A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (17 page)

All the little packages of saltines around the house, however, are there to remind her who her mother is. Netta, like some bag lady, shamelessly slips the little crackers into her purse whenever she goes to JB's or The Rib House, as if they are as complimentary as matchbooks. She says it's just automatic for her to take them; it's from the days when she had teething babies to always think about.

“Get over it, Mom. The last time you had a teething baby was more than forty years ago,” Carlene tells Netta.

Carlene also notices how her mother slyly stashes away the last little piece of pie or cake or pizza, as if somehow she hasn't gotten
her fair share. Weeks later Carlene finds these little treasures still unwrapped in the back of the refrigerator, mushy as jam and covered with soft, green fur.

“Honest to God,” Carlene tells Ham on the night before Halloween when he surprises her with a six-pack of Old Milwaukee, “if I start squirreling things away like my mom, shoot me, please. You'll be doing everyone a favor.” She grabs a pencil and uses it to open the flip-top can so she won't break her nail. She holds the beer up in a quick toast to Ham, then leans back and takes her first long, cold drink.

“Tell you what,” he says. “I'm going to shoot you if you don't get a costume ready for tomorrow night.”

Carlene's doorbell starts ringing at twilight the next evening. Goblins and rabbits, witches and ballerinas crowd her front porch, then drift noisily away when it is apparent that no one is going to answer. Carlene has exactly seven mini candy bars in a bowl, which means she has popped thirteen of them herself while sitting at the breakfast nook, feeling black and weightless, listening to her doorbell as it becomes one long, fluid ring.

Later, when Ham comes out of the bedroom dressed in a sea-blue off-the-shoulder robe with a cardboard crown barely balanced on his head and the gold trident flaking glitter everywhere, Carlene turns around on her stool, gawks at him, and finally claps. She knows that this is as good as Halloween will get for her.

Although Carlene is dressed in everyday jeans and a shirt when they leave for the party, Ham doesn't say a word, doesn't suggest disappointment in the least. In a tight spot Ham's discretion always comes through. He reaches down and puts his arm around her shoulder and as they walk toward the driveway they watch a tiny lion scurry down the street swinging an orange lantern, making bright arcs in the night.

On the way to the party, Ham suggests dropping by Carlene's parents' house since it is still early. Netta answers the door wearing an apron, the pockets stuffed to the top seams with Sugar Babies and
Atomic Fire Balls. She throws her hands back and cannot stop laughing at Ham, who basks in her attention, strolling this way and that, thumping his trident on the wood floor.

Carlene walks over to her father in his bed. The polyspun cobwebs shimmer in the window next to him. His eyes are open, but she can't get him to look at her, and automatically her hand comes up, she snaps her fingers and softly swipes at his nose, a technique that never fails to get a dog's attention.

Carlene, for the life of her, can't explain whether she is watching a reverie or some tangled predicament. He is down to 117 pounds, his big, bare collarbone holding up the frailest of necks, and still he won't let go. All at once the anger that rises in her is so swift and complete that for a moment she can't get her breath. Her lips part and her shoulders lift two or three inches. She backs away from him, whoever he is, until she feels the chair behind her and sits down. She picks up a
Golf Digest
and fans herself and the air comes back to her in small, bitter waves.

Netta is feeding Franklin miniature marshmallows that night—a Halloween treat, she says—depositing them by two's and three's until his mouth is full. Franklin chews by rote, making a soft white soup which sticks in the corners of his mouth.

By the time Carlene and Ham leave, Carlene has her breath back and is brooding again, ready to wring Netta's neck. She sees that if nothing else works the old woman is bound to keep him alive with sugar.

There is a turkey scare two weeks before Thanksgiving. The news has reported a gross shortage of both fresh and frozen birds, which sends Netta into a tailspin. She hits five markets on her side of town, comes home with three frozen Butterball toms, six pounds of cranberries, enough yams for the block.

When she pulls into her driveway and stops the car, the memories start up, like a tune she can't get out of her head—Franklin bustling out the front door to help her carry in groceries. He'd be peeking in the sacks before he even had them into the kitchen, hoping for licorice or peaches or a dark, resinous bottle of Old Crow. Netta wants him back so bad she can taste it—a shallow sweetness in the back of her throat, a raw craving. She opens the trunk and carries in the groceries herself.

“Want one?” she asks Carlene when she is inside the house, pointing at a turkey.

“What are these?” Carlene is holding up a deck of flash cards. Turkeys and Thanksgiving are lost—a million miles away.

“Oh, watch this,” Netta says excitedly, taking the cards from Carlene. She sidles up to Franklin's bed and shimmies a thick hip onto the mattress. She does a quick, fancy card shuffle—something she learned in Atlantic City, turns the pile face up, looks at the top card, then centers it in front of Franklin's face. “Tree,” she says, “tree,” bending her head forward with each hard
t
.

When there is no response from Franklin, Netta swivels around and says, “It may not seem like anything is happening, but the brain is a sponge, Carlene, and he's soaking up our every word, and when he's good and ready he'll start spitting it all back.”

Netta moves to the next card. “Mouse,” she says, at least three times, pointing to the picture, which simply infuriates Carlene.

