Swim the Fly (6 page)

I move to the fridge and put the water jug away. “What do you want me to do?”

“You’re going to be Mrs. Hoogenboom. I’m going to knock on your door and then I’m going to try to ask you out to dinner.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Whatever comes to mind. Like you’re Mrs. Hoogenboom.”

I feel my insides clench up. “I don’t know, Grandpa. I’m not really good at that sort of thing. Can’t you just practice in a mirror?”

“No. I need feedback. Look, it’ll be easy. You’ll see.” Grandpa Arlo grabs my shoulders and steers me out of the kitchen, through the den, and toward the entryway. “Now, I’m going to come up and knock. You’ll answer and I’ll try to get you to come out on a date with me. But I don’t want you to just say yes. You need to be cagey. Noncommittal. Make me work for it.”

“Like how?”

“You’ll figure it out as we go. Just think about Mrs. Hoogenboom and act how you think she would act.” Grandpa Arlo fixes me with his eyes. “You ready?”

I’ll never be ready for this. But I nod.

Grandpa Arlo goes outside and shuts the door behind him.

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to get in the proper frame of mind. I’m a seventy-five-year-old woman. How do I feel?

I don’t know.

Tired? Yeah, that’s good. And maybe sore? Sure, old people are tired and sore.

I look around and see a throw blanket on the recliner in the den. I grab it and drape it over my shoulders like a shawl. I hunch over a bit.

Voilà!
Mrs. Hoogenboom.

There’s a gentle rapping on the door.

I pick a piece of fluff off the throw.

Another knock. This one a bit harder.

I rub my sore, “arthritic” fingers.

Grandpa Arlo opens the door and sticks his head inside. “What the hell are you doing? Answer the door.”

“If I was really Mrs. Hoogenboom, I wouldn’t be able to get to the door that fast.”

“Oh, Christ.” Grandpa Arlo runs his hand down his goatee. “Just pretend you were near the door already.”

“Why would I be hanging around the door?”

“I don’t know. You just are.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like I was expecting you.”

Grandpa Arlo sighs loudly. “Just answer the door.”

I think a moment. “Maybe I was going out to do some gardening.”

“Fine. Whatever. Let’s try this again.” Grandpa Arlo steps back outside and closes the door. He knocks again.

I pad toward the door and open it. “Oh. Hello, Arlo.”

Grandpa Arlo holds one hand inside the other. He can barely meet my eyes. “Hello, Edith.”

“I was just going out to do some gardening. That’s how come I answered the door so quickly.”

Grandpa smiles shyly. “May I come in?”

“Oh, um, yes. Why don’t you come in?” I move aside, and he steps into the house. I close the door behind him.

“So, uh . . . How are you?” I say.

“I’m very well, thank you. And yourself ?”

“Me? Oh . . .” How am I? “I . . . uh . . . Well . . . I guess . . . My husband just died. As you know. So. I’m still kind of sad about that. But otherwise, I’m good. The gardening helps.”

Grandpa Arlo rolls his eyes skyward. “I must say, you look positively radiant this morning, Edith.”

“Oh, well, thank you.” I pull the blanket tight around my shoulders. “This is just my old gardening shawl.”

“All right. Enough with the gardening crap.”

“But it’s my motivation. You said —”

“I said be Mrs. Hoogenboom, not Robert De Niro.”

“Okay. Sorry.” I take a breath, resetting myself. “Oh, this old thing? I’ve had this shawl forever.”

Grandpa Arlo smiles. “It suits you. It matches your eyes.”

“That’s, uh . . . very kind of you . . . I . . .” I have no idea what else to say. “That purple shirt . . . looks good on you, too. It matches . . . the blood vessels on your cheeks.”

“Nice,” Grandpa Arlo says.

“What?”

He pinches the bridge of his nose, scrunching up his eyes.

“I told you I was bad at this,” I say.

Grandpa Arlo opens his eyes. “So, Edith,” he says, “I was wondering if you might care to join me for dinner this evening?”

“Oh, yes,” I say. “That sounds wonderful.”

“No,” Grandpa Arlo scolds. “I told you to be evasive.”

