Archives

[img_assist|nid=4292|title=Show of Hands|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=191]As soon as the bus driver pulls the door shut, I drop into an empty seat, pressing my head against the glass, closing my eyes so I can’t see the girls waving their arms out the windows, muffling my ears so I can’t hear the boys chewing gum. Mrs. Harden and Shanna are standing in the aisle, delivering their speech about good behavior but I’m thinking about bad behavior, about Shanna’s body, which I can see even though my eyes are closed. It’s been six months since I’ve touched anybody’s body, since I broke up with Andrea. A boy named Douglas Patton sits down beside me but doesn’t say hello or slow his chatter with his friends in the row behind us or in any way disrupt my daydream. I love field trips.

Something Mrs. Harden tells the bus driver pierces my daydream, though. We aren’t going to the museum on the permission slip. We’re going to my father’s house.

“My father doesn’t even live in this town,” I say, opening my eyes. Mrs. Harden is staring at me, taking notes on her clipboard without looking down at her hands. It’s weird to make eye contact with her and still see her hand writing away as if it’s got its own brain, writing her list of good and bad things I’ve done, a compilation of faults for my end-of-the-year review. I look away. “It wouldn’t be a positive learning experience,” I say desperately.

“Mr. Mirer’s father is a teacher also,” Mrs. Harden says to the students. “A teacher of genetics.”

“No, he’s not,” I say. “He’s an accountant. He knows nothing about pedagogy.”

But Mrs. Harden is walking the aisles, passing out a two-page, stapled handout. Douglas, who’s reading his copy, asks me, “Who’s this Andrea?”

“Andrea?” I ask. “Give that to me. What does it say about her?” Andrea was my high school girlfriend, my college girlfriend, too. We planned to get married after our college graduation, to attend the same law school, to lead one preconceived life but I bailed without giving anybody a good reason, which led my father to accuse me of self-sabotage. I fell into this job, into being a teaching intern, by accident.

Mrs. Harden takes Douglas’ copy away before I can read it. She holds it in front of her while she instructs the class to find each mention of my first name – Eric – to cross it out and to write instead, “Mr. Mirer, Jr.” Even in adult-to-adult conversations in the teachers’ lounge, Mrs. Harden refers to us only by our last names. She’s the grade coordinator; look at her nametag: “Mrs. Harden, Grade Coordinator and English.” Shanna’s says, “Ms. Mercer, science and math.” Mine says, “Mr. Mirer, history.” (Mrs. Harden’s kind enough not to write “teaching intern.”) The kids have nametags with exclamation points written after their names: “Douglas Patton! Seventh Grader!”

While Mrs. Harden reads from my father’s handout, Shanna slides into the seat in front of mine. She’s 25, a real teacher, and she talks as if we’re in the middle of a long conversation that started years ago and won’t ever reach an ending.

“Nice outfit, by the way,” she says. “Field trip informal, I suppose.”

Looking down, I’m surprised to see that I’m not wearing any clothes. My testicles lie flat on the bus’ brown plastic seat like two deflated balloons. My nametag dangles from my chest hairs. When I tug, it hurts.

“But I dressed this morning,” I say. “I know I did.”

“Shh,” Shanna says. “Mrs. Harden’s about to turn around. Just walk normal, like you don’t notice. She might not mark it on her clipboard.”

 

 

The bus stops in front of our old house, the house my mother and my father and I shared until I was fourteen, until he moved west to Springfield, Missouri, where he’s lived since. After he split, my mother and I squeezed into a little apartment up the hill from the Chi-Chi’s, an apartment too small for our furniture, which we left behind in the house for the next owners to deal with.

My father is standing on the wooden front porch waving us inside. He’s shaved his beard, trimmed his bushy eyebrows, even made himself look shorter, more like a regular, middle-aged man, instead of the world’s tallest and hairiest accountant, which is what he used to call himself. He’s also wearing enormous green sunglasses, cheap ones that Mrs. Harden will think frivolous. Look at that, I say, but as she writes in her clipboard, I realize that she may well think that I am responsible for my father’s bad choices, so I rush to the porch and sweep the sunglasses off his nose. Since I don’t have any pockets I can use to hide the glasses, I toss them into the hedges.

“Nice pants,” my father says.

When Mrs. Harden catches up to us, she sticks a nametag on his lapel. “Mr. Mirer, Sr.,” it says. “Parent/ Educator.”

 

 

My father’s changed almost everything about the house. Instead of our red couch and upright piano, there are six rows of theater seating, the good kind with fluffy, reclining chairs. And instead of the kitchen and the dining room, there’s an open space and a gigantic projection-screen television where the sink used to be. I like being inside. It’s the only place aside from school that doesn’t remind me of Andrea. We never did it here, not on the couch, not in my bedroom, not in the back yard. I didn’t start with Andrea until my mother and I moved to the apartment near the Chi-Chi’s.

My bedroom is smaller than I remember but preserved intact. The same bedspread showing a map of the United States. The same stack of shoeboxes in a corner, each filled with unsorted 1982 Topps baseball cards. “Ray Knight,” I say, looking at one. Then, remembering my condition, I reach into the closet, which miraculously is full of my old things, slacks and T-shirts and collared jackets.

Even though I’ve grown nine inches since I was 14, the blue jeans still fit. The shirts, however, all disintegrate into threads when I touch them, but that problem I solve by zipping up my gray Members Only jacket.

“Don’t have to worry about Mrs. Harden now,” I say.

 

 

Before returning to the screening room, I step into the bathroom so I can clean my pants with a washcloth, so I can look teacherly for the students. Inexplicably, my mother is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, combing her long, brown hair. She’s in the white gown she wears to work at the nursing home. Her patch says, “Annie, Orderly.” She doesn’t seem surprised to see me.

