge to check my underarms.

  “Ugh,” I say. “Cleaning? Really? Worst summer ever.”

  She gives me that inimitable Aisha smile that engulfs her whole face and says, “Well, you’ve obviously never cleaned with Aisha before….” She does a spin and a little jump, and I watch her, wondering where the hell this is going. She stops with her arms out wide, facing me. “Sorry, I got nothing,” she says. “Can you take care of the boxes? I’d rather scrub floors than deal with boxes that have been gathering spiderwebs for decades. That freaks me out.”

  After we do our morning stuff, we get to work. The boxes are, in fact, covered in cobwebs. Some have been numbered with orange Magic Marker — a “1,” a “3,” and a “4.” Some are damp on the bottom, like maybe there was a flood, and I imagine a box with an orange “2” on it floating down a river. When I lift “3” off the pile, it feels soggy on the bottom and begins to collapse into itself. I wrestle that one safely down to the ground and open it.

  The box is filled with old photo albums. It’s pretty clear to me that this is my grandmother’s stuff, and that my father must have decided, upon moving in seven years ago, that everything should be put away and tended to at a future date that never quite arrived.

  The top one is a wedding album. I flip through and the photos are all black and white — more like black and yellow, really — and the setting is some sort of banquet hall, in some town where smiling was illegal or at least really frowned upon. Of the posed shots, not a single one is even a little bit joyful. A few show strangers on the dance floor having maybe a moderate amount of fun. In one shot, my grandfather appears to be smiling as he dances with my grandmother, but she’s glowering up at him. When I get married, I probably won’t keep any of the glowering shots.

  My grandfather looks even more like me than my dad does, which is weird because he’s, like, a missing person. His face is long and thin like mine. My dad, with his rounder face, looks a lot more like my grandmother.

  “I wonder how long these have been here,” I say, closing the box and then placing another on top of it. Aisha doesn’t respond. She’s busy scrubbing a dirt stain off the carpet near the stairs.

  I open another soggy box — the one marked with the “4.” Unlabeled folders are stacked on one side, and on the other, random trinkets have been tossed in together. I pick out a wooden cross with peeling green paint, a lone turquoise earring that appears to be rusted, and a jewelry box. Inside the jewelry box are four baby teeth. Someone has written, on a small piece of paper thrown into the box, “Matthew’s first teeth, 1971.”

  “If you were wondering where my father’s baby teeth are, I found ’em,” I say.

  Aisha laughs. “Mystery solved.”

  “You think there’s a good baby teeth market on eBay?”

  “Probably Craigslist,” she says.

  I grab one of the files, sit down, and open it up. The front page is stuck to the file, and as I pull it back, I can see that blue and black ink has tattooed the inside of the folder itself, creating blurred backward words, unreadable. The top page of paper is illegible, and a few more pages are stuck to it. Some of the inside pages are readable, though, and I flip to a form called “Petition for Dissolution of Marriage with Children.”

  “More workin’, less sittin’,” Aisha calls over.

  I ignore her and turn through to the final page, and there, under the title “Petitioner,” is my grandmother’s name, Phyllis Helen Smith, and her gritty, harsh signature.

  Across from it, under the title “Respondent,” is my grandfather’s name, Russell Alan Smith. In his more animated autograph, the letters seem to be battling for attention.

  There is also a witness’s signature: John Francis Logan. Everyone’s favorite pastor slash neighbor. The date is listed as May 23, 1983.

  I’d never heard anything about my grandparents getting a divorce. I mean, according to my mom, my grandfather just up and left one day, never to be heard from again. I guess not. I wonder if my dad knew that they were having trouble, and that they had gotten divorced?

  I riffle through the trinkets. Other than the baby teeth, most of the stuff is religious — crosses, a little round thumbnail picture of blond Jesus on a silver necklace, a cracked picture frame with an embroidered angel inside bearing the phrase, “With God all things are possible.”

  I roll my eyes. Yes. All things. Like happy marriages and well-raised children. All possible.

  I GET BACK to cleaning, and soon I have the boxes stacked neatly against the wall and Aisha has the room smelling a little less musty.

  We go up for a snack, and my father is sitting in the kitchen in a pair of tattered blue shorts and a rat
ty white T-shirt, eating frozen waffles with Aunt Jemima syrup. His legs are pasty white and skinny, and I’m a little embarrassed to have Aisha see him like this. Dad smiles when he sees her. “So you’re the lesbian in the basement,” he says.

  I blurt out, “Dad!”

  But Aisha laughs. She walks over and sticks out her hand. “Thanks for letting me stay here,” she says. “Really.”

  “No sweat,” he says, smirking as he shakes her hand, and I realize my dad is a bit of a charmer.

  “And yes, that’s how I like to be known. As the lesbian in the basement.”

  Dad laughs and takes a chomp of his waffle. “Good, ’cause I’m bad with names.”

  She says, “And what should I call you?”

  My dad thinks for a bit, and then he coughs a couple of times into his hands and wipes them on his T-shirt, leaving an amber smudge. “The drunk upstairs,” he says.

  She nods like this is normal fatherly behavior. “Nice to meetya, the drunk upstairs.”

  “Nice to meetya, basement lesbian.”

  I want to play with them, so I find myself trying to come up with the funniest thing I can, but nothing comes to me. “So Grandma had quite the collection of religious things down there,” I say. Dad looks at me blankly, and I add, “We did a little box organizing.”

  He nods. “Oh yeah, all sorts of shit.” He turns to Aisha and says, “That religion crap gives me serious butt cramps.”

  Aisha laughs. “Butt cramps. Thanks for that … image, Mr. Smith.”

  He shrugs. “What can I say? I’m a poet.”

  “I’m not a fan of religion either,” Aisha says. “I mean, I only became the lesbian in your basement after my Bible-thumping dad threw me out.”

  My dad shakes his head. “That’s rough,” he says. “A guy shouldn’t do that to his kid.”

  I feel my jaw tighten. Have another drink, Dad. Maybe you should choose that over your son?

  Aisha sits down next to him. “He was all about the Jesus,” she says. “I guess the Jesus told him to do it.”