Fat Bald Jeff

by Leslie Stella

  The Lemming called in the midst of a Saltines and gingerale binge.

  “What are you doing home in the middle of the day?” he accused.

  “Why are you calling here in the middle of the day?” I shot back, choking on the crackers. The Lemming and I parry barbs like an old married couple. Can’t he see we belong together, bound by law and expensive gold rings?

  “What’s wrong with your voice? You sound like you’re retching,” he said.

  “I’m convalescing,” I said. Why elaborate on the cause? Even though the Lemming appreciates good liquor, he might be loath to take on a fiancée who falls down drunk at parties.

  He said, “Well, I just wanted to leave a message to ask if you were available tonight, but I guess not.” I would be available to accept four carats, but not available to help him do his laundry, which is what he had planned for us this evening. Nerve!

  By lunchtime I had started to feel like my old self again. So much better, in fact, that I began to feel like I was playing hooky from the Place—which is scads more enjoyable than merely missing work due to illness. This elevated my mood considerably, so I switched off religious television and got dressed. Since no one was about, I put on a pair of pumpkin-farmer pants and a green cotton sweater. Caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Looked gaseous, but nothing like Austin Powers.

  Went out in the yard. The boys had dug a large bed in the back, with curved edges that ran down along one side of our fence. Massive bags of peat moss, cow manure, and humus sat by the garage in readiness. The peat moss disbursed a ripe, earthy pungency that smelled wonderful outside. It also emitted a reeking fetor when thoroughly embedded in pristine wheat overalls. Felt a mean sort of satisfaction the other night at the sight of 2F’s gardening clothes hanging up in the laundry room, filthy and stinky even after several washings.

  A separate square bed had been dug in the corner, probably for vegetables. Val said he wanted to plant an olive tree for our martinis, but I said our climate was all wrong. I had then waited for him to ask what I would like to plant, but he just said he’d consider planting cocktail onions instead. Grandmother would be very impressed with the boys’ effort. As for myself, I was simply a cynical observer. Until they invited me to participate, I could only look on with amused detachment.

  Teared up a bit when I thought of Gran’s lovely cottage garden. She cannot be as infirm as she says! She still wears spectator pumps to church. We still do the Sunday crossword puzzle together over the phone each week. She still arranges her hair into a neat chignon and puts full makeup on every day, even when she just sits around the house playing solitaire. Old people do none of these things. They stare at peeling walls and think their maids are stealing from them.

  If Gran is indeed becoming frail and incontinent, then it is no one’s fault but my parents’. Decades of witnessing their free-living experiments and hideola clothing have undoubtedly broken down Gran’s resistance to disease. Her decline really started the day we left on our cross-country bus trip. Father drove the VW minibus over to my grandparents’ house so we could say good-bye. Grandmother stood in the driveway, flapping a funeral fan and clutching at Grandfather. Father exited the bus, shirtless in front of his own mother! Admittedly, he did wear a giant brass KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ belt buckle that covered half his stomach, so at least they were spared the vision of his crusty navel and gruesome “happy trail.” Grandfather staggered backward a step or two as Mother jumped out of the bus to hug him good-bye. She wore a see-through macramé vest, blue Janis Joplin sunglasses, and low-rise, flared jeans that looked lousy on her childbearing hips. My parents had ordered me to stay in the bus, but I made my escape as they tried to wheedle gas money out of Grandfather. Ran to Grandmother and flung myself at her bosom. She stumbled a bit, but hung on.

  “Oh, Gran!” I cried. “Don’t let them take me!” She hugged me tight as Grandfather squeezed my shoulder and made soothing sounds. Gran launched an almighty pair of poison darts from her eyes at Mother.

  “Should we leave Addie here?” Mother asked Father. She would! The wistfulness in her voice was impossible to ignore.

  But Father pulled me away. I struggled out of his grasp and threw myself into the azaleas. Neighbors had come out to watch the show. I gave a decent hysterical performance, which ended in anticlimax as Father drawled, “Is that the best you can do?” Could have done better, I suppose, but didn’t want to scuff my shiny Mary Janes.