“You’re upset,” she says. “Aren’t you? You don’t have to tell me why. Would it make you feel better if I held your hand?” I give her my left one. “Would it make you feel better if I held them both?”

From the hallway Mrs. Harden is looking in at us, jotting something on her clipboard, something else I’ll have to explain at the end of the year. I slam the door.

“Look what you did,” I say. I splash water on my face while my mother tells me not to get upset. “I have to get upset,” I say.

“You don’t have to get upset at me.”

“We have the same argument every day.” I turn off the faucet. “You can’t stay here. What if Mrs. Harden needs to use the bathroom? Go hide in my bedroom.”

“I won’t do it,” she says but she does. That’s the power we have over each other. My mother walks down the hallway toward my bedroom. “I don’t see why I’m doing this,” she says as I lock the door.

Back in the living room, my father is standing near the television, pointing a bamboo stick at the screen, at pictures of my mother projected there. The students are all sitting up in their chairs, sipping orange Kool-Aid from plastic cups. One girl’s taking notes on her hand-out.

“A good woman,” my father says. “A woman with a good soul.”

I sit down beside Shanna, who glances at me, then whispers, “This is such perfect timing. You walk in buck naked and up on screen you’re about to be born.”

It’s true. I look down at my white legs; run my fingers through my chest hairs. Where did my Members Only jacket go?

My father taps the television screen firmly with his bamboo stick, pointing at an overblown picture of me as a child. He’s talking about me like I was his patient.

“Eric was a well-developed baby,” he says, “with a propensity for night-time crying. Typically Eric would cry for a few minutes at about 3:30 in the morning, then pause for ninety seconds while he defecated, then resume crying again. Eric had the largest lung capacity of any child ever born in Mirth-Lace Hospital.”

Shanna leans over, whispers to me. “It’s true that you were a cute baby.” For some reason this feels like an accusation. Mrs. Harden stands up quickly, raises her palm in the air, her signal for quiet. “Mr. Mirer, Sr. means to say Mr. Mirer, Jr.,” she says. I cannot tell you how much this reassures me.

“Mr. Mirer, Jr.’s extremities grew quickly,” my father says.

 

 

I try not to listen during my father’s talk, which is mind-grindingly dull, but for some reason the only thing I can think of is Andrea. When I stand up, I have to shield my genitals with my hands.

This time no one’s waiting for me in the bathroom. I sit on the john and think about Andrea’s legs, about her tan lines, which isn’t a good idea; just as I feel myself getting excited, someone knocks at the door. It’s Douglas Patton.

“Mr. Mirer?” the boy says. “Mr. Junior? I have to go.”

I look hurriedly through the closet for towels to cover myself, but finding only washcloths, I tear the shower curtain from its loops with two good pulls. On the shower wall, I see my old poster of Tom Seaver, from his chubby, Cincinnati Reds days. As a boy, I wouldn’t get in the bathtub unless my father taped the poster one more time to the wall. Of course with the humidity, it was always falling off.

“Mr. Mirer?” Douglas says. “It’s positively an emergency.”

For some reason the idea of Douglas seeing my poster feels wrong to me. With one graceful tug, I pull it down from the wall and shove it into the towel closet. Then I toss my shower curtain toga-style over my shoulder, bunching it up over my groin so nobody will notice.

After Douglas comes into the bathroom, I slip back into my bedroom, hoping to find some new clothes, but instead my mother’s in there bent over my bed, untucking the sheets, which makes me nervous. What if my old Hustler magazines are still down there? What if those sheets are still stained?

“Relax, Mom,” I say. “Don’t do anything.”

“I’m not doing anything,” she says. “This is what not doing anything looks like.”

Back in the screening room, there’s an ominous clap of laughter, and I have to go check on it.

 

My father’s up to my teenage years, which explains the laughter.

“He was a fine soccer player with a good left leg,” my father says, “but he wanted challenges and so he played baseball, a sport where his lung capacity didn’t help him. Andrea and I both thought he shouldn’t play baseball. But he didn’t need our advice.”

“I had a good arm,” I protest, but Mrs. Harden scowls at me and jots something on her clipboard. I have to raise my hand to talk.

“Can I talk to you privately?” I ask my father. As he and I walk to the bathroom, I hear the children behind me whispering, “Who’s Andrea?”

When I open the door to the bathroom, Andrea’s looking into the mirror, patting powder over a zit on her forehead. I close the door, hoping she hasn’t seen me.

“Coward,” my father says.

“It’s not your life,” I say.

“This life isn’t your life, either. It belongs to somebody else, somebody dumber than you, and you’ve stolen it so that you don’t have to bother with your real life.”

“What happened to all those compliments you were telling the students?”

“That was a different audience.” We hear some grumbling from the living room. “That’s them,” he says. “They’re waiting for me.”

When I walk back into the screening room, they’re all staring at me. Mrs. Harden. Shanna. Douglas. The blond-haired girls who adore Shanna. All of them. Getting stared at is worse than watching this awful documentary. “Everybody hush now,” I say, repeating one of Mrs. Harden’s lines. “It’s time to be serious.” Then I sit deep in my chair, pressing my hands to my face so no one can see me.

 

 

The documentary shows pictures of Andrea in bathing suits, in prom dresses, in business suits, and then strange, empty photographs of the bedroom in my mother’s apartment, of my Tempo, of a state park picnic table, of the hospital parking lot. I can’t ignore this any more. I can’t keep from staring, remembering.

“They did it here,” my father says, tapping the screen. The picture changes. “They did it here,” he says. “He was brave enough to say all those things and do all those things in all those places and still not marry her. Lots of people would have felt obligated by their promises, by the way he used her, but not Mr. Mirer. He’s too courageous to be trapped by anything. Now turn to page two of your hand-out.” Papers shuffle.