Before Netta can get to the next card, Carlene stops her. “Okay, okay,” she yells, “that's enough.” Her arms are stiff at her sides. Her hands are balled into the tight fists that have started to dominate her life. “How can you do this?” she asks her mother. “How can you humiliate him? He is not getting better.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear you have a medical degree now, Miss Smart-Ass,” Netta shouts. She turns her back to Carlene and stops the argument flat, her usual tactic.

Before she really has time to think about what she is doing, Carlene
glides past her mother and scoops up the thick, blocky, first-grade cards right out of Netta's hands. She walks to the front door and opens it, then pushes back the screen and throws the whole stack, Frisbee style. They catch the air and go down slowly. The rose card spirals. The hat card catches high in the privet. The zebra almost touches the ground and then is caught up again and carried to the neighbor's yard.

Netta puts her hands on her hips and walks to the door and both women stand there looking out at the white whirlwind of litter across the brown grass. Sorrow has hammered its way so far into their chests that a moment like this—a sudden mess, something that now has to be picked up off the lawn—is strangely welcome in their lives.

Carlene turns to her mother and says that, yes, she will take one of the turkeys.

Each evening, in the voice of a librarian that she once knew from Okinokee, Netta reads the newspaper to Franklin. She polishes the vowels, repeats any important names, and in general tries to make sense of the world to Franklin.

“Ice Palace Collapses” she reads to him, an article sadly detailing how the local Jaycees' icy Christmas wonderland melted due to a puzzling electrical short. “In only a few hours,” she reads, “the life-sized ice reindeer were reduced to winter slush.” She abbreviates the articles, tries to keep the news short and to the point for Franklin, who dozes often and unexpectedly. She is especially on the lookout for uplifting news—lottery winners, dogs that roam two thousand miles to find their owners, job openings down at the canning factory. She doesn't actually see a smile on Franklin's face, but for a moment his cheeks seem to draw up, he seems to want to smile, and certainly that counts for something.

Another thing that Netta is convinced he enjoys is the family pictures. From the attic, she has brought down several old albums and
she is teaching him his family all over again. “You have two brothers, Franklin. Their names are Clarence and Reed. Clarence is in the nuthouse, I'm sorry to say, and Reed still drives for Greyhound Bus.”

She points and turns the album pages slowly, lingering on some, getting teary-eyed over long-gone uncles and the way that all the couples loop their arms loosely, though the knot between them is tied deeply elsewhere. When she grows tired, she moves Franklin over and climbs up onto the bed with him. He has blankets up to his chin. He has lost his eyelashes and his eyes have receded back into the sockets, dark pools with no understanding. She lays her arm over him and thinks of peas in a pod, buttons in buttonholes, her crochet hook with the thread wound tightly around it.

That's how Carlene and Ham find them when they arrive at the house bringing the surprise three-foot spruce. Carlene walks over to the bed, appalled, her mother dwarfing her father as she has never seen before. And Netta's freckled arm pinning Franklin as sure as ground ropes.

When Netta wakes up, Carlene wants to give her hell, but she steadies and calms herself and gives Netta the Christmas tree she and Ham have brought instead. “See how it's nice and full all the way around,” Carlene says, holding the top of the tree and spinning it so that a few dry needles go flying.

The tree sits there undecorated, untouched. Day after day Netta often looks over at it and Christmas has never seemed so small to her. The tree barely reaches to her waist, won't hold more than a handful of ornaments. It's not like the trees they used to have—bushy ten-footers, trunks thick as a thigh.

In the weeks before Christmas, in the stone-cold winds that sweep down from the north, Boise gets lively. Rum-filled carolers totter from house to house. Quiet holiday cocktail parties mushroom into entire block parties. Stray crepe paper and tinsel blow down the streets in the early mornings. The mood infects Netta and even Carlene. Netta gives herself a holiday goal: to get Franklin to sit up. She starts out small—five minutes at a time—the surgi-bed cranked up and
Franklin secured with a soft rope of dish towels. His head droops miserably to one side or the other, but Netta knows she can't have everything all at once. When she has him up, she sets an empty coffee cup on his lap, stands back, and the results are impressive. To her, enough hope, an empty cup, and their lives are back again.

Carlene doubles her efforts on the days she spends with her father. She gives him short, hushed pep talks: “Go on. There's not a thing to be afraid of.” She turns his head to the side so that he has to see out the window, so that he can't avoid the broad, welcoming sky. Cones of incense burn around him, the sweet smoke nudging him away.

What is usually a flurry to get the shopping done and the gifts wrapped becomes just Netta and Carlene moving frantically around the old man, cranking his bed up and down, bringing their separate messages to him: stay, go. Netta plies him with raw cookie dough and spoonfuls of half-cooked divinity, sings for him and dances—as well as she remembers how. Carlene brings him clear broth and melba toast and lays a warm cloth on his forehead.

It's finally Ham who decorates Netta's Christmas tree when he sees it won't get done otherwise. He goes for something novel—he can see that this is no ordinary year, no run-of-the-mill Christmas. At a nearby Sprouse Reitz, he chooses plastic chili peppers and little white lights. He is slow and meticulous with the spruce, taking all of an afternoon to arrange it.

Ham gathers everyone that night for the tree's unveiling. He springs for pizza, and even before the tree is lighted Netta's house is full of the celebratory smell of pepperoni, rich and spicy. Drake has been allowed to come; he sits at Carlene's side and gulps the oily pepperonis that she tears off her pizza for him.