by Mary Robison
“It’s everyone’s fault. Everybody involved botched up. I can tell you how, from step one, everyone botched up.”
Cleveland said, “Is that what you’ve been doing? Tallying errors? Adding up the various stupidities of my stupid family?”
Cleveland went a few steps off toward the dining room.
“I don’t care if they can hear me,” Virginia called after him. “Just don’t tell me to lower my voice.”
“Who said anything about lowering your voice?”
“I just want some tea,” she said.
He came back. “Help yourself to tea. Help yourself to yelling and tea drinking.”
“I warned you not to tell me to lower my voice.”
“Who said anything about it? Me? I didn’t. I said help yourself. Bust a lung. Scream out,” he said.
“I wasn’t screaming.”
“But do. Do. And drink a million gallons of tea. A jillion gallons.”
“I wasn’t screaming,” she said.
“Who said you were?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Who said you were?”
“I don’t care if they hear me.”
“Do you think I care?” Cleveland said. “I don’t care. I think you’re right. We are a stupid family.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Cleveland said, “Just because Howdy and Maureen did so well on placement tests and IQ tests in high school that their teachers wanted to skip them up to college, just because of that, I don’t think we’re smart.”
“Those tests mean nothing,” Virginia said.
“Who said they did? I didn’t. Just because I built myself from a redneck Okie into a billionaire businessman, that doesn’t take any intelligence, either. You think I don’t know that?”
“Making money doesn’t prove—”
“While you run around in public dressed up like a ginger-bread girl because that’s intelligent. Playing with Grook the Clock on the goddamn television box, which no one watches on Sunday morning except the mentally bankrupt.”
“You drunken sinner. Don’t raise your hand to me.”
“I was just going for the bottle of rye, sweetheart.”
“You’re not drinking another swallow in my presence,” Virginia said.
“I wasn’t reaching it down to drink it but to bang you on the snout with it.”
“Hey,” Maureen said.
“What is it?” Cleveland said.
Maureen skidded between him and Virginia to the refrigerator.
“Ham sandwich,” she said.
“Get out,” Cleveland said.
Maureen did an abrupt about-face.
“That’s all, brother,” Virginia said.
“Good,” Cleveland said.
“You are repugnant, disgusting, perfectly ridiculous.”
“Good.”
“I will pray for you.”
“Good.”
“I will pray for you and your children.”
“Great. Bye now.”
“There’s no power that can restore you.”
“Bye-bye. So long. Good.”
“You are not a man. You don’t talk like a man.”
“Good, good, good,” Cleveland said. He put his fingers into his ears and squeezed his eyes shut.
Four
1
Bathed, sober, and sipping carrot juice, Cleveland spent his morning in the study. He spoke on the phone with his insurance agent, caught up with his business mail, and, in longhand, drafted replies to be typed by his secretary downtown. He read and initialed memos and clipped the papers together. From a drawer, he pulled a computer printout headed “Revised Personnel List.” He was wrestling with the list when Lola brought him a lunch tray with red caviar, cheese, coffee.
“My stars, it’s the niggra,” he said.
“You seem chipper enough for a case of advanced senility,” she said, setting the tray on his desk.
“I’m rethinking your indenture. Sit down,” he said.
“You always want me to sit down. I guess so you can look up my dress.”
“No, you never wear a dress. I want to look down your blouse.”
“Nothing to see in that direction.”
“You’re in a good mood, too,” he said.
“I had a date.”
“Your friend from the university?”
“That’s the one,” Lola said.
Cleveland rattled the printout. He used a ruler and a marker pen to make a line on the page.
“This is you,” he said.
“Turtlidge, L.,” Lola read. “That’s me, all right.”
“You know that you are in the corporation, with profit sharing and insurance breaks and all?”
“I know they pay me sometimes,” she said.