On the screen my father shows a picture of Andrea sitting in our college health clinic. By herself. A magazine open across her lap.

“He was so clear in his morals that he would not stoop to soil himself with birth control, with medical opinions, with comfort during infections, but instead kept himself above it, entertaining himself with video games while his girlfriend sat alone in a clinic.”

Now all the children turn away from my father. They kneel on their seats, pressing their chins against the padded chair tops, staring at me. They’ve decided it’s time for me to respond, but I can’t speak. My teeth are locked together, my tongue heavy as cement. Mrs. Harden has her clipboard ready; Shanna is asking me a question I can’t hear. Douglas is raising his hands, signaling that once again he needs to go to the bathroom. Since Mrs. Harden won’t recognize him, Douglas finally forgets about permission and sneaks down the hall to the bathroom, to the bathroom where Andrea is waiting for me. I chase after him, but he gets there before I can catch him.

“Don’t worry about her,” I say.

“Worry about who?” he says. The bathroom’s empty; I start to breathe again.

“Mr. Mirer, what is this field trip supposed to teach us?” he asks. He’s one of those gentle boys who loves to tease his teachers, who understands teachers aren’t machines. “If the next trip is about Mrs. Harden’s life, I’m staying home.”

“I don’t know why we’re here.”

“You’re supposed to know. You’re also supposed to be wearing pants.”

I look down again. “Shit,” I say.

“You’re also not supposed to cuss,” he says and closes the door.

Luckily my father’s bedroom door is open, so I run in there and close the door behind me. Andrea is sitting on my parents’ bed, a blue blanket pulled up to her chin, her white arms spread over the pillows. “Come in,” she says.

“You’ve got to get out of here,” I say. “They’ll see you.”

“If you don’t want to see me, then why are you so excited?”

“I’m not excited.”

“Look down,” she says.

“That’s not excitement. That’s something else.”

There’s a knock on the door, my mother’s voice. “Shit,” I say. “Help me find some clothes.” Dutifully, Andrea helps me find slacks and a collared shirt, matching shoes and socks, a brown leather belt. The more she helps me, the angrier I get. When she tries to thread my belt through my slacks, I push her hand away. “I can do it,” I say. My mother is still knocking on the door.

“I’m coming,” I say. After Andrea hops under the sheets, I open the door. Along with my mother, there’s a mob of children in the hallway, pressing into the room, pointing at Andrea, pointing at me. From far down the hall, I hear my father and Mrs. Harden calling them back. “The show isn’t over,” they say but the children keep asking questions. What am I doing? Why am I still naked? Explain, they say. Explain.

Caught in this mass of words, I hear my mother say something cutting about Andrea’s fashion sense, and Andrea responds by insulting my mother’s cooking. They’re bickering back and forth, trying to pin me to different targets on the same board. The only thing I can do is run past them down the hall and through the screening room where my father and Mrs. Harden and Shanna and Douglas are looking at a picture of me on the television, a picture of me on the school bus, a picture taken earlier this morning as we drove to my father’s house. I’m leaning against the window, my eyes closed. Shanna is looking back at me from her row; Douglas is sitting on the seat beside me. In the picture my arms are crossed over my chest. I’m wearing clothes, thank God. The children in the hallway ask me to explain.

“Ask him,” I say, pointing at my father. “It’s his show.”

“It’s boring,” they say. “Tell us.” In the hallway behind them, I see my mother and Andrea arguing bitterly with each other about my physical health.

Outside there’s air, cold and cutting, and I gulp it as I run through the yard. When I reach the street, I stop, unsure where to go next. Douglas is walking across the lawn toward me, carrying a folded-up piece of paper in his hands.

“Mrs. Harden wrote this for you,” he says. Instead of reading it, I throw it on the ground. “Cool,” he says.

“What do they want from me?” I say.

“They want to understand. They don’t even know who you are.”

“They don’t need to understand. They don’t care who I am. They don’t even listen to what I say when we’re in class.” They come running down the steps, children first, adults behind them. Mrs. Harden scratching notes on her clipboard. Shanna asking questions I can’t hear. My mother wagging her finger at Andrea. Andrea wagging her finger at my mother. Behind them my father is waving his arms, trying for attention.

“Let’s run,” I say, and Douglas and I take off across the street. As I look over the houses on our block, it occurs to me that our old neighbors – the real ones, the retired firemen and schoolteachers who lived there when I was a boy– are dead.

“You need to put on some clothes,” Douglas says.

“I am wearing clothes,” I say. I touch my chest. “Shit. I have got to stop this.” The two of us bound up the nearest house’s porch steps and press the bell until an Asian man opens the door. He’s wearing a blue Oxford shirt, khaki pants, a hat advertising a casino. When he sees us, he yells something unintelligible; we hear pounding footsteps. A pudgy Asian boy in a sweat suit jogs down the stairs.

“I need some clothes,” I say.

The man and the boy say unintelligible, laughably complex things to each other. Talking faster and more intelligently than I ever could. If I could say anything with that much assurance, I would surely be a happier person. The man says something that sounds like “Konizipachen.” The boy says, “Howzibatsu.” I have the feeling they’re talking about me in an unflattering way.

“Clothes,” I say, pointing at the mob of children running toward us. “I need clothes.” While his father blusters on, the boy grabs a purple robe for me from the hall closet. It’s a beautiful, shimmering thing that falls lightly around my shoulders, gliding over my skin. Beside me Douglas Patton is sliding into a large orange robe. The extra fabric pools glowingly at his feet. After we are properly attired, the boy says, “Sorry. We are eating turkey. It is a bad time.” The door closes.