“Oh,” I say. “Right.” I swallow. “I . . . Um . . . No, I don’t think I can.”

“I just thought it might be nice to get out of the house.”

“I don’t feel much like going out.”

Grandpa Arlo nods. “Okay, well. Maybe I could come over and cook my world-famous beef bourguignonne for you.”

“Mmm, that sounds delicious. I’d like that.”

Grandpa Arlo scowls at me.

I wince. “But . . . I couldn’t.”

“It’s my great-grandmother’s recipe. You’d really enjoy it. The meat just melts in your mouth.”

“I see. Well . . .” Grandpa Arlo slowly shakes his head at me. “To tell you the truth, beef gets stuck in my dentures. I’d spend the entire night picking it out of my teeth. So, I’m sorry but I’ll have to say no.”

“Can I at least invite you over to my house for some tea? I make a mean Darjeeling.”

I look at my grandpa for some indication of how he wants me to answer, but he just stares at me all doe-eyed. I decide to continue along the same path. “No thank you,” I say. “I’m just not up to it.”

Grandpa Arlo glares over the top of his glasses.

“What?”

“It’s
tea.
You’re telling me she wouldn’t even come over for a goddamn cup of tea. What am I, a leper?”

“I was just doing what you told me. I thought you were going to keep trying.”

“What the hell is there to try after tea?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Exactly. Which is why you should have accepted the invitation.”

“Well, I’m sorry. But it’s not like you were very convincing. I mean, all you did was make the dates less and less interesting. Dinner out, a home-cooked meal, and then tea.”

“I was trying to be nonthreatening.” Grandpa waves at the air. “You know what? Forget it. This was a dumb idea.” He storms by me and heads toward the kitchen.

“Grandpa, wait. I’m sorry. How would I know what
Mrs. Hoogenboom would say?” God, I feel terrible. “Grandpa?”

But he doesn’t say anything more. He just turns the corner, and a moment later I hear his bedroom door slam.

Part of me thinks I should go talk to him, but the other part says I’ll just make it worse. I have no choice but to leave it for now and get on with the rest of my workout routine.

I kick my sneakers off and fling them into the coat closet with my toes. There’s a crash, and a bunch of canisters roll out onto the vestibule floor. It’s Mom’s latest NutraWorld containers, which she’d stacked at the bottom of the closet. I start collecting them up, when I notice that there are two different colored cans here, blue ones and red ones. The blue ones say
NUTRAWORLD ORGANIC FIBER LAXATIVE
and the red ones say
NUTRAWORLD ORGANIC MUSCLE-BUILDING PROTEIN POWDER
. Normally I don’t pay too much attention to the products Mom brings home, but this protein powder catches my attention.

I grab a red can and read the back. It says how protein is essential to the building of muscle mass and that one NutraWorld shake a day provides all the protein you need. I’m sure Mom wouldn’t mind if I took one of the cans. They can’t be too expensive; I bet one week’s allowance will take care of it.

I carry the canister with me to the kitchen; I might as well get started right away because, as my pathetic run this morning revealed, I need all the help I can get.

The directions call for two scoops of protein powder to be mixed with a glassful of skim milk. We don’t have any skim milk, so I decide to just use water. I’m sure it won’t taste much different; skim milk is pretty tasteless to begin with.

The label says that results should be seen in eight to ten weeks. I need results a lot sooner than that, so I dump maybe a quarter of the can into my glass of water.

It’s a bit of a mess because the heaps of powder cause some of the mixture to seep over the sides and drip all over my hand. I stir and stir with a spoon but there are still big clumps floating around in the glass. I try to squish the lumps of wet powder against the sides of the glass but this just makes more of the drink spill. I can’t afford to waste any of this, so I give up and just slug back the shake the way it is.

It’s got the consistency of batter. I have to sort of chew it more than drink it. Also, it tastes pretty awful. Kind of orangey and chalky. Sort of like a baby aspirin.

It’s impossible to get it all down without retching. I have to force myself to think about something else. I settle on Kelly, and how beautiful she is, and how she thinks it’s cool that I volunteered to swim the fly.

