Authors: Jill McCorkle
When it is time for good-byes and I walk them to the door, Clark tilts his head to the breeze and comments that something must be wrong with the sewer system. “You need to get that checked,” he whispers, while Nanci goes to the bathroom.
I smile and say thank you without moving my lips. Now Charles has his brother dousing plagues as well, even though their grandmother keeps pointing out that they are in the wrong holiday. I can tell she wants me to make them stop. “Blood. Guts. Puke.” They fall out laughing and I ignore all the looks. I call out cheerful good-byes and happy holidays. Then I focus on the nativity scene, where Mary pulls her coat close around her and stares up into the dark night sky. Joseph has driven away in his little green car, and now it is once again just the three of them. She breathes deeply. Behind her, within the warmth of the manger, Jesus and Spiderman are happily talking and laughing. They are swaddled in worn soft quilts while they drink eggnog and rid the world of plagues and pestilence. She ponders this in her heart and it is good. There is no place on earth she would rather be. And that is what makes this night different from all the rest.
ANOTHER DIMENSION
Ann has not been back to her childhood home in over two years, not since the death of her father, but her brother, Jimmy, has updated her on all the changes he and his new wife have made. Ann has not met the new wife but could tell from the pictures Jimmy sent at Christmas that she looks a lot like the ones before her: short, blond, young, some pedigree or another Jimmy will find worth telling. Ann’s luck with lasting relationships has been just as bad as his, the difference being she hasn’t married all of hers. “That’s because I’m honorable,” he said during his last divorce when she pointed this out. “Or stupid,” she responded, falling into the sarcastic sparring that had long ago become their way of communicating. Her first and only wedding
ring was then in place on a finger she hoped might some day plump around it, claiming permanence, as she’d once admired on an older neighbor who, after forty years, couldn’t get hers over her knuckle. The trapped ring reminded Ann of a photograph she once saw, a tree grown around and embracing a tombstone, both recognizable for what they were and yet now joined and inseparable in the most natural way. But now she is returning, post-divorce, to collect Jimmy’s
I told you so
in person or maybe to see if she
can
return. Call it tired of running. Call it an exorcism.
Right after their
mother’s death, when Ann and Jimmy were kids, their dad had dated somewhat indiscriminately. Therapists might have suggested he do things differently but he
was
a therapist and assumed he knew best. “Besides,” he said at the end of his life, hospice care and their stoic stepmother and her polished professional children in the kitchen planning the details of his funeral as well as her move to a condo in Atlanta, “your mother was dying for so long. Did anyone ever look at it from my point of view?” He was a frail abbreviated version of himself by then and yet he talked more in those last days than he had ever talked. Still, there was much left unsaid.
Their dad was
a reasonably nice-looking man, and when their mother died, he was only forty-three, five years younger than Ann is now. Jimmy had manifested his looks, the long lean legs
and nonexistent ass, which looked fine on a young guy in Levi’s but kind of pitiful on a grown man. Still, their father had a head full of thick gray hair he kept cut close and he kept himself fit by nightly sit-ups and walking the golf course from sunup to sundown every Saturday and Sunday that he could. If there was anything that appeared unattractive about him, it certainly didn’t stop the calls and indications of interest —things he said began happening the year
before
their mother died, when Jimmy was in fourth grade and Ann was in first. He never revealed their names but it left Ann with a sense of distrust for many of those who arrived with arms full of food and sympathy and, later in her life, of those who wanted to hover too close and comfort her during a difficult relationship. When their dad headed out on a date, Jimmy said things like:
At least pick one with a vertebra and opposable thumbs. One not beaten up by the ugly stick. One who won’t steal Mom’s things
.