Now everyone is standing a few feet beneath us in the neighbor’s yard. They look to be beyond quieting, but when Douglas raises his right hand, Mrs. Harden and Shanna and my mother and Andrea all follow suit, raising their own hands, calling for quiet. Soon everyone is silent. Everyone is waiting for me, fanning themselves with those awful handouts. And at this moment I would like to oblige them, to be profound and exculpatory, but I can’t. While I stammer my father bounds up on stage and starts introducing me, explaining that the documentary’s montage ended precisely at this moment of free choice when I can decide what direction the story will follow. He’s blathering, hogging attention.

“Talk,” Douglas whispers to me. “You’re supposed to teach them something.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

There’s a single, awful moment then, while Mrs. Harden lowers her hand and begins to write on her clipboard, while my father continues talking, while my mother and Andrea resume their argument, while Douglas pounds his head with his fist, muttering, “Think, think.” Then he whispers to me, “Konizipachen.”

“What?”

“Konizipachen,” he says, pointing at the crowd. “Say, ‘Howzibatsu,’” he whispers. “I say, ‘Konizipachen. You say, ‘Howzibatsu.’”

“Konizipachen,” he says to the crowd.

“Howzibatsu,” I say dumbly. I step forward, nudging my father off the porch.

“Marzusikibad,” Douglas says. I mumble, struggling over what to say next. “Say anything,” he reminds me.

“Marenship hibitersen.” I say it loud. The sound makes me giggle.

Then Douglas starts to say something, a full sentence of silliness, a sentence that wraps around us both like a robe, soothing us, a sentence that would make sense of all of this if I could ever decipher it, but since I don’t have time for puzzles, I start talking too, cutting him off before he runs out of breath, before the silence can hurt us. And I say my sentence, a sentence from far in my past, a sentence of nonsense, a sentence like I’ve never said before.Greg Downs lives and writes in West Philadelphia. His short story collection, Caught Up in the Past, is forthcoming in October 2006 from the University of Georgia Press, which awarded it the 2006 Flannery O’Connor Award.

My father closes the refrigerator door and takes seven steps, so I know he is halfway through the dining room when he lets out one of those long-winded farts to beat the band. The shuffling sound of socks on tired linoleum tells me he is doing the victory dance he always does when he thinks he has outdone himself.

My friend Debbie mouths, “Yuck, gross.” She knows better than to make a sound.

From the kitchen there is a familiar thwack and dishes rattle. I don’t need to see my mother to know she has slapped the table the way she does when she wants to make her point.

“Jesus Christ, I’m eating here,” she shouts.

“S’cuse,” he says, but he sounds more proud than sorry, which must piss her off more, because she whacks the table again.

For a minute I start humming This old man he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb, to block out what might come next. They don’t know I’m in the closet so when I hum I do it in my head so only Debbie and me can hear. While I hum I count his footsteps. I’m good at this keeping track while I do something else like hum, so I know he’s going to sit down even before I hear him plop into his chair.

It’s always the same with him, seventeen footsteps to get from his Lazy-Boy to the refrigerator, four from the chair to the TV, five to get to the bottom of the stairs. Even though my mother always nags and calls him unreliable, you can at least guess where you stand with him. Not like her, who might take twenty steps to get from the kitchen to the living room, but sometimes gets there in twelve or fourteen.

My father rattles the handle on the side of his chair and the swish tells me he is back to half-lying-half-sitting while he swears at the idiot ref on TV, which is what he was doing before he got up to get his beer.

With him settled, and my mother still in the kitchen, Debbie and me get back to playing in the closet under the stairway. My father started to build this closet before I was born. Like most things in his life, he never finished it. He broke through the wall and put up some shelves but never hung the door. To spite him for not finishing, my mother hardly puts anything in here, which leaves room to spread out when we play.

Before my father got up, we were playing Miss America Pageant, but now Debbie wants to play Indian princess falling in love with the white-man cowboy, which is something we saw on an old movie when we snuck downstairs a few weeks ago after my mother went to bed. We waited until we knew she was asleep; watched her back through the crack of the open bedroom door. She was scrunched all the way on the edge of her side of the bed, even though my father wasn’t in there with her. Him not being there was the reason we crept downstairs in the first place. My mother always turns all the lights out if he’s not home by ten. I don’t want the neighbors to see him stagger either, but I worry he might trip and break his neck on the front steps, so whenever I can, I sneak down and turn the porch light back on.

Like every time we’ve played this new game since that night, Debbie wants to be Laughing Waters. It’s the best Indian princess name and just once I want it to be my name, but Debbie is my best friend, the only one I let inside because most kids would make fun or not know what to say, so I let her have her way so she doesn’t get mad and disappear. I can be Bubbling Brook she says, but that’s too much like Laughing Waters, so I pick Weeping Willow instead.

We don’t have buffalo teeth, or feathers, or stones to make necklaces in the closet, so we wrap winter scarves around our necks and pretend we are weaving baskets near the fire when the handsome cowboys ride up. Hers wears a white hat over his blond hair and looks like Brad Pitt. No matter what we play, my boyfriend always has shamrock green eyes and curly black hair like my father. Sometimes I wonder if my mother ever told my father dreamy things about his eyes. When I get married, I know I will tell my husband what is nice about him.

The cowboys are just getting off their horses to tell us their names when my father pumps the handle on his recliner to get up. There is one step, then a crash like thunder and the sound of breaking glass. In a blink Debbie is gone. No matter how I try, I can’t make her stay when the noise starts.

My mother’s feet thud-thud-thud ten times. Already she is in the living room. The sound coming from her throat reminds me of when the car won’t start.

I peak around the missing doorframe at her back. She steps over my father’s passed out body. Without touching him, she picks up the end table and wipes up a wet mark on the tabletop with the tissue she always keeps in the sleeve of her cardigan. “Would it kill you to use a goddamn coaster,” she says, even though he is passed out. “I can’t have one frigging thing you don’t ruin.”