“They always do—even when it’s one of my checks. And now they’ll pay you double the underlined figure on that sheet, and you’ll have twice the vacation plan, and I’m throwing in two more shares of Whistle-Low, and do you know what a share is selling for now?”
“Lord, Lord.”
“I’m not joking. I’m fixing it this afternoon.”
“My savior.”
“And before you fumble over some sorry kind of thank you, I’ll tell you it doesn’t mean piss to me, I’m so rich.”
“How nice,” Lola said. She stood and handed back the paper.
“Oh, you’ll spend it unwisely and get in hot water with the IRS and curse me in the end,” he said.
“That’s the truth,” Lola said.
She left him, and he called, “It’s not from my pockets, Turtlidge, L. It’s from the coffers of the company, which are bottomless! All it’ll mean is that the price of my cream sodas goes up another dime!”
2
Howdy was shirtless. He was putting a good two-coat wax job on his MG. Sweat ran off him as he moved the rag in swirls. Every so often, he straightened and stepped back to study the work. Once when he did this, he stumbled on Maureen, who lay on a towel on the blacktop with her face aimed at the overhead sun.
Howdy hitched up his chinos and set to work on the other side of the hood.
Maureen said, “Ow.”
“Just feeling it, huh?”
“You kicked me,” she said.
“Your body’s just someplace else, huh?” he said.
“They have greyhound racing six nights a week in Dublin,” Maureen said.
“We’ll go every night.”
“But there are hardly any trees in the whole country,” she said. “Only one-fortieth of the country has trees.”
“Who needs trees?” Howdy said. He flapped and turned the rag over, and then left it on the car to look around at the elms, the sycamore, the butternut and poplar trees.
A stray cat with something alive in its teeth galloped from the copse that surrounded the statue of the nymph.
“What do you think about Dad and Virginia splitting up?”
“He deserves a Nobel Prize.”
“Why didn’t we like her? Why did we hate Virginia?”
“You’re the older brother. You don’t know?”
“I am?” Howdy said. “Oh, older, yeah, I am. But, I mean, I guess I keep forgetting why I didn’t like her.” He walked around the car once and started back to buffing. “You know, I’ve never enjoyed talking to you.”
Maureen said, “We didn’t like her because she didn’t like us.”
“Violet!” Howdy said. “Do not chase that cat!”
“What’s she doing?”
“Chasing a cat.”
“Don’t chase it, dear!” Maureen yelled, without moving.
“Why not?” Violet trotted up, short of breath.
“It was eating,” Howdy said.
“So?”
“So, it was eating a birdie. Eating its guts and eyeballs, which you don’t want to watch it do,” Howdy said.
“Who says I don’t?”
“Did it really have a bird?” Maureen said.
Howdy pu
ffed and made his scrubbing motion. “Had something,” he said.
“You’re making a shadow, baby,” Maureen said. “Honey? Move away.”
Violet had more or less recovered from the wasp stings. She hadn’t wanted to play outside, though, until the Whier children—the children closest in the neighborhood—had come to collect her. She had been fearlessly running in the front yard ever since.
“Tommy Whier is still sneaking peeks at you, Mo,” Howdy said. “He’s over in the lilacs, slobbering.”
“The swine,” Maureen said. She checked the halter of her bikini.
“I hate him,” Violet said.
“That’s wise,” Maureen said.
“I hate him too,” Howdy said.
“I wouldn’t mind betting the dogs in Dublin,” Maureen said.
Violet lay down beside her mother.
“Go noodle around with the Whiers,” Maureen said.
“I hate them all,” Violet said.
Howdy finished burnishing the second coat of wax. He spritzed the headlights with soapy water from a plastic bottle and wiped them with a clean rag. Maureen turned onto her stomach. Violet tore the packaging from four small blocks of bubble gum and ate all four.
“Zzzzz,” went Howdy, imitating a dentist’s drill. Violet’s cheeks were blown up by all the gum. Her lips were pressed out, and when she smiled, saliva ran.
“Give me one,” Maureen said.
