The Brutal Language of Love (16 page)

“Nope,” I said, and Grandma patted me on the back for being such a sharp Blackberry Girl.

The doctor said, “Well, it's a beauty all right, with the meat and all, but it's got to come off. It's soggy.”

“No!” I said, feeling more shocked by this than by Grandma's tall tale.

But she said, “Be quiet and listen to the doctor!”

He brought out a saw and cut through my cast. It looked like he was chopping meat. I cried over what he was doing to Dalton's art, and even Grandma said, “Such a shame.” Afterward, one of the nurses dumped the cast into the black garbage bag Grandma had brought and took it away. The doctor let me itch myself for a while before laying on new plaster of Paris.

When we got home Grandma put pork chops on the range for dinner. They made me think of my old cast and I started crying again. “Stop that,” Grandma said, handing me a tissue from her sleeve. It was still damp from when she had dried her eyes in the car, and I felt instantly comforted by the fact that I was now in sole possession of her only tears.

Cliff had spent the afternoon sorting screws by width with Grandpa and did not seem surprised to see my new cast when he came in for dinner, though Grandpa was beside himself. “Where's the meat?” he said. “The boy worked so hard on the meat!”

“Yeah, what the hell?” Dalton said, coming down from his room. He had been listening to the Steve Miller Band when Grandma and I came in and we didn't want to disturb him.

“Tensie did it,” Grandma said firmly. “He did it this morning, when Patty and I were outside collecting laundry before breakfast. She didn't notice the smell until she got to school and the other kids started making fun of her. Tensie is a bad dog, but don't listen to me, Gauge! I've only been telling you for years.” Then Grandma turned to Tensie, who was eating his propped-up dinner beside the stove, and said, “Bad dog!” which made him cry and run under the table.

“Dammit, Tensie!” Grandpa said. “Get out here!” But he wouldn't come. So Grandpa reached under the table and pulled him out by the collar. “Out!” Grandpa said, pulling Tensie across the pale yellow linoleum and toward the back door. “Out!” he said again.

“Easy, Dad!” Dalton said.

“Dog urine on the cast for godssakes,” Grandma said, and we all sat down to dinner.

After the serving dishes had been passed around and Grandma had taken her first bite, the rest of us picked up our utensils. “Stop kicking your feet under the table,” Grandpa told Cliff.

“I'm not,” Cliff said.

Grandpa set down his fork and lowered his voice in the way he did to reprimand grandchildren. “Don't lie to me, son,” he said. “I can see your shoulders shaking, you got it? We don't sing at the table and we don't kick our feet.”

“I wasn't singing,” Cliff said, although he did stop kicking.

Grandpa ignored him.

“Grandpa,” Cliff said.

“What?”

“Three boys peed on Patty's cast at recess. They pulled down their pants and peed on her in a bush. I saw it.”

“Now, what kind of dinner story is that?” Grandma asked him. “You want to make us all sick?”

“We don't talk like that at the table, Cliff,” Grandpa said.

“But I saw it,” Cliff said.

“What did you see?” Grandma asked him. “You dreary little boy!”

“Three boys peed on Patty's leg, and she let them. She told them to do it.”

“I did not!” I said. “Tensie peed on me and I didn't even know! You're making us all sick!”

“Cliff,” Dalton said quickly, “you want to wear my riding goggles?”

Cliff shrugged. Nobody said anything for a while. We ate our pork chops and lettuce and rutabaga and listened to Tensie cry on the porch. Then Grandpa said to Grandma, “What's he talking about?”

“Who knows,” Grandma said.

“You said not to lie to you,” Cliff told Grandpa. “That's what you said and I was doing what you said. I even admit I was kicking my feet under the table. I was!”

“Who wrecked your cast, Patty?” Grandpa asked me then, point-blank.

“Tensie,” I said.

“You leave her out of this,” Grandma said, and she stood up.

Grandpa stood up, too. He was still holding his fork and now he pointed it at Grandma, like he was going to stick it in her cheek. When he spoke, a bauble of spit landed in her hair. “You go bring that dog back inside, Rachel. I mean it. You bring him in and you give him your supper.”