Their mother was the real beauty of the family, or so everyone said, and she had grown more and more beautiful in these decades since her death, forever preserved in the family portrait that had hung in their dad’s waiting room, where depressed and troubled people had to sit and look at the perfect image of a perfect family. Autumn day —Pongo Lake —idyllic picnic spread: a wicker hamper draped in antique linen, bone china plate with deeppurple grapes and a thick crust of bread. Ann has often imagined the scene, striving to recall every little detail, as if studying one of those hidden pictures, looking for the missing piece, the
explanation that must be housed there, the bit of insight that has the power to pull her whole childhood together with a secure snap so that she might move forward once and for all. All that she has pulled from memory, though, is that when she lifted the basket lid, it was empty. And when she bit into one of the grapes, it was soft and rubbery, part of the artificial fruit that graced the milk-glass bowl always centered on the mahogany sideboard of their dining room. When she said she was hungry her mother said they were just there for the photograph and promised they would stop somewhere on the way home. Ann begged for the E&R Drive-In, a place famous for foot-long hotdogs and the little order boxes like parking meters at each spot. But she can’t remember if they stopped or drove straight home. She can’t remember what happened beyond sitting there in itchy church clothes, her mother’s thin cool fingers pressing Ann’s leg to keep her from jiggling, and an affected man in tight black clothing posing them like mannequins and then insisting they relax and look natural and happily joyful on this exquisite and delicious family outing.
Their dad had a few sleepovers in those early years. He thought he was being discreet but it would have been hard to miss the parade of women tiptoeing to the front door between midnight and dawn, traces of their fragrances lingering behind, on the living room sofa and on their dad’s bedspread, the one their mother had custom made complete with shams and window treatments because she hadn’t been able to find exactly what she wanted in
any of the stores. The women were probably only thirty or forty at the oldest, but in Ann’s memory, they were all old, and they all ran together, dark, light, plump, thin like funhouse mirrors, only not fun at all. Their voices went all singsongy when they saw Ann, speaking to her the way people talk to babies and kittens, sweet and fake and sometimes with gritted teeth like they could just as easily squeeze her to death like a boa constrictor.
“Major dog fight,” Jimmy often reported with a bark or a growl, Ann relying on his every thought and belief. “Hope she was fixed.”
If either said anything about the women to their dad, he blinked in a way that was distant and dismissive, like a robot being charged before quickly shifting topics. “How’s football?”
“Football sucks,” Jimmy said. “And I hate school.” Jimmy had been a star athlete in the Pony League, but nothing seemed to matter anymore.
“Well, it will improve.”
“That’s what you said about Mom two years ago,” Jimmy started laughing then —nervous, loud laughter —and as always Ann joined in. It was true after all. Their dad had never been able to tell them the truth about how sick their mother was and instead they learned from a neighbor who wasn’t even close to them but was aggressive and nosey enough to think she had the right to try and make them face reality. She said it was her Christian duty to share the truth, and she used words like
incurable, terminal
, and
heaven
, her breath sharp with the spearmint gum clenched in her teeth. Then with a loud burdened sigh and sympathetic smile, she patted their backs and handed off a long rock-hard loaf of French bread, which Jimmy later used for a Wiffle ball bat.
Back when their mother
was sick in her darkened room, they were obsessed with scary stories and movies. There was not enough manufactured fear in the world to erase the pain and sense of dread that filled their own house, but it was a way of forgetting, if only briefly. They rose early on Saturday mornings for Shock Theatre, imitating lines from
The Fly
—
help me, help me
—or walking like Frankenstein’s monster. Jimmy liked to shine a flashlight under his chin, lower jaw thrust forward like a skeleton, or pull his buttoned shirt all the way up so he looked headless. They loved
Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte
and
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
and they scoured the
TV Guide
for any mention of Hitchcock’s
Psycho
or
The Birds
. They liked the reruns of his television show, too, but their favorite show of all was
The Twilight Zone
, and in between times when they actually got to watch, they entertained themselves by recounting the episodes that scared them the most: a goblin on the wing of a plane making a man go nuts, and the Talking Tina doll that murders Telly Savalas, and the little girl who goes under her bed and rolls through an invisible hole into another dimension. That episode reinforced every fear Ann already had, darkness, being lost, the
maniac-under-the-bed story Jimmy liked to tell, the one where the girl keeps putting her hand down for her dog to lick her because if her dog licks her then everything is okay. But of course, everything was not okay and in the morning the dog was dead and there was a note that said, “Maniacs can lick, too.” It was so horrible that, when she thought of it, she forgot the way her mother looked there in the other room, the way she could barely lift a hand to touch Ann’s face, the way the room smelled heavy and overripe with bad things to come.