I am extra careful to slip out of the closet when she isn’t looking so she won’t know where I came from, because I am going to be ten on my next birthday and she says that is too old for playing in a closet. It is never good to do what she thinks you are too old to do. I learned that once and for all when I was brushing Debbie’s hair when we were almost eight. My mother had asked me what I was doing, and when I said can’t you see I am brushing Debbie’s hair she took the hairbrush from me. She said you-are-too-old-for-this-make-believe-nonsense, spanking me with the hairbrush each time she said a word.

Ever since then, I don’t mention Debbie.

The closer I get to where my father sprawls on the floor, the more he looks dead, but I know he isn’t because he is making the fog-horn sounds he makes when he is asleep. My mother bends down to pick up some pieces of the broken vase. She gawks at those two pieces of broken glass like if she stares hard enough she might figure something out. I look closer at a wet spot on the braided rug beside my father’s face to make sure it isn’t blood, but it’s just spit-up dribbling off his chin. My mother finally sees me and as if she can read my mind and knows I want to wipe his mouth and put a pillow under his head. “Don’t touch him,” she says. “Just get the broom.” She sighs so deep she looks like a blow up raft when you pull the plug and the air escapes in a hiss.

I dart to the broom closet and grab the dustpan and broom; afraid if I take too long she’ll pass out too, leaving me alone to clean up their mess.

When I get back, she is still staring at the glass in her hand, making little start and stop sucking sounds, as if even breathing has become too much to handle.

Her head tilts to the left. I lean in a little closer, because her eyes look like what she is about to say is really important.

“I was so happy the night we got engaged and your father gave me that vase filled with violets.” For a second, she sounds like someone else, like someone I want to know better. That happens every now and then, and when it does, it makes me want to tuck in next to her on the couch, and coil my finger in her hair. I take a step toward her, but she pulls back and tosses the broken pieces into the dustpan. Her voice is all-brittle again. “It might as well be broken. It’s been empty for years.”

I sweep up the rest of the vase and put the broom and dustpan away, but when she isn’t looking I hide the broken vase in my closet. I am thinking if I fix it and buy violets; maybe she could be happy like that again.

 

A few hours later my father is still asleep on the living room floor. He is on his back, making huge, gurgling snoring sounds. In the kitchen I eat dinner in silence while my mother goes on about never having one uneventful day, and having to do everygoddamnthing all by herself.

“I’ll help,” I say.

“What can you do?”

I lower my head and separate the tuna from the macaroni and cheese on my plate. When she isn’t looking, I push little flakes of tuna over the rim and cover them with my napkin.

“I can dust and mop after school. I’m almost ten, I’m old enough.”

I know I will miss going next-door to Patty’s everyday to do my homework if my mother agrees. I like next-door Patty with her pink-tinted lips and hair neat in a bun, so unlike my mother, who doesn’t have time for smooth hair or a touch of lipstick. When Patty leans over me to check my homework, she smells like baby-powder and there’s a sparkle in her voice when her husband Eddie comes home and she asks him about his day. She kisses him hello on the lips everyday, and looks happy to see him, not just relief because he didn’t go drinking, but like she is glad just to have him there.

After dinner, I do the dishes so my mother can go out on the front step to smoke with Patty.

Maybe because she lives in the row house next door, and can hear the truth through the too thin walls, or because her Eddie drinks too – whatever the reason – my mother talks to Patty. She is the only exception to my mother’s it’s nobody’s business rule. I have overheard plenty from my closet while they sit on the porch or at our kitchen table pouring out coffee and their troubles.

I rinse out the sponge while my mother carries the coffee pot and two mugs out to the front porch. After she leaves, I cover the rest of the casserole with aluminum foil, and put the dish on the pilot light to stay warm. I scoop up the napkin filled with tuna flakes and push it to the bottom of the trashcan. Why anyone has to ruin good macaroni and cheese with tuna fish is beyond me, but the nights she makes it, it’s easier to get rid of the fish when she isn’t looking than to remind her I don’t like tuna.

Even with the water running I hear my father stir. I turn the water off and carry his warmed plate to the living room. He wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his flannel shirt and settles in his chair. I flatten a section of newspaper so he can use it like a placemat on his lap. His eyes are yellow-green and bloodshot when he winks and asks if I don’t mind getting him a cold one.

“How about it, my pretty baby girl?” he adds. I do mind, but I mind less after he says that, so I go to the kitchen and open his beer with the magnet bottle opener stuck to the freezer door. The opener has a design on it like an American flag. We got it from Avon when Patty was selling it last summer around the fourth of July. We don’t really have money for things like Avon, but we had to buy something, since it was Patty. Lucky for us she stopped selling in August, so we didn’t have to buy anything else.

After I give him his beer my mother is still outside, so Debbie and I are in the closet playing getting ready for Saturday night dates with our boyfriends. Debbie wears a pink sweater-set with jeans, and I wear a turquoise v-neck with a short black skirt. We saw Rachel wear these same outfits on Friends on TV, so we know they are the latest thing. We take turns putting on each other’s makeup before our boyfriends ring the bell to pick us up. Our boyfriends, Matt and Timmy, look the same as the cowboys, but now they wear Gap chinos and pressed shirts, and smell of woodsy cologne. They take us to Appleby’s and tell us we can order anything on the menu. I want spare ribs, but I know Rachel thinks you can’t look ladylike eating spareribs, so me and Deb get the shrimp combo with two kinds of shrimp, like on the commercial. After dinner we go dancing and Timmy holds my hand. While we’re dancing my father gets up and I don’t stop dancing, just count to seventeen, listen to the fridge door open and close, and count seventeen again and he is back in his chair.

