Just Plain Weird (12 page)

         
I sat alone at the kitchen table and ate. Dinner turned out to be a beef stew-like dish that may actually have been beef stew, or something close to it. It tasted somewhat bland, but I finished it just the same-- my mother’s cooking was always nutritious, if not always tasty.

         
I was still feeling pretty downcast about Eliza. I could see her in my mind moping about her house. The image bothered very much, and I tried to figure out why. I had just met the girl, after all, so, really why should I care so much? I thought maybe it was because, for whatever reason, she believed in me, and that I had let her down. No one-- not even my parents, even-- had every really expected much of me. So I had, never in my life, been in a position where I felt that I had disappointed anybody-- this was the first time. I decided I didn’t like the feeling at all; it was an empty, hollow, lonely feeling, and sitting there in my deserted house just made me feel worse. I ended up realizing how funny life can be; you wake up one morning and your greatest concern is the size of your biceps and whether you’ll be able to make the football team, and then the next thing you know, you realize you’ve wounded somebody’s feelings, and you have to figure out how to make it up to them-- until then you suffer this thing called guilt, which you never felt before because you never felt anything you’ve ever done or said mattered enough to anybody to hurt them.

         
I went up to my bedroom and retrieved some money I had set on the side. I had no idea what to get Eliza. Frankly the only gift I’d ever bought a female, outside of my mother, was when a bought a birthday gift for a cousin’s three-year-old daughter. I bought her a doll that slept when you laid it down. You could also feed the doll with a baby bottle, and a short time later the doll would wet its diapers and start crying. The kid had been thrilled with the doll, but maybe it was just me, I couldn’t see why. It actually seemed like a very stupid doll, as dolls go. One of its main functions was sleeping; how can a kid play with a doll that looks like its sleeping? Also, there wasn’t a big enough time lapse between the time you fed it and the time it wet its diapers. It took only about five or six seconds, which is hardly realistic, as the manufacturer claimed. If they had wanted to make it truly realistic, why didn’t they make it so that they doll wets its diapers and starts crying when the kid was watching her favorite television program, doing homework, or eating dinner? It finally occurred to me that manufacturers are forbidden from making dolls that are too realistic, because if they did and little girls around the world saw how troublesome babies really are, by the time they grew up they’d never want to have any. And then there would go human race, down the tubes along with the toy manufacturer’s future consumers. At least, this was what I had reasoned.

         
Now, as far as Eliza was concerned, I figured I would heed what her father had suggested-- just get her something odd. After all, he knew her much better than I did.

         
There were no large shopping centers in walking distance from my home, but on the main street, a few blocks away, there were a scattering of stores, mostly small, mom-and-pop shops, mixed in with apartment buildings and small offices. So I walked over there and wandered up and down the street. There was a florist that was run by a couple elderly sisters, so old in fact that they had always seemed timeless-- but flowers, for some reason, were out of the question, at least according to her father. I wondered why. Maybe everything with Eliza worked backward. Maybe if you got her something totally normal, the kind of thing everybody gives everybody else, she got offended or something…. I passed a few apartment buildings and a small insurance office. I almost went past the hardware store, but had the sudden urge to go inside and looked around. It seemed like a very unlikely place for me to find I gift for her, and maybe that made it the perfect place to check. I wandered up and down the cramped aisles, through the paint section, through the fastener section, through the gardening section. I must have looked lost wandering around, because the store manager approached me and asked if I needed help to find anything. When I told him I was looking for a gift, he didn’t appear the least bit surprised. He asked whom I was buying the gift for, and I told him just a friend. He suggested I check out the tools, which sounded good to me because Eliza certainly wouldn’t expect anyone to get her a lug wrench or something. I searched through all the tools hanging on hooks behind the sliding glass doors of the tool aisle. What I found, and thought might be perfect, was a socket wrench set. It came it a small metal box-- the wrench and about a dozen sockets of different sizes. So I bought it, and the headed home.

         
As luck would have it, I ran into Raffles-- about the last person I wanted to see at the moment. It was one of those awkward encounters; I was walking down the main street approaching a side street, and he popped out of the side street right in front of me. There was just no way to avoid him.

         
“Hey, sport,” he called out to me. As he turned and walked over to me, I noticed how much he reminded me of a stork. Tall and rail thin, with the strange bobbing way of walking. He started to walk next to me. “So how’re all the aliens doing?” he asked.

         
“There are no aliens,” I said, thinking, No, just nice normal people who might have found an alien artifact-- so there, you’re wrong, smart guy.

         
“You suddenly sound like a non-believer, sport,” he went on, always speaking just a little too loudly. “You mean, given the vastness of the universe, you believe the human race is condemned to eternal loneliness?”