Ann had to leap in and out of bed for years because of the maniac and the other dimension, and even as an adult, when making the bed, she is still aware of how vulnerable her feet look there at the edge of darkness beyond the dust ruffle and spread. Sometimes she can’t help but fall to her hands and knees and look, to see whatever is lurking there before it sees her.
“What will you do if you find something?” her husband had asked a year into their marriage. The question surprised her. She had not even been aware of looking, and yet there she was crouched on all fours and peering into the dusty darkness, looking for the invisible hole where she might disappear, so aware that she was already looking for a way out, that the loose ring on her finger had not made her feel safe and connected at all. If anything, it had left her shocked and numbed by how conditional her life felt.
. . .
Not long after
their mother died, Ann and Jimmy saw a
Twilight Zone
episode where children who have lost their mother are able to pick parts to create a robotic grandmother: the eyes, the hands, the voice. It was hard to watch because the girl’s name was the same as her own, so she distracted herself by the reality beyond the show, how really the girl was Angela Cartwright, known best for getting to be a kid in
The Sound of Music
and the younger daughter on
Lost in Space
. “And look,” she told Jimmy, “the dad is really Larry Tate from
Bewitched
.” But Jimmy started crying when they were sifting through what looked like marbles, picking the right eyes, searching for those most loving and motherly. He screamed at the television that he couldn’t remember her eyes anymore, that he sometimes couldn’t remember her face or her voice, and then got furious, threatening to beat the shit out of Ann if she ever told she’d seen him cry.
When Jimmy was
in the sixth grade and Ann in the third, there was one woman their dad really liked being with. She was nothing like their mother and nothing like all the others they’d seen in what Jimmy called the “Country Club Dog Parade.” The woman was average looking, little to no makeup, frizzy dark hair yanked back in a loose ponytail, and a silver ankh around her neck. Her car was littered with thrift-shop finds and good grocery store deals. She was always appearing with things just out of style or not the real thing that she gave freely to kids
who came into the restaurant where she worked: Babette instead of Barbie, Soldier Jim instead of G.I. Joe. She always had bags of rings like you might get at the dentist office or in a gum machine, wax lips and those little wax bottles filled with sugar water. They called her “Dime Store Dodo” and then “Rosemary Looney” because she was always playing her records and singing along, “Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes,” when she came over to cook dinner, which got to be more and more often. She even did the little talking parts of the song when she thought she was all alone and staring at herself in the chrome of the toaster or the reflection in the kitchen window. She loved Doris Day, too, so Jimmy often mimicked a falsetto “Que Sera Sera” while answering the questions: “Will I be pretty?”
Hell no
. “Will I be rich?”
Only at Pine Cone Manor
(which was the county home for the poor over beside the Methodist church). He said she was Doris Day on the darkest night of her life, and though Ann laughed and went along with him, the truth was she had started looking forward to seeing Rosemary Looney and hearing her corny songs echoing through the house, smelling the familiar scent of her coat by the door like bread just baked or fried chicken. Ann practiced how to look like she was feeling nothing at all so Jimmy wouldn’t read her thoughts and get angry at her.
Rosemary worked at a restaurant downtown known for calabash seafood and hush puppies, which is where their dad said he met her, though Jimmy insisted late one night that really
Rosemary Looney was one of their dad’s patients and he’d gotten her from the state hospital the same way they’d gotten Bingo, an unruly beagle mix, from the pound. They still told their scary stories late at night, but it was getting harder and harder for Ann to listen; the images stayed with her longer now and kept her awake. Now that she could no longer wander into the room beside hers and find her mother still breathing there, it was hard to calm away the scary parts. She tried to picture her mother other ways, but like Jimmy, she found it getting harder and harder, and instead what she saw when she closed her eyes was what was left of her mother’s body closed in the dark coffin. And Jimmy wasn’t always there anymore. He got phone calls and closed his bedroom door. He spent more and more time with his friends. She wanted to think of funny stories, happy stories, but she didn’t dare tell Jimmy for fear that he wouldn’t spend any time at all with her. She just listened to his whispered stories and held tight to Bingo’s collar so he wouldn’t jump off and venture under the bed.