Small Great Things (10 page)

Clarice's feet move away from my range of view, and then I feel cool air on my legs as she begins to massage my left calf. “My mother got me this treatment for my birthday,” I say.

“That's nice…”

“She is a big fan of moisturizing. She actually said that it wouldn't kill me to not have dinosaur hide for skin if I wanted my husband to stick around. I pointed out that if lotion was what was keeping my marriage intact I had a much bigger problem than whether or not I had time to schedule a massage…”

“Ms. McQuarrie?” the therapist says. “I don't think I've ever had a client who needed a massage quite as much as you do.”

For some reason, this makes me proud.

“And at the risk of losing my tip, I also don't think I've ever had a client who was so bad at getting a massage.”

This makes me even prouder. “Thanks,” I say.

“Maybe you could just try…to relax. Stop talking. Clear your mind.”

I close my eyes again. And start going over my to-do list in my head.

“For what it's worth,” I murmur, “I'm bad at yoga too.”

O
N DAYS WHEN
I work late and Micah is still at the hospital, my mother picks Violet up from school. It's a win-win-win—I don't have to pay for a sitter, my mother gets time with her only grandchild, and Violet adores her. No one throws a tea party like my mom, who insists on using her old wedding china and linen napkins and pouring sweet tea from the pot. I know, when I come home, that Violet will have been bathed, read to, and tucked in. There will be leftover lemon drops or oatmeal raisin cookies from the afternoon's tea party, still warm inside a Tupperware. My kitchen will be cleaner than I left it that morning.

My mother also drives Micah crazy. “Ava means well,” he is fond of saying. “But so did Joseph McCarthy.” He says that my mother is a bulldozer dressed as a southern belle. In a way, this is true. My mother has a way of getting what she wants before you consciously realize you've been played.

“Hi,” I say, dropping my briefcase on the couch as Violet launches herself into my arms.

“I finger-painted,” Violet announces, holding her palms up to me. They are still slightly blue. “I couldn't take the picture home yet because it's still wet.”

“Hey, sugar,” my mother says, coming out of the kitchen. “How was your day?” Her voice always makes me think of heliotrope and a convertible ride and the sun beating on the crown of your head.

“Oh, the usual,” I tell her. “I didn't have a client try to kill me today, so that was a plus.” Last week, a man I was representing in an aggravated assault charge tried to strangle me at the defense table when the judge set bail unusually high. I'm still not sure if my client was angry, or planting a seed for an insanity defense. If it was the latter, I sort of have to give him props for thinking ahead.

“Kennedy, not in front of the C-H-I-L-D. Vi, honey, can you go get Grandma's purse?” I set Violet on her feet, and she sprints into the mudroom. “You know when you say things like that it makes me want to get a prescription for Xanax,” my mother sighs. “I thought that you were going to start looking for a real job when Violet went to school.”

“A, I do have a real job, and B, you're already taking Xanax, so that's a specious threat.”

“Must you argue
everything
?”

“Yeah. I'm a lawyer.” I realize then that my mother is wearing her coat. “Are you cold?”

“I told you I couldn't stay late tonight. Darla and I are going to that counterdance to meet some silver foxes.”

“Contra dance,” I correct. “Number one, ew. Number two, you never told me.”

“I did. Last week. You just chose not to listen, sugar.” Violet comes into the room again and hands her her purse. “That's a good girl,” she says. “Give me a kiss now.”

Violet throws her arms around my mother. “But you can't go,” I say. “I have a date.”

“Kennedy, you're married. If anyone needs a date, it's me. And Darla and I have big plans for just that.”

She sails out the door and I sit down on the couch. “Mommy,” Violet says, “can we have pizza?”

I look at the sequined shoes on her feet. “I've got a better idea,” I tell her.

“
W
ELL!”
M
ICAH SAYS,
when he sees me sitting at the table of the Indian restaurant with Violet, who has never been anywhere fancier than a Chili's. “This is a surprise.”

“Our babysitter skipped town,” I tell him, and I glance sidelong at Violet. “And we are skating the thin edge of DEFCON Four, so I already ordered.”

Violet is coloring on the paper tablecloth. “Daddy,” she announces, “I want pizza.”

“But you love Indian food, Vi,” Micah says.

“No I don't. I want pizza,” she insists.

Just then, the waiter comes over with our food. “Perfect timing,” I murmur. “See, honey?”

Violet turns her face up to the waiter, her blue eyes wide as she stares at his Sikh turban. “How come he's wearing a towel?”

“Don't be rude, sweetie,” I reply. “That's called a turban, and that's what some Indian people wear.”

She furrows her brow. “But he doesn't look like Pocahontas.”

I want the floor to open up and swallow me, but instead, I paste a smile on my face. “I'm so sorry,” I tell the waiter, who is now unloading our dishes as quickly as he can. “Violet…look, your favorite. Chicken tikka masala.” I spoon some onto her plate, trying to distract her until the waiter goes away.

“Oh my God,” I whisper to Micah. “What if he thinks we're horrible parents? Or horrible
people
?”

“Blame Disney.”

“Maybe I should have said something different?”