“Certainly,” Grandma said, and she went to get Tensie, who, even though he had been crying, did not seem to want to come back in. Then Grandma picked up Grandpa's plate instead of her own and scraped it into Tensie's bowl.

Grandpa didn't wait for her to finish before he knocked her over, causing her to spill the last of his dinner onto the floor. Quickly she rolled herself into a ball, so that when Grandpa tried to give her a kick, he couldn't find a place that would hurt. Before he could try again, Dalton was up out of his chair and punching at Grandpa. Grandma unrolled herself and hopped to her feet, at which point it became difficult to tell whether she was separating Dalton from Grandpa or joining in the fight.

I punched Cliff but he just sat there, watching the three of them cry and yell and carry on. They hated each other and lied to each other, and it was probably all Grandpa's fault. I thought they were very complicated, very smart people, and I wondered if I would ever make anyone mad enough to attack me. So far the only people who hated me were the kids at school, who I didn't even like. I vowed then to find someone I could fight with—someone with a Class 4 license like Dalton's, who lived in the country and didn't mind the smell of his own shit. Together we would struggle and tussle and lie, and when it was all over, we would sit down and watch TV while the dog tested our patience from the doorway.

“I want you to do me a favor,” my mother, executive
secretary, says on the telephone one Thursday.

I'm standing at my kitchen sink, washing a chicken I plan to bake for dinner. Suddenly I feel very aware of salmonella, one of my mother's archenemies, along with streptococcus and bat guano, which, studies point out, is often found on the organic produce purchased by yuppies like me and Cyrus. My mother, in turn, points the studies out to me.

“No,” I say, preemptively. Her favors tend to involve me asking people she barely knows, like my in-laws or co-workers, what their favorite color or flavor is so she can buy them extravagant gifts that signify little except that she is crazy and I must be as well, since I helped her out in the first place.

“I picked up a runaway on the way to work this morning,” my mother continues, “a very nice young man who needed a hundred and fifty dollars to get back to his people in Florida. He'll be arriving in Orlando at four-fifteen tomorrow and I want you to meet him at the bus station and talk to him about careers before he reboards for Tampa.”

“No,” I say again, removing the giblets from inside the chicken and setting them in a stainless steel bowl. “Forget it.”

“And just why not?” she asks, indignant. I am a guidance counselor, which my mother seems to think is similar to being a doctor in that I am bound to help all troubled high schoolers at any time of the day or night.

“I'll be at work tomorrow at four-fifteen,” I say.

“It's four-fifteen now and you're not at work,” my mother argues.

I set the chicken on a plate and begin patting it dry with a paper towel. “Mom,” I say, “you gave a stranger a hundred and fifty dollars?”

“He's interested in animals,” she says excitedly. “That's why I thought you could encourage him to become a veterinarian. His people sound sort of, you know, common, so I thought talking with someone like you might be just the thing to set him straight.”

I picture her at her desk in New Jersey: coral lipstick faded from endless coffee sipping, hair fuzzy from ineffective conditioner, locket once devoted to me and my brother (though now that mother and Farrell aren't speaking, modified to include a baby picture of Cyrus) resting atop the substantial shelf of her bosom. Over the phone I hear her boss, Dr. Mondo, dean of communications, hacking away with emphysema. He and my mother behave as if they're married, though Dr. Mondo is already married to someone else and my mother swore off men after my father left her years ago for a woman much heavier than she. This, my mother announced, was a personal affront, since at least if he was going to dump her he might have done so in a way that indicated her appearance was at fault, and not her company. It was the shame of this, she insisted, that caused her to lose face with all her girlfriends, while Farrell, fed up with her teary midnight phone calls, assured her that no, her lousy personality had simply struck again. Hence the loss of his locket ranking.

“So you'll go?” my mother asks me.

“No!” I say, resting my hand atop my own human shelf, a belly six months pregnant with a girl Cyrus wants to call Georgiette. My mother has informed him that this is unacceptable, however, and that my suggestion of Twyla is even worse. I understand she will settle for nothing less than Meredith, her own name, which has compelled Cyrus and me to refer to the baby by her chromosomal construction: Double X.