Violet stuffed a piece of gum into her mother’s hand and flipped one up to Howdy, who snatched it on the fly and said, “Good arm.”
“Before you, we had a dog that was named Walter,” Maureen said. She munched her gum to get it under control.
“Old Walter, that’s right,” Howdy said.
“And he could chew gum and blow bubbles.”
“You had to put a rubber band around his nose to make him do it,” Howdy said. He was chewing furiously, racing Maureen to soften the gum and inflate the first bubble.
“You remember wrong,” Maureen said. “The rubber band was for something different.”
Violet spat her gum into her palm. “Where is he?”
“Walter?” Howdy said. “Long dead.”
“Long, long,” Maureen said.
“I’ll show you his grave,” Howdy said.
Violet said, “Okay.”
Five olive-drab helicopters, flying low and in a pattern, zoomed over the carriage house.
“Maneuvers,” Howdy said. He had gotten into his car, one leg still out, and was dusting the dash. Maureen heard his gum snap.
“Beat you,” he said.
Violet rested her bright pink wad carefully on the blacktop and said, “Watch this for me, will you, please?”
“She’s just a list of demands,” Maureen said as Violet sprinted away.
“Two more years and she’ll want you to watch her divorce papers.”
Maureen made a bubble, cracked it, and said, “Yep.”
“Did you ever have a song in your head that wouldn’t go away?” Howdy said.
“All the time,” Maureen said.
“For like a month? You find yourself walking to the beat and chewing to the beat and doing everything just the way the rhythm goes.”
“I wish this driveway were my bed,” Maureen said.
“It’s never a song you like.”
“True,” Maureen said.
“It’s always a Connie Francis song.”
“Or the theme of a TV show,” Maureen said.
“Exactly,” Howdy said. “It’s a song you don’t even know.”
“Right,” Maureen said.
Howdy hummed the theme from “Father Knows Best.”
“I wish I were in my bed,” Maureen said.
They chewed their gum in silence awhile, and then Maureen began to hum the theme from “My Three Sons.”
“That’s it,” Howdy said. He got out of the car. “Man, look at the job I did. I really did a job.”
“Wonderful,” Maureen said.
“You didn’t even look.”
“Mind’s eye,” Maureen said.
“I sure did make it clean,” Howdy said with pride.
3
Cleveland was still at his desk, poking holes in the blotter with a pen, when Lola stepped in and announced dinner. He pulled himself up from the leather chair and executed a few stretching exercises. His bones clicked.
He found Howdy in the breakfast room. Howdy was filling soup plates with reddish liquid from the canister of a ten-speed blender. He said, “Gazpacho.”
“Let’s consult the wine cellar,” Cleveland said to Lola. She was in a nice cook’s apron. Opposite the range, on a shelf, was a flimsy, nine-slotted wine rack that Howdy had built from pine and metal rods.
Violet, whose plate was loaded with cheese-stuffed celery stalks and corn chips, was already busily eating at the dining room table. Maureen joined her.
“Let me, Grandpa,” Violet said, hopping out of her chair and rushing to the kitchen.
Cleveland had a butterfly corkscrew he was driving into the top of a bottle of California Medoc. He got the bit completely buried in the cork before he allowed Violet to push down the gadget’s handles. The extraction made a nice small sound.
“Gazpacho,” Howdy said, serving Maureen and Lola. He had a bouquet of parsley, and he wouldn’t let anyone eat until he’d clipped chunks of it onto the soup with a pair of kitchen shears.
“You made the soup, right?” Maureen said.
“From a recipe by Vincent Price,” Howdy said.
“I wish Vincent Price could have come over and wiped up the kitchen for you. There was stuff on the ceiling,” Lola said.
“I couldn’t find the top of the blender,” Howdy said.
“There are carrots and garlic stuck on the ceiling,” Lola said.
“It’ll taste good, though,” Howdy said, sniffing with his nose over his bowl.