This works pretty well until the last, thick glob unsticks from the bottom of the glass and slides right down my throat. I gag a little, and a pasty orange bubble forms in my mouth. My whole body shudders as I try not to heave.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER,
I send Sean a text to let him know I’m at his front door.

Come in,
Sean texts me back.

It couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds after I’d just choked down the last of my protein shake when Sean called, all excited, like he’d just discovered a gold mine in his backyard or something. I’d told Sean I was busy, but he said I had to meet him at his house immediately. Coop was already on his way.

“There’s only a small window of opportunity,” Sean had said, then hung up before I could ask him what the hell he was talking about.

I open his front door and am immediately nosed in the balls by Tug, Sean’s hog-shaped brown Lab.

“Nice to see you too, Tug,” I say, pushing the dog out from between my legs.

When you step into Sean’s house, you’re hit by a squall of animal odors so strong it makes your eyes water. His family has more animals than anyone I know. They have four more dogs besides Tug, and I don’t know how many cats, and a parrot who’s always cursing at you. Besides all the animals that they actually own, the Hances also foster pets for rescue services, which is nice and all, but I have to say, I could never live here. Sean says you get used to the wet circus smell and the noise and everything, but I’d rather not.

“We’re upstairs,” Sean calls out. “In my sister’s room.”

I walk through the family room, and the other four dogs come out of nowhere and surround me. Yipping and panting and leaping, and wagging their tails. There’s a small hairy white one, and a bigger bristly brown and black one, and there’s a collie, and some sort of German shepherd mix. Don’t ask me their names. I only remember Tug’s name, because every time I come by, Mr. Hance is always saying, “Tug, no. Tug, no. Stop that, Tug. Tug, no. Tug down. Tug off. Tug, Tug, Tug.”

I give each dog a little pat as I push through the pack, so none of them will feel left out.

Then there’s the inevitable high-pitched squawk from the corner of the room, followed by, “Assbag. Assbag.”

“Back at ya,” I say to Sean’s parrot. Her name’s Ingrid, and she’s an African gray. Ingrid was a rescue bird that the Hances have never been able to adopt out. She rocks
back and forth on the perch in her cage like she’s happy to have someone to insult.

“Eat shit,” Ingrid caws.

“No thanks, Ingrid. I’m not hungry.” I should know better than to get into a conversation with this bird.

“Eunuch,” she says to me, but I just leave it. You learn after not so long that the parrot always gets the last word.

“They do it all the time in the movies,” I hear Sean say as I enter his twin sister Cathy’s room.

“They also have zombies, aliens, and dragons in the movies,” Coop says. “It’s called make-believe for a reason.”

Cathy’s room is like a haunted mansion. There are gargoyles and dark red drapes and a zillion half-melted candles all over the place. Cathy used to be all pink and yellow and girlie, and then one day she went over to the dark side. No one seems too worried about her, though, because she’s an honor student and she knows three languages and can play the violin and never gets into any kind of trouble. Mrs. Hance tells anyone who asks that it’s just a phase and that you can’t stop people from expressing themselves. So no one really says anything. They just pretend Cathy is still the same old Cathy and not someone who celebrates Halloween 365 days a year.

“It’ll work — you’ll see,” Sean says, his head buried in a dark wooden chest at the foot of Cathy’s bed. He’s pulling out all of Cathy’s old, pre–Addams Family clothes. Blouses and skirts and sundresses.

“What’s up?” I say.

Coop turns and smirks. “Einstein here thinks he’s got the perfect plan to see Mandy Reagan naked.”

“I don’t like it already,” I say, looking at the girl clothes piling up on the floor.

Sean gets to his feet and brushes off his pants. “You’ll like it when you see Mandy Reagan with nothing on.”

“Sean’s still going on about how Mandy takes tae kwon do down at the Community Center,” Coop says.

“So”— I shrug —“you want us to dress up like girls and take tae kwon do? I’m sure she doesn’t do the class in the nude.”

“No, dill weed,” Sean scoffs. “We dress up like girls, a little makeup, and then hang out in the women’s locker room. When Mandy’s finished with her class, she’ll come into the change room all sweaty and she’ll shuck down to take a shower and we’ll be there to witness her oh-so-heavenly body.”