  Grandfather sighed and pulled out his wallet. He counted out some bills for Father as Grandmother gently rolled me out of the bush.

  “Darling, it’s a delicate variety,” she said. I wept into the mulch.

  The neighbors shook their heads and went back home. “It’s the mother I feel sorry for,” muttered one of them. Meaning Gran, obviously.

  Exhausted and spent, I trudged into the bus like a prisoner to the gallows. Gran handed me a box of six dozen chocolate bourbon-ball cookies in front of Mother and said it was likely that these would be the last home-cooked things I would eat for some time. Then when I seated myself in the back, she slipped me a pocket-size white book through the bus window.

  “It’s the Good Book,” she whispered. “Read it in secret and don’t let the heathens take it from you.” I thumbed through it. She had highlighted all the passages about wanton women and motherless children. Gran and I waved our twin hankies at each other as Father drove down the street. She looked like a little old person.

  For days we drove. The parents sang boring labor anthems while I surreptitiously scanned biblical passages. They were looking for a certain commune where people grew their own food and shared all their belongings, but they weren’t sure if it was in Iowa or Oregon.

  “I’m not sharing my underpants,” I told Mother.

  “Nobody wants those convent bedsheets,” she snapped.

  I cried. Mother never understood my need for modest undergarments. But some primal mothering instinct deep within her must have been activated by the sound of my sobs. Against her will, she stiffly petted my head and asked Father sotto voce what those little squeegee things were.

  “Tears, I think,” he said.

  She handed me a greasy rag from the bus floor and said, “Blow.”

  It was just pure luck that I haven’t turned out maladjusted.

  * * *

  Staring at the square that would soon be home to vegetable rows gave me a queasy feeling. I’ve nothing against vegetables. If it weren’t for them, my digestion would be as sluggish as the Chicago sewers. And I liked helping Grandmother pick out veggies for her garden. But the experience of growing them has been ruined for me by Mother’s pioneer efforts in hydroponic bus gardening. I shared the backseat with trays of pale cabbages and carrots, which jealously sucked all the nutrients out of my air. Even though I now understand the symbiotic relationship we have with plants, I am convinced that those particular weeds robbed me of vital pubescent nourishment. Nevertheless, I resumed speaking to the parents several days into the journey, to ask if I could grow some flowers.

  “We don’t have room to grow anything that we don’t eat,” said Father. My eyes strayed to the cannabis plant on the wheel well.

  “You can eat that,” he said, eyes flashing in a dangerous challenge. “Go ahead. Eat some.” Peer pressure from my own father! I shook my head and replied that one of us had better stay lucid as we wove in and out of the highway lanes past state troopers. He turned back to his driving but anxiously checked the rearview mirror three hundred times over the next hour.

  We drove through most of Iowa, ostensibly looking for the commune. I think they just liked traveling around because, as Father said, “everywhere is beautiful, man.” Everywhere, that is, but Evanston, Illinois. What was wrong with Evanston? We had a civilized block club and timely garbage men.

  We had left on our trip at the end of August, and as the September days passed on, I asked my parents if we would be back in time for my first day of eighth grade at St. Cuthbert’s.

 
; “You’re not going back to St. Cuthbert’s,” they said. “We’re homeschooling you in the bus.”

  I fell upon my hard sleeping pallet and wailed. My whole world—gone! Gone was the prim, starched little uniform I so loved. Gone was the possibility that this year I would make a school friend. Gone were the lessons in Catholic Doctrine, English Composition, and U.S. History—to be replaced with Beginning Tai Chi, Communism as a Viable Alternative to the Pig System, Lying About 101, and—worst of all—Open-mike Poetry Readings.

  I went on a hunger strike that was supplemented by private scarfing of Grandmother’s bourbon balls, but nothing would make the parents turn back home. I woke up early one morning, three days into the strike, and found a blotchy red mess extending over my face, neck, and ears. I screamed as I glimpsed my reflection in the rearview mirror. Mother groggily sat up and rubbed her eyes.