Micah takes a spoonful of vindaloo and puts it on his plate. “Yeah,” he says. “You could have picked Italian.”

I
'M STANDING IN THE MIDDLE
of the nursery my son is never going to use.

My fists are like two anvils at my sides; I want to swing them. I want to punch holes in the plaster. I want the whole fucking room to come tumbling down.

Suddenly there is a firm hand on my shoulder. “You ready?”

Francis Mitchum—my father-in-law—stands behind me.

This is his duplex—Brit and I live on one side, and he lives on the other. Francis crosses the room and yanks down the Peter Rabbit curtains. Then he pours paint into a little tray and begins to roll the walls white again, washing away the pale yellow that Brit and I brushed onto the walls less than a month ago. The first coat doesn't quite cover the paint beneath, so the color peeks through, like something trapped under ice. With a deep breath I lie down under the crib. I lift the Allen wrench and begin to loosen the bolts that I had so carefully tightened, because I didn't want to be the reason anything bad happened to my son.

Who knew there didn't
have
to be a reason?

I left Brit sleeping off a sedative, which was an improvement over the way she was this morning at the hospital. I'd thought nothing could be worse than the crying that wouldn't stop, the sound of her breaking into pieces. But then, at about 4:00
A.M
., all of that stopped. Brit didn't make a sound. She just stared, blank, at the wall. She wouldn't answer when I called her name; she wouldn't even look at me. The doctors gave her medicine to make her sleep. Sleep, they told me, was the best way for a body to heal.

Me, I hadn't slept, not a wink. But I knew it wasn't sleep that was going to make me feel better. That was going to take some wilding, a moment of destruction. I needed to pound out the pain inside me, give it a home someplace else.

With one last turn of the wrench, the crib collapses, the heavy mattress landing on my chest. Francis turns at the sound of the crash. “You all right there?”

“Yeah,” I say, the wind knocked out of me. It hurts, but this is a kind of hurt I understand. I'll have a bruise; it will fade. I slide myself out from the tangle of wood and kick at it with my boot. “Probably a piece of crap anyway.”

Francis frowns. “What are you going to do with it?”

I can't keep it. I know that Brit and I might have another baby one day, if we're lucky, but putting this crib back into a nursery would be like making our new child sleep with a ghost.

When I don't answer, Francis wipes his hands clean with a rag and begins to gather up the pieces of wood. “The Aryan Women's League will take it,” he says. Brit had gone to a few of their meetings. They were a bunch of former skinchicks who went to WIC with fake IDs and got baby formula for free, bilking the system to bring formula to women whose men were serving time for fighting for the cause.

Francis isn't much to look at now. He runs the drywall crew I work for, has a decent rating on Angie's List, and votes Tea Party. (Old skinheads don't die. They used to join the KKK, but now they join the Tea Party. Don't believe me? Go listen to an old Klan speaker and compare it to a speech by a Tea Party Patriot. Instead of saying
Jew,
they now say
Federal government
. Instead of saying
Fags,
they say
Social ilk of our country
. Instead of saying
Nigger,
they say
Welfare
.) But in the eighties and nineties, he was a legend. His White Alliance Army had as much clout as Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance, Matt Hale's World Church of the Creator, William Luther Pierce's National Alliance, and Richard Butler's Aryan Nations. Back then he was raising Brit on his own, and his terror squad would roam the streets of New Haven with tack hammers, broken hockey sticks, blackjacks, lead pipes—beating up niggers and faggots and Jews while Brit, still a baby, napped in the car.

But when things began to change in the mid-nineties—when the government cracked down on skinhead crews—leaders like Francis found themselves strung up by their own brass balls, headed to prison. Francis understood that if you don't want to break, you have to bend. He was the guy who changed the structure of the White Power Movement from an organization to small cells of friends with common political leanings. He told us to grow our hair out. To go to college. To join the military. To blend in. With my help, he created and ran a website and message board.
We aren't crews anymore,
he'd tell me over and over.
We are pockets of discontent within the system.

And as it turned out, it was even more terrifying to people to know we walked and lived among them unseen.

I think about the Aryan Women's League taking the crib. The changing table that I got at a garage sale and sanded down. The baby clothes that Brit picked through at Goodwill, that are folded up in the dresser. The baby powder and shampoo and bottles. I think about some other baby, some
live
baby, using it.

I stand up so fast I get dizzy, and find myself staring into a mirror with little balloons painted on its frame. I'd come home from work to find Brit at the table with a brush in her hand, and I teased her about becoming Martha Stewart. She said the only thing she had in common with Martha Stewart was a record, but she was laughing. She painted a balloon on my cheek and then I kissed her, and for that one moment, holding her in my arms with the unborn baby balanced between us, everything was perfect.

Now my eyes are ringed with dark circles; my beard's started to grow in; my hair is matted. I look like I'm on the run from something.

“Fuck this,” I whisper, and I slam out of the nursery into the bathroom.

There, I find my electric razor. I plug it in and in one clean swoop mow a clear trail down the center of my head. I buzz each side, letting tufts of hair fall on my shoulders and into the sink. Like magic, as the hair falls away, a picture is revealed right on the crown of my head, just above the hairline: a thick black swastika, with my initials and Brit's forming its knotted center.