         
“You’re born alone, and you die alone,” I said. “Why shouldn’t loneliness be the eternal human condition, then?”

         
He shut his mouth a moment. I didn’t look at him, but felt him staring at me, his swollen eyes boring through me.

         
“What’s in the bag?” he asked then.

         
“Nothing.”

         
“You’re carrying an empty bag?”

         
“Yes.”

         
“Are you sure? Or is it you just don’t want ole Raffles to know what’s inside?”

         
“Yes.”

         
“In other words it’s not of my business.”

         
“Exactly.”

         
“Well, why don’t you just say so?” he asked.

         
“Because if I just say so, you’ll start pestering me until I tell you what’s inside it.”

         
“Well, if you understand that, then why don’t you just save yourself the aggravation and tell me?”

         
“Because I don’t what to.”

         
“Why don’t you want to?”

         
“It’s just a secret.”

         
“Oh, a secret,” he said, scowling. “Well, sure, you can have a secret, I guess. But keeping secrets from ole Raffles? That’s never happened before.”

         
“Things change, remember?”

         
“Of course, and before long you’ll have all kinds of secrets, I suppose.”

         
“Maybe.”

         
“Well, it’s your right,” he said, now actually brooding.

         
We walked in silence for quite a while, then.

         
“Well,” he said. “If you won’t tell me what’s in the bag, at least tell why you won’t tell me.”

         
I sighed. “Because if I tell you, I’ll end up having to answer twenty more aggravating questions about why I have what I have in the bag.”

         
“I see,” he said slowly, thinking. “Then that means whatever it is, you shouldn’t have it.”

         
“I never said that.”

         
“Good God,” he cried. “It’s not a gun, is it?”

         
“If it were a gun,” I said, “I would’ve already taken it out and shot you.”

         
“All right,” he relented. “I get it…I get it…. How you’ve changed in a day,” he commented then. “You even used a couple fairly large words too. For a moment, you didn’t even seem like the same monosyllabic mesomorph I have come to know. Well, I’ll see you later, sport.”

         
As we came up on the side street where he lived, he split off from me, and crossed over to the other side of the street. Watching him walk away, with his bird-like gait, I couldn’t help feel I had just survived an attack by a pterodactyl. It was something of a victory-- the first time I could ever recall not being forced to share everything that was going through mind. I started to dwell on what he had said about my having changed, and couldn’t deny the truth of it. I really hadn’t noticed-- maybe was only somewhat aware of it-- but I didn’t feel like the same person I was when I’d woke up that morning. I felt transformed in some way, but couldn’t put my finger on it exactly. Maybe this is normal for someone who has been driven off a cliff and survives. You hear about it all the time; somebody survives a near-death experience, after which they change, become enlightened. Though I didn’t exactly feel enlightened, I sure did feel changed. Maybe I would even find a dictionary and look up ‘monosyllabic’ and ‘mesomorph.’

         
The rest of the walk home was a peaceful experience, though I had an occasional pang of guilt, a little tugging sensation in my chest, whenever I thought of Eliza.

***********

That night I had a hard time falling asleep. I had an antsy feeling that kept me tossing and turning in bed. It was an exceptionally warm night. I must have ventured downstairs in the dark a half dozen times to adjust the air conditioning. When I turned the temperature down, and then went to bed, suddenly it seemed too cold to sleep. When I reset the temperature high, it seemed to hot to sleep. I just couldn’t find the setting to make me comfortable. Through it all, all that went through my mind was Eliza; I kept visualizing her sitting on her sofa, as I’d left her, alone and defeated, her spirit broken. A couple times, I got out of bed and went to the window. Resting my elbows on the sill, I stared at her dark house across the driveway. There were no signs of activity; no lights went on and off. I dreaded my next encounter with her, not sure how she would respond, but at the same time I wanted to get it over with, wanted to reconnect with her. Until then, I knew, I wouldn’t feel right.

         
At about one in the morning, I heard my mother come home. The station wagon pulled up to the curb, rumbling away with a hole in its muffler. Then I heard the front door slam shut as she came into the house. She sounded a little tipsier than usually, which led me to believe there was more drinking done than bowling tonight. She must have bounced off a couple pieces of furniture before she made it upstairs, and headed to her bedroom. I could hear her humming something, but couldn’t make out the song she was so off key. She paused by my partly opened door, as if checking on me. I tried really hard to stay still, not wanting her to know I was awake. As she continued toward her room, she started singing something about being so lost nobody could ever find her…. Her bedroom door closed, thankfully, and all I could hear was the beating of my heart and the mournful murmuring of the night.