He has hardly sat back down when the front door swishes open. My mother comes in and picks something up and slams it down. It is probably his beer. Sometimes talking to Patty calms her down, but not tonight. Tonight she starts right in on him. Already Debbie and Matt and Timmy are gone, and I am sitting in the closet alone, holding my own hand.

“You haven’t had enough?”

“One beer, Alice,” he says.

“One fucking beer, my ass,” she says.

Like usual, instead of answering, my father raises the volume on the television louder, as if by some miracle it will drown her out while she tells him for the millionth time how much she hates her life. She stomps from the living room to the kitchen, opens drawers and bangs them closed saying, I am sick of it, sick of it, sick of it. It might be my only chance, so I run upstairs and make a tent under the covers to read with my flashlight.

“I have had it. I can’t take anymore,” she says. There is a crash and rattle, like a metal tray hitting the wall, and I know she is throwing the kitchen utensils again.

“ Alice.”

“You wouldn’t drink if you loved us.”

I am trying not to listen, but needing to know if he loves us is all that I can hear.

 

When she finally goes to bed, I listen for her sobbing to stop. It seems like hours before I tiptoe to her door to hear the steady breathing that means she is asleep. My father is sitting in the dark when I go downstairs. I pick up the spatula and slotted spoon, the eggbeater and wire whip to clear a path and lead him, half-sleepwalking to their bedroom. My mother doesn’t move when I pull the cover up the best I can from his side to cover her too.

I listen from my room. When he starts to snore, Deb and me will sneak back to the closet with the flashlight. She’ll help me glue the vase back together. We’ll get it fixed, even if it takes all night.Carol Brill is the author of two novels in progress, Ordinary Eggshells and Peace by Piece. Her work has appeared in The Press of Altantic City, NovelAdvice, WriterAdvice and several professional journals. She holds a MFA degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

[img_assist|nid=4295|title=”Dravidian’s Cure” by Antonio Puri © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=73]I’m sitting at a small rickety table by the window of this nondescript cafe, its only sign a half-shattered plastic square that reads “Breakfast.” No name, just what it serves. What I serve. Remarkably, Angel manages to keep this place open. I don’t know why he picked this location, this dingy block of downtown Long Beach , so empty of hope the only life on the sidewalks are the alcoholics ditching into the Algiers Bar across the street. I’m on my break, trying to read a moldy paperback copy of The Stranger, drinking coffee I’ve laced with whiskey from the flask I keep in my apron pocket. The awning of the bar reflects the sun in glaring hot swaths across the asphalt. I lift my cup to drink and in she walks, predictable as the heat of the California sun.

I wonder where she’s been today. She looks more alert than usual, though wearing the exact same outfit as she has all month: leopard skin coat, fake-fur collar gray with cigarette ash and dandruff, grimy pink mules. The exposed rough skin of her unshaven ankles makes me sad.

“Hi, Mom,” I say.

She ignores me and slowly pushes a stiff lock of yellow-streaked white hair from her broad forehead. She makes no eye contact, although I note a distinct lift of her chin. My mother is too good to be seen talking with the hired help. She glides like a queen toward the counter where Angel is wiping down the plastic wood-grain paneling. Her hands hang limp. A black patent leather purse dangles off the tips of her long-fingered left hand.

She clears her throat, a rheumy thirty years of tobacco smoke clogging the pipes. Angel ignores her, and my heart hurts. She’s beautiful. How can he ignore her? But Angel has a business to run, as he explained to me last week, when he dialed 911 to report a vagrant: my mother.

I am worried at how best to proceed because she’s earlier than usual and I am not prepared. Yesterday had been a good day, because I had remembered to lay out two quarters on each table before she got here, so that she could come right in, do her work—which is to steal my tips—then get out before Angel calls the cops. But today everything—the sun, the heat of the whiskey—pushes me to forget just where I am.

I watch her and feel the familiar urge to have a normal conversation, the urge like a gnawing hunger. It must be normal to want that, especially now. I’m getting married this week. It’s normal for a girl to turn to her mom at a time like this. It must be. I think: I’m so glad you came in. I wanted to tell you something. Mike and I are getting married on Wednesday. Do you remember Mike?

Angel is now glaring at my mother although he still hasn’t spoken to her. He hates it when she comes in. Says it ruins business to have crazies wandering around. I tell him it isn’t her fault; she is my mother, what am I supposed to do? We don’t argue about it anymore, though. Angel is only threatening to call the police. He’s the last person to want the cops to come in, check things out, study the fake green cards and expired licenses. Besides, he doesn’t want me to quit, really, because who else would work in this dull, nameless place?

My mother turns on her heel and heads toward the table in the far right corner. I wince. I have not cleared the table, and the last customers had had a three-year-old who, with both hands, smeared pancake syrup all over everything. I’d noticed the hacking cough of the father, the balled up napkins containing God knows what.

I want my mother to sit with me, have a cup of coffee, watch the people slip into the darkness of the Algiers Bar.

Remember Mike? We came to see you at the hospital? Mike paid for the taxi fare. He gave you a carton of Lucky Strikes. You told him you were trying to quit so you were going to flush them down the toilet. He thought that was funny. I was relieved, because he’d paid for them out of his tip money and I thought he’d be mad. And he’s so mean when he’s mad. But instead he said, “Well, hon, do me a favor and flush them one at a time so they last.” You thought that was funny.

Angel jerks his head over at my mom, then looks pointedly up at the clock. My break is over. I get up and dig through my pockets for some tips. I have about three dollars in change. I approach my mother, who has seated herself at the filthy table.

You’re invited. Will you come? Adrian ’s Wedding Chapel. Adrian said we could invite a witness, but if we couldn’t find one, he’d ask his assistant, Hilda. I thought since maybe you were around here, you know, you might stop by. Just a thought. Two o’clock on Wednesday. That’s the day after tomorrow.