“Oh, don't be so uncharitable!” my mother says.

“Listen to your mother!” Dr. Mondo yells in the background.

“How is it that my idea of common sense equals your idea of being uncharitable?” I ask.

“Who knows what kind of crappy ideals you picked up in college?” my mother says, irritated, while Dr. Mondo chuckles nearby. “In any case,” she continues, her voice alarmingly smooth, “it turns out you
have
to go and meet the boy.”

“Why?” I say.

“Because he has something for you.”

“What?” In my head, I quickly compose a list of things I'd be happy to do without: money, baby clothes, a dozen real bagels.

“Your baby pictures,” my mother says. “Didn't you ask me for those?”

I did indeed. I am a pregnant, thirty-four-year-old guidance counselor who recently had a hankering for my baby pictures and expressed as much to my mother, who in turn expressed a reluctance to send them through the mail as there are no remaining negatives, and the post office is completely incompetent.

I wash my hands with orange antibacterial soap, then move down the counter to a spot where we keep Post-it notes and a cup of pens. “Okay, Mom,” I say. “Tell me again what time he gets in?”

She repeats the boy's itinerary and I do not bother to point out he probably won't be on the bus, and that she and I will never see my three-month-old bare butt being washed in her kitchen sink again.

We hang up. I return to the chicken and rub its skin with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic. Cyrus will be home shortly, and when he sees I have made dinner he will kiss me everywhere and tell me how wonderful it is to have the night off from cooking. He will then tell me I most certainly will not meet a runaway at the Greyhound station tomorrow, after which I will tell him about the baby pictures, and he will curse my mother and the biology lecture he cannot afford to cancel the following afternoon. He will want to call my brother, Farrell, instead, who lives nearby, but I will assure him that the bus station is a public place and I will be perfectly safe. After much hemming and hawing he will concede that I am a grown woman who knows how to take care of herself, though if anything happens to me or Double X, he swears, it will be curtains for Meredith.

The next day I chicken out and call Farrell myself.
He is only in Orlando temporarily, studying storm trends for the National Weather Service in the city with the greatest number of lightning strikes per year. Farrell himself was struck by lightning as a teenager one April morning. He had just screamed at my mother for telling me and my father he must have had a wet dream since why else would he be washing his own sheets before breakfast, then stormed out of the house, threatening never to return. Eyewitnesses saw him pedaling maniacal figure eights in the relatively empty high school parking lot (it was a Saturday) when a storm rolled in and he was knocked to the ground by a crinkly yellow bolt. Doctors attributed his survival to his great physical strength (he was a varsity linebacker) and the fact that the rubber tires on his ten-speed were poor conductors of electricity. Still, he was no longer able to play football after the accident, and his memory was short-circuited. Though he remained hateful toward my mother, he could not recall specifically why, much to her delight. She made my father and me promise not to remind him of the wet-dream argument, and I agreed, not for her sake but because I didn't want to embarrass Farrell a second time. My mother then threw away his old sheets and made his bed up with brand-new ones. When Farrell returned from the hospital and asked where she had bought them, she shook her head sadly at what had become of her son's mind, then gently reminded him we'd had these since he was a kid.

Because he heads his Orlando research team, I know Farrell can get time off at the last minute, especially with the safety of his beloved niece at issue. This is the reason I tell myself I am calling him, in any case. The fact that he can get particularly violent where my mother and her shenanigans are concerned is neither here nor there. Double X requires protection, no matter the cost. Anyone would agree with me on this.

“That stupid bitch!” Farrell yells when I get him on the phone. It is 3:30 in the afternoon and I have just seen my last appointment of the day, an Indian senior in tears over a postgraduate arranged marriage her parents are planning for her. Nothing makes me feel more powerless than other people's cultures. If only she had been pregnant or abusing drugs I might have been of some real help.

“Don't say ‘bitch,' Farrell,” I say wearily.

“Why not?” he asks.

“It's very antiwoman,” I instruct him. “There's no equally derogatory term for men, so until there is, we have to be fair.” This works well with my male students in that it seems to give them a bizarre hope for the future. Farrell, too, has heard it before, but the lightning keeps him from retaining it.