  “Look what you’ve done to me, Mother!” I shrieked. “Eczema. Psoriasis. Lupus. Major epidermal inflammation. All from living in this disgusting bus with no food and all these cabbages stealing my oxygen!”

  She sighed and poked me in the face. “Zits.”

  I screamed again, for it was even worse than I had suspected.

  Mother told me to be quiet, as Father was still asleep. Worn out, I expect, from long days of singing songs and not working. She began unearthing piles of garbage around the bus in search of Father’s kit of homeopathic remedies.

  I cried, “I don’t want bovine udder salve or essence of bugloss smeared on my face. I want chemicals and I want them now.” She ignored me and withdrew an empty cardboard box that was hidden under my straw pallet.

  “You ate seventy-two cookies in three days? No wonder you look like you’ve had an acid bath.”

  I slumped down in the passenger seat and whimpered that I had been starving to death. She made disparaging remarks about the success of my hunger strike.

  I stared at my gross countenance in the rearview mirror as she went back to her pallet. She’d given me a tub of creamy goat unguent to slather on my pustules. I openly refused this treatment, then glopped some on when she finally fell asleep again.

  Bored and needing to go to the bathroom, I sneaked out of the bus. I thought we had passed by a public library recently but couldn’t remember which way to go. I was always disoriented, since we had to move our bus every night. The Iowans complained about our eyesore of a vehicle parked on their quaint streets. Father didn’t see anything wrong with parking the hunk of junk in front of people’s houses, then napping on their lawns.

  “It’s everybody’s planet,” he objected.

  After wandering around for an hour—where I could have been abducted by a depraved Iowan, no thanks to my parents—I found the library. Immediately reassured by the air-conditioning and asbestos tiles, I heaved a sigh of relief. This was more like it. I walked in the bathroom and was struck dumb by the horrible little girl staring at me from the full-length mirror. The oozing skin condition was vile enough. It was the rest that pushed me over the edge.

  My hair hung in two lank plaits, dripping like the grease trap at a Chinese restaurant. Half-moons of dirt adorned each quick-bitten fingertip. A ring of filth encircled my neck like an Elizabethan collar. My T-shirt—once snowy white with darling cap sleeves—was now sullied with chocolate bourbon thumbprints, and the iron-on decal was coming loose from the fabric. My shorts exposed a shockingly defiled pair of knees. Black scabs on the shins, threadbare tennis shoes. And I stank. My God, how I still remember that smell: like a can of bacon drippings forgotten under the sink.

  I, who had always prided myself on a conventional appearance, now looked for all the world like a common guttersnipe.

  Twenty minutes later, as I scrubbed myself raw with a hard little nub of yellow soap and brown paper towels, I began to emerge from my stench. I had to leave on the goat ointment in order to clear up my skin, but the rest of me was in better shape. The shirt was still dirty, but as Mother had given up laundry as a tool of masculine oppression, I would have to live with it.

  Exited the bathroom and headed toward the stacks. A good hour or so with kindred spirit Oliver Twist would restore me. How I longed for a nice tidy orphanage with good-tasting porridge! But I hardly had time to consider Fagan’s unseemly attachment to cockney boys when a bony finger jabbed me in the shoulder.

  It was the librarian, asking why I wasn’t in school. Confused, I tried in vain to recall St. Cuthbert’s start date, then remembered I wasn’t going back there at all. I hurriedly explained that my parents were homeschooling me in a bus, but with a sweeping glance, she took in my scullery duds and DOWN WITH THE PIG SYSTEM decal and promptly called the truancy office. Curse Mother and her stinking forays into politics! The only time she had ever wielded an iron was to solder that horrid patch to my shirt.

  The truant officer sequestered me in a small cataloging room in the back and barraged me with questions and insults, as though I had swiped a lipstick at Woolworth’s. He wanted a phone number where he could reach my parents, but I explained that our bus had no phone line nor even electricity for household cleaning appliances. He demanded to be taken to the bus, but I couldn’t remember where it was.