My mother lights a Lucky Strike and gazes out over the cafe while I gather the sticky plates and place them on the table next to us. I pull a clean ashtray from my pocket and sit down across from her. Angel slams something and stomps into the kitchen. I can hear him making a ruckus, something that sounds like forks being thrown into a fan.

Her body smells unwashed. Her black shiny purse sits in front of her. I want to open it up, dig through to the bottom for pennies and sen-sen and flecks of tobacco.

“How are you doing, Mom?” I push the quarters in her direction. “I have something to tell you.”

She sighs, plumes of white smoke pouring from her nostrils. She looks down at her hands, the backs of her long beautiful fingers tanned from Thorazine and her wanderings beneath the hot sun. Then she frowns. She picks up the quarters. Her brow twists in confusion, her hand resting on the table, palm up, full of quarters. She looks up at me, perplexed.

“Who the hell are you?”

I fold my hands around hers, curling her fingers around the quarters. Her hands are cool and soft.

Will you come? Maybe you could play for us. There’s an old piano at Adrian ’s. Nothing much. But all the keys work. I checked. You could play anything you wanted. Chopin. You always loved Chopin.

She is still frowning at me and I can’t find any words to speak. I get up and hug her shoulders. Suddenly she pulls me down and we kiss. It is an awkward quick collision of soft smoky lips. We have never done this before, kissed on the mouth, and for a moment I hold my breath, not knowing what to think. Then my mother turns fierce, her eyes blazing blue and sharp. She grabs my collar and whispers loudly, “I’ve got a tip for you. Never fall in love with a woman.” Her eyes fill with tears. “They’ll break your heart.”

I stand up , blushing , and my mother’s face snaps back to its calm disdainful beauty. She stands abruptly, drops the quarters into her purse and marches across the cafe to the front door. She stands there until Angel sighs and opens it for her. I run to the window and watch as long as I can the leopard skin back prowling down the street.

It’s okay. Never mind. It’s no big deal. We don’t love each other very much anyway.

Angel whistles and calls out that it is time for me to get back to work, though there are no customers. The breakfast rush is over. I put my hands into the pockets of my apron, feeling nothing, feeling nothing because I don’t know that I will never see her again.

 

*

 

This piano is old.

“Strange that a piano this old and so, umm, untaken care of, sorry—”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Well,” he crawls out from beneath the legs as if from under a car. His clean blue jeans are worn at the knees, his waist is slender. The piano tuner, Timmy, sits on my carpet, legs crossed Indian style. He rests his hands and polishing cloth in his lap. His hair is black and curly. His long lashes wave up at me. “It’s one of the sweetest pianos I’ve ever heard.” He grins.

I am grateful for this young man, who has come into my home with shiny , elegant tools. I always thought it was just my opinion, just my love for this piano, my mother’s piano, loving it the way we love the first voice we ever hear, how we come to understand that all other voices are mere echoes of that first sweet voice, a voice I have not heard for 15 years.

It is a Winter 1937 cottage grand. A cottage grand looks like a regular spinet, but there’s something different about its internal workings that I never understood. The chain of events that flows through its intricate systems of levers, springs and hammers, through felt and wool and wood, makes it different.

We lift the upper lid , swing the tapered arm down to keep it propped open. I gently pull the hinged lid that covers the keyboard all the way out, exposing its insides. Timmy gets to work. He raps a silver tuning fork against his knee, then sticks it between his teeth. He reaches in and secures a tiny wrench, making minuscule adjustments, seeking 440 vibrations per second.

I ask Timmy what happens to a piano as it ages. He explains that first the leather and felt compact so that the action becomes uneven and less responsive. Rattles and squeaks develop.

“All the action parts become worn out,” he says, tapping middle C. He frowns. “Hmmm. The keys are getting wobbly.” I want to stop his hand from tapping the key, from using up its strength.

“It gets worse,” he continues. “Hard to believe, but the strings may actually break.” He plucks a rusty B-flat string and its dull thud silences us for a moment.

“Some pianos just die.” Timmy leans toward the hammers and sighs. “The big failure is hidden—look, just below the surface of the cap.” He points to the cap, fingers it, and in the rising dust I smell decades of cigarette smoke and my mother’s breath.

When he’s finished tuning, we examine the ornate cabinet. Its color shifts from one side to the other. The side closest to the fireplace is paler than the rest. He rubs his finger into a round cigarette scar; around the water-stains of the alcoholic years I spent trying to rid myself of Mike.

To distract Timmy from the damage I tell him, “I clean the keys with curdled milk.”

He shoots me a glance. “Oh, I think I heard about that. Something about lactic acid?”

He encourages me to reconsider restoration. “I know it’s expensive, but it’s such a lovely instrument. Still. She’s worth it.”

When the piano tuner leaves, I pull out the bench. I’ve draped it with a homely pink rug to cover up how it is cobbled together with too many thin nails since that day ten years ago , when Mike broke it into pieces against the wall then came after me, w hen one post-blackout morning the damage he did to the piano, to me, finally entered my consciousness and I made calls. The police came. I met Margaret, a therapist, in a hospital rehab hallway.

I rub the dampness of last night’s bottle of whiskey off the coffee table. I only had one, just one when I got the letter; when I heard the news, then called Margaret; what should I do?

Thirty or more books of music line the shelf above the piano. I choose Chopin preludes. The prelude is not a piece I’m familiar with, so I proceed slowly, addolorato. But even in this dirge I can hear the water, the life force. The piano tuner told me this piano is now only in tune with itself, accurate pitch no longer possible for its aging body.