“Oh right,” he says. “I forgot.”

“That's okay,” I say.

“But she is such a stupid cow! I mean, picking up boys on the highway and giving them money just because they ask for it? Pleased to meet ya, shit for brains!”

“Be that as it may,” I say, “I've agreed to meet this kid at the bus station and I really don't feel like going alone.”

“I don't know, Joyce. There's a big storm coming in.”

“C'mon, Farrell,” I say. “For the baby.”

He sighs. “As long as I'm back at the weather station before the storm.”

“What time does it start?” I ask him.

“Say, oh, seven thirty-eight
P.M.
” Farrell is the only person I know who expects the weather like a favored dinner guest: nervously and with high hopes for a glorious evening.

“We should be done by then.”

“Did she send any of
my
baby pictures along?” he asks.

“I don't know. I mean, I'm sure you're probably in some of mine.”

“Unless she cut me out.”

“I doubt it, Farrell.”

“Stupid bitch.”

“Farrell!”

“What?” he asks sincerely.

“Never mind,” I say.

In the outer office my secretary, Gwynn, is eating from a box of chocolates my mother sent her the previous week. “Want one?” she asks as I head out the door.

“No thanks,” I say.

“Why did your mother send these again?” she says. “Refresh my memory.”

Gwynn likes a good laugh, and I decide to humor her. “Because,” I say, trying to recall my mother's exact words, “she's so glad that you, unlike so many other secretaries, know your place and do not feel resentful toward me simply because I am your boss.”

“What if I increase my words per minute? What do I get for that?”

“Job satisfaction,” I say.

Gwynn laughs again and calls me a bitch, which I permit her to do on occasion, and we say good night.

In the car on the way to the bus station I can see Farrell's storm approaching—a series of gray, smoking clouds ruining a vacationer's sky. They remind me of Farrell himself and the doom he brought to our family after the accident. For he became increasingly angry at my mother as the years went by, who cried pitifully in response and demanded to know what she had done but nurse him back to health, after all? “You know what you've done!” he would tell her uncertainly, and we would all give a start because it was true, she did. I decided if Farrell ever asked me about that Saturday in April I would immediately tell him the truth, but he never did, and I couldn't bring myself to raise the issue of the wet dream first. It was part embarrassment, part selfishness on my part, as I had come to relish his attacks on my mother. In his rage he spoke for both of us. Often I pictured myself as hysterical as Farrell, screaming at Meredith, her fleshy neck caught between my hands, but I had not been struck by lightning and so had no excuse.

The Greyhound station is one of those modern-looking
brick structures that seems like it could be worn as a helmet should someone decide to shrink it down. As I pull into the parking lot I see that Farrell is already there, idling the engine of his black truck. His vanity license plate from New Jersey reads
LIT-NIN
, while painted along each side of the truck are jagged renderings of the bolts that once struck him.

When he sees me coming, Farrell cuts his engine and eases out of the truck, briefly checking the sky, as is his habit. He remains a big man but he moves slowly and painfully, as if the electricity were still in his bones, shocking him. Only his eyes move quickly anymore, alert to the slightest atmospheric change. His standard uniform is jeans and sneakers along with a neatly pressed shirt, and as he comes toward me, I take in the familiar smell of English Leather.

“Hey, Double X,” he says, throwing a genial, fake punch at my stomach, something that never fails to set Cyrus on edge. “Hey, Joyce.”

We hug lazily, then head toward the station entrance. “What's this guy's name anyway?” Farrell asks as he opens the front door for me.

“Ellsworth,” I say mournfully.

“Ellsworth!” he yells, and several people inside turn to look at us. “That's not a real name.”

“Quiet down, Farrell,” I say, looking around the station. To our left is the ticket counter; the waiting area takes up the central part of the building directly in front of us, with all its molded plastic chairs and requisite pay-TVs. To our right is an impressive bank of vending machines and, looming in the distance for those requiring a meal, a small kitchen offers made-to-order hamburgers. The place smells of smoke (though there are No Smoking signs everywhere), and is mostly populated by unkempt teenagers hauling backpacks and tired women hauling children.