  The truant officer and I drove around for two hours and finally found the bus on a quiet suburban street four blocks away. We pulled up in front of it and watched Mother and Father roll about on someone’s lawn like two vulgar teenagers, apparently unconcerned with their missing child. The truant officer started barking things at my parents. My father jumped up and starting barking things back. He was wearing a paisley loincloth.

  We all had to go down to the truancy office so my parents could explain their unorthodox schooling methods. More barking. Father called them “school pigs.” Mother whispered that I smelled bad and told me to wipe off the goat salve.

  It was dusk by the time we got back to the bus. Parents were screaming at each other and at me. We ate a silent meal of cold lentils in the bus. I cried into my bowl, then retreated to my bunk, where I commenced a fresh round of weeping into my indestructible hemp pillow. I could hear Mother and Father talking quietly outside the bus, and I wailed louder. Sometime later they came to me, grasped my hands, and looked meaningfully into my eyes. I perceived a turning point. Had they reclaimed their senses and decided to drive back home? There was still time to iron my kneesocks and rehem my uniform.

  “Addie,” began Mother in a solemn voice, “Dad and I have been talking. We appreciate what you’ve given up to travel the country with us, and we want to show you how grateful we are. It’s a big deal to come of age on the road.”

  Uneasily, I sensed a group discussion of menstruation.

  But Father said with the air of one passing down Hammurabi’s Code of Indulgences, “Yes, hon. We want you to call us Harvey and Ruth.”

  Kicked and screamed until the morning light.

  Fat Bald Jeff phoned later on. He was breathless and difficult to understand. He said he was calling from the Italian joint next door to the Place.

  “Why didn’t you call from the Hole?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t risk being overheard!”

  Ha! Everyone knows the other techies could not bother rousing interest in anything besides motherboards, Hot Dog Day, and the annual party in the boiler room celebrating Leonard Nimoy’s birthday. But Jeff assured me that he had ample reason for discretion.

  “Well, out with it,” I said, impatient for the news. I had an instant onion soup in the microwave.

  “I can’t say,” he replied. “It’s a matter of security. But can I stop by after work to talk to you?”

  There’s nothing like fat, bald melodrama. But I looked forward to Val’s meeting Jeff. He knew all about Jeff’s hovel and degradation from my description over soft-boiled eggs this morning.

  About five o’clock I heard the pitiful cries of the puppy on the fire escape across the gangway. I peeked out Val’s bedroom window. It was sitting in its cage and shivering. A soft rain had started, adding to the path
etic tableau. Sat down on Val’s bed and thought. Decided I could either call some animal organization, send a strongly worded note to the owners, or ask Val to intimidate the owners with menacing threats. Letters of complaint are my forte, but I didn’t think they would have much effect in this situation. It’s not like the dog owners are the CTA, in danger of losing my business forever. And Val, frankly, is not very menacing-looking, with his burnout glasses and Beatle boots and particolored sportswear. He also has a velvet frock coat that he struts about in every autumn, much to the delight of the neighborhood. No, I would have to phone the officials.

  The officials, however, were less than forthcoming. They said they needed substantial evidence to investigate. I pointed out that the puppy cried all the time—one doesn’t cry all the time unless one is mistreated. I should know! I spent two and a half years crying inconsolably on the minibus. But the animal official merely said she would process my complaint and that I should call back in a week’s time.

  “In a week’s time, it may be too late,” I warned.

  “Ten days, then,” she said and hung up. Curse our dispassionate system!

  The buzzer sounded. Ah, Jeff. He would know what to do about the puppy. He had a lot of experience with both neglected mongrels and indifferent bureaucrats.

  But after I hit the buzzer and opened my door, I found Francis standing there, holding a bunch of drippy red carnations.

  “Don’t you ask who’s there when people ring your buzzer?” he asked. I said I was expecting someone else.