I finally woke at about seven in the morning. I felt very tired, as though what little sleep I had did not allow my body much rest. I seemed to remember that I’d had a couple disturbing dreams, although I couldn’t remember what they were about.

         
I took a warm shower--which made want to climb back into bed-- dressed, and went downstairs.

         
My mother was already up and making breakfast. She looked none the worse for wear. She coaxed me into some scrambled eggs and bacon, though I had no appetite. I found it very difficult to sit there, at the kitchen table, across from her. I was starting to get that strange, almost otherworldly feeling, that you get sometimes when you’re with someone you’ve known your whole life-- that detached feeling that, though you’ve known the person forever, you don’t really know the person at all. It was like sitting across the table from a stranger, in a strange house, eating a meal they’ve made for you, and you end up feeling more like an intruder than a resident.

         
“Your father should be home next weekend,” she said. “Then he’s off to Atlanta on Monday.” It was all strictly small talk, something to say between sips of black coffee out of a chipped cup. “I so wished he’d find another job. On the road nearly thirty weeks a year-- what kind of life is that for somebody his age?”

         
I just sat and listened. I couldn’t wait to finish my breakfast so I could get out of there, but she’d piled up the eggs and bacon pretty good. When I tried out for the football team, I probably wouldn’t have to worry so much about making the team as I would about dropping dead of a coronary for all the plaque in my arteries.

         
“The bacon’s not burnt, is it?” she asked.

         
“No, it’s nice and juicy.”

         
“Good.”

         
Sometimes I wondered whether she had secretly taken out a large life insurance policy on me.

         
“You have any plans for today?” she asked.

         
“Not really.”

         
“You get a chance the read your brother’s latest story?”

         
Here it comes, I thought. “Yeah.”

         
“Pretty good, huh?”

         
“Actually I thought it was a little over-written,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I said it; I’d read it a couple days ago, and thought it was fine. But, now, in afterthought, it did seem over-written.

         
“Well, listen to you,” she said, surprised. “A regular critic. And what did you get in English last year.”

         
“C plus.”

         
“And that qualifies you to be a critic?”

         
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure what qualifies anybody to be critic. It just seemed to me that the prose was a little bloated.”

         
“‘The prose was a little bloated’? Listen to you.”

         
“It’s just an opinion. You asked.” By now, my mind was commanding me to eat faster, eat faster and get out of the house.

         
She sipped her coffee, studying me over the rim of her cup. Her eyes were somewhat bloodshot.

         
“That’s not a little hint of jealousy I detect?”

         
“Jealousy? Why? I’ve never been interested in writing. And I’m secure in the belief that he’ll never be able to do a hundred push-ups. Jealousy has never to do with it. I just thought the story was a little verbose.”

         
“Verbose?” She stared at me. “Are you feeling all right?”

         
She had me there. I was sure that in my entire life I had never used the word ‘verbose’. It didn’t sound like me at all, I had to admit.

         
“Listen, I need to get going,” I said, and shoved my plate away.

         
“I thought you didn’t have any plans.”

         
“I just remembered something,” I lied. “I promised to run an errand for the people next door.”

         
“The new people?”

         
“Yeah.”

         
“What are they like, anyway?” I never see them.”

         
“They’re nice enough,” I said. “But they’re quiet-- you know, they keep to themselves.”

         
“Well, I guess that’s better than the skinheads that were renting the place a few years back. You remember that? The loud music-- people over there at all hours of the night.”

         
“I have to go,” I said simply, and left her sitting there at the table to finish her breakfast.

         
Normally I would go down into the basement, now, and lift weights for an hour or so, but today I felt so drained I knew I couldn’t do it. So I went upstairs to retrieve the socket wrench set I’d bought Eliza. It was still pretty early, but I hoped she was awake. I really wanted, needed actually, too get through this next meeting with her-- get past the awkward moments of making up with her.

         
I had planned to wrap the gift, but then decided against it. I guessed that she would appreciate it more if it were unwrapped. I started to suspect her mind work almost backwards-- though I didn’t think it was quite that simple-- so that she might believe it more thoughtful if the gift were unwrapped, because then she wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of unwrapping it.

         
I found her father sitting on the front stairs of their house. He had his elbows resting on his knees, and he was holding his head in his hands, face tipped toward the ground. It looked as if he were fighting off a monumental headache. As I approached, I noticed the small bald spot on the top of his head. He must have heard the scrape of my shoe on the front walkway, because he looked up, then, adjusting his glasses, and blinking his eyes a couple times. Relief passed over his troubled face when he recognized me.