My mother had schizophrenia and perfect pitch. She’d call out “G” when the phone rang, “F” at the doorbell. As I clumsily, slowly, begin the prelude’s arpeggio down the keyboard, like so many drops of rain on a lonely night, I try to remember if this piano—her piano—was always weak in its pitch, and if so, was this what drove her mad, knowing the way she did what constituted a perfect sound? I do not know what drove her from me that last day near the Algiers Bar. I do not know what killed her. Tomorrow, because Margaret says I must, I will find out.

 

*

 

When I enter the Medical Records office of Metropolitan State Hospital , a man rises from a desk. The nameplate on the desk reads, Miguel Torres. He is the records clerk who answered the phone when I called weeks before, when Margaret and I decided it was time to know. He waves his hand at a long table. On it is a stack of folders twelve inches high. I stand in the middle of the room, rubbing the backs of my hands. They burn when I am afraid. The smell of dust and mold is familiar and sad.

A woman wearing a white muumuu with pink hibiscus comes into the room. I think she is a patient. She says hello. She stands close to me and then I think she isn’t a patient, because she smells fresh and wears socks and white tennis shoes with her laces tied. She smiles at me and motions to the tower of my mother’s records.

“Go ahead, honey. Tell us which ones you want. We’ll copy them for you.”

Miguel comes back in and hands me a box of paper clips. “Sixteen admissions,” he says. “What do you want?”

Everything, I want to tell him. How can he ask me that? Why can’t I just pick up this stack and walk back to my car and drive away? Miguel leaves the room again and the woman touches my shoulder. “Five cents a sheet.” She shakes her head and sits down at a typewriter table and begins to poke fingers at the keys.

I open the first manila folder. There is a small black and white Polaroid of my mother’s face, an intake photo of a woman in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Her hair hangs longer than I remember it. Her eyes seem sleepy and she is almost smiling, as if she has just had good sex or heard the voice of God.

I did not expect to find my mother, not like this; I have been without her for so long I assumed all traces of her life had disintegrated into dust. I had thought, wrongly, that this hospital had closed, that the tools that shocked my mother, burned her memory down to ash, the so-called machinery of cure, had been bulldozed.

When I received the notice from the hospital that her records were to be purged I called Margaret, whom I had only seen a few times, back when I was disintegrating into alcoholism, before these blank years of sheer coping. Margaret asked, how did she die? I told her I did not know, that she had disappeared one hot day while I was at work.

But here is my mother, stapled to a form. I quietly yank the photo from the page and slip her into my purse. For an hour I turn the pages slowly, finding more photos, delaying the inevitable final pages. Miguel comes back into the room and taps his watch.

“We have to get started copying or we won’t be able to give you anything,” he threatens.

I relinquish my stack to him and he carries it back into the bowels of the archives.

When I rise to leave, my hands not full enough of what I came for, of what I crave, the woman in the muumuu says, “Wait, honey. I’ve got something for you.” She opens a drawer and hands me a piece of paper. On it is a recipe for shrimp mousse. And a recipe for Harvey Wallbangers.

“It’s different now,” she says. “It’s not shameful anymore.” I’m not sure what she’s referring to. I thank her for the recipes and touch her shoulder lightly as she turns back to the typewriter. She bats my fingers away and bends toward her work. I notice, then, the key dangling from her wrist. She’s not a patient. At least, not anymore.

On my way home I stop only once, for bourbon. The red blinking light of a message greets me as I unlock the door to my house. It’s Margaret, asking me to call her. I do.

“Did you get the records?”

“Yes.” I move to the refrigerator and try not to make any noise as I drop ice cubes into a glass. My hand is shaking. “Not all, though.”

“Call me if you want to later, will you?”

I hang up, and my hand stays on the phone for a long time. Chopin is playing in my head and I am riveted to the spot, one hand around a glass of booze, one on the phone. It is my mother’s crazed rendition of the minute waltz, which she played in thirty seconds flat, and I see before me the frenetic dance I would dance behind her as she sat at our piano, the sweet oceanic dread of the waltz making me weep with her.

When the music fades I bring the hospital records to the couch. I hold tight to the glass. Finally, I begin to turn the pages.

There she is again, more photos. They are askew, as if she could not stop moving. In one she looks like a mean parrot; in another her hands blur as she makes the sign of the cross across her polka dot blouse. The blouse is on backwards. In another her eyebrows are lifted into a dramatic “v” as if to plead, “what am I doing here?”

I begin to disbelieve. It is all so unreliable. I remember my mother as young and beautiful, not sick and dying. I thought she was not mad, just agitato and rhapsodic. As I read these records, I see that even the orderlies have written down the wrong year in places , that the nurse mistook her sleeping form for another patient , that a doctor noticed she had some musical ability.

Then I am stopped by one last photo. It is the leopard skin coat. It is the stiff white hair.

The phone rings and its Margaret again.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk?”

I shake my head, but she can’t hear that. I want to tell her I am grateful she called but that I have to go now, the news has arrived and my mother is dying. I must attend to her funeral. I hang up, hoping she understands.

I turn to the final page. The handwriting is elegant for a doctor. I wonder briefly if he was an artist, then I read this, how it was lung cancer that killed her. She drowned in ash, and the physician wrote: “all I could do for this patient was give her a cigarette, for which she was obviously grateful.”

Yes, she would have been. What a kind gesture. I wonder if there had been any others since I saw her last.

The phone rings. I set the glass down, push it to the edge of the table. The liquid makes a tinkling sound, and the smell hovers, like smoke.

 Robin Parks’s fiction has appeared in Bellingham Review, Prism International, The Raven Chronicles and other journals, and has won the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. Parks has an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she was the Presidential Fellow in Creative Writing. Originally from Southern California, she lived for many years on a tiny island in the Pacific Northwest, and now calls Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, her home.