“I don’t like it,” Violet said.
“I don’t either,” Cleveland said. “It tastes like Youngstown.”
“It’s an acquired taste,” Maureen said.
“What does that really mean?” Cleveland said. “It seems to me you could acquire a taste for anything, but who’d want to?”
“Well, that’s your problem right there,” Howdy said.
Cleveland tipped some wine into his glass. “I got a problem?” he said.
“No class,” Howdy said.
“There’s ice in my soup,” Maureen said.
“There’s supposed to be,” Howdy said. “You’ve got no class either. Nobody wants to try anything a little different around here.”
“Give it a rest,” Lola said.
“Barbarians,” Howdy said.
“There’s the paper,” Maureen said in response to a bump at the front door. “Violet?”
“Okay, Mom,” Violet said wearily.
She brought Cleveland the paper and a pair of black-framed glasses, which he hitched over his ears.
“You going to read at the table?” Howdy said.
“What’s wrong with that?” Violet asked.
“Shut up,” Howdy said. “You don’t know what we’re talking about, Vi.”
“We weren’t talking about anything,” Cleveland said. He reached around his newspaper, picked up his wine glass, returned it after a moment, empty.
“She was just asking,” Maureen said.
“Don’t be so testy about your gaucho soup,” Lola said. “So long as you like it, that’s all that counts.”
“This is just like my goddamn play,” Howdy said in exasperation. “You all don’t understand something, so you make wisecracks about it. I feel so alone sometimes. And it’s not gaucho soup, Lola.”
“Just you and a bunch of slobs,” Cleveland said.
“That’s right,” Howdy said.
“We just aren’t up to your standards,” Cleveland said, and rustled his newspaper.
“Go ahead and make fun,” Howdy said. “Be brutes.”
“Were y
ou supposed to use so many cucumbers in this soup, Howdy? With the peel still on? I’m just asking,” Maureen said.
“Yes,” Howdy said. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“I was just asking,” Maureen said.
“This tastes like trash in the disposal,” Violet said.
“Try a little more before you decide,” Maureen said. “Maybe you’ll think of something worse.”
“If it kills her, I take no responsibility,” Cleveland said from behind his newspaper.
Lola snorted.
“It’ll give you class, Violet,” Maureen said. “If you live through it.”
Howdy said, “It’s a serious problem for me. I feel I can’t talk to any of you. I try to make you all something nice and something new. Sometimes, I don’t think you’re smart enough to appreciate me.”
Cleveland shot the newspaper into a corner, causing Violet to jump. “Now look, boy,” he said, “you made a bad dish, pure and simple. Maybe you left something out or maybe Vincent Price was playing a little joke on you, but this is no good.” Cleveland turned his bowl of gazpacho upside down. It ran a little way toward the side of the table and stopped. “I don’t want to hear any more talk about the lack of intelligence in me or my family ever again.”
“People sure throw a lot of food around for me to blot up in this intelligent household,” Lola said.
Cleveland turned over Maureen’s soup bowl and then Violet’s. “Now let’s continue eating,” he said.
Cleveland turned away from the table, and then he turned back to them. “What are you?” he said. “Because you aren’t my kids, and you aren’t adults, and you aren’t anything that anyone could respect or love. What are you doing in my house when every day you break my heart? Looking at you, day after day, I feel pity and even horror. Yes, I do. And, above all else, disappointment. You let me down in dozens of ways—hundreds of ways, and you’ve been doing it every day of your lives. Did either of you ever think of that? You’d better—both of you—find a true course and stick to it, and stop destroying your own father.”
Maureen was trembling. Her fingers went up and covered her mouth.
Howdy stood abruptly, knocking over his chair. “Okay, Daddy,” he said.
Cleveland stared at him. “Okay what?” Cleveland said.
“Mother,” Maureen said.
“That’s right,” Howdy said. “We’re going to our mother. We forgive her and we’ll never forgive you.”