I'd gotten it when she said yes, she'd marry me.

I had been twenty-one, and pretty shitfaced at the time.

When I came to show Brit this testament to my love, she didn't even have a chance to comment before Francis walked up and smacked me hard on the back of the head. “Are you as stupid as you look?” he asked. “What part of
undercover
don't you understand?”

“It's my secret,” I told him, and I smiled at Brit. “
Our
secret. When my hair grows in no one will know it's there, but us.”

“And what if you go bald?” Francis asked.

He could tell, from the expression on my face, that I hadn't thought about that.

Francis didn't let me out of his house for the next two weeks, until all you could see was a dark shadow under my buzz cut that sort of looked like mange.

Now, I take a straightedge and some shaving cream and finish the job. I run my hand over my smooth head. It feels lighter. I notice the movement of air behind my ears.

I walk back into the nursery, which isn't a nursery anymore. The crib is gone, and the rest of the furniture is stacked in the hall. Everything else is in boxes, thanks to Francis. Before Brit is discharged this afternoon, I will haul back in a bed frame and a nightstand, and she will see it as the guest room it was a few months ago.

I stare at Francis, daring him to challenge me. His eyes trace the lines of my tattoo, like he is feeling for a scar. “I get it, boy,” he says softly. “You're going to war.”

T
HERE'S NOTHING WORSE
than leaving a hospital without the baby you went in to have. Brit's in the wheelchair (hospital protocol) being driven by an orderly (more hospital protocol). I have been relegated to bringing up the rear, a stocking cap pulled low on my forehead. Brit keeps her eyes on her hands, folded in her lap. Is it just me, or is everyone staring at us? Are they wondering what's the medical issue with the woman who doesn't have a bald head or a cast or anything else visibly wrong?

Francis has already pulled the SUV up to the horseshoe driveway of the hospital. A security guard opens the back door as I help Brit out of the chair. I'm surprised by how light she feels, and I wonder if she will just float away from me once her hands stop gripping the arms of the wheelchair.

For a moment, pure panic crosses over her face. I realize she's recoiling from the dark cave of the backseat, as if there might be a monster hiding inside.

Or a car seat.

I slide my arm around her waist. “Baby,” I whisper. “It's okay.”

Her spine stiffens, and she steels herself before ducking into the car. When she realizes that she is not sitting next to an empty baby carrier, every muscle relaxes, and Brit leans back against the seat with her eyes closed.

I slip into the front seat. Francis catches my eye and raises his brows. “How are you feeling, ladybug?” he asks, using the term of endearment he used to call her as a child.

She doesn't answer. Just shakes her head, as one fat tear snakes down her cheek.

Francis revs the engine and peels out of the hospital driveway, as if he could outrun everything that happened there.

Somewhere, in a freezer in the basement, is my child. Or maybe by now he's gone, carved open like a Thanksgiving turkey on the coroner's table.

I could tell him what happened. I could tell him the Horrible Thing I see every time I close my eyes: that black bitch beating on my son's chest.

She was alone with Davis. I overheard the other nurses talking about it, in the hallway. She was alone, when she wasn't supposed to be. Who knows what happened, when no one was looking?

I glance back at Brit. When I look in her eyes, they're empty.

What if the worst thing isn't that I've lost my child? What if it's that I've also lost my wife?

A
FTER HIGH SCHOOL,
I moved to Hartford and got a job at Colt's Manufacturing. I took a few classes at the community college there, but the liberal shit those professors dished out made me so sick I quit. I didn't stop hanging around the college, though. My first recruit was a skateboarder, a skinny kid with long hair who cut in front of a black dude in line at the student café. The nigger shoved him, and Yorkey shoved him back and said, “If you hate it here so much, go back to Africa.” The food fight that ensued was epic, and it ended with me reaching out a hand to Yorkey and pulling him from the fray. “You know,” I told him as we stood outside smoking, “you don't have to be the victim.”

Then I handed him a copy of
The Final Call,
the Nation of Islam newsletter that I'd planted on bulletin boards all over the campus. “You see this?” I said, starting to walk, knowing he'd follow. “You want to tell me why no one's marching into the black student union and arresting them for hate speech? For that matter, how come there's not a
White
student union?”

Yorkey snorted. “Because,” he said, “
that
would be
discrimination
.”

I looked at him as if he was Einstein. “Exactly.”

After that, it was easy. We'd find the kids who were bullied by jocks and interfere, so that they knew they had protectors. We invited them to hang out with us after classes, and as we drove, I'd plug in a playlist of Skrewdriver, No Remorse, Berzerker, Centurion. White Power bands that sounded like a demon growling, that made you want to mess with the world.

I made them believe they had worth, simply because of the color they were born. When they complained about anything on campus, from the registration process to the food, I reminded them that the president of the school was a Jew, and that it was all part of a bigger plan by the Zionist Occupation Government to suppress us. I taught them “Us” meant “White.”

I took their weed and molly and tossed it in the dumpster, because addicts snitched. I made them over in my image. “I've got a great pair of Doc Martens,” I told Yorkey. “They're just your size. But there's no way I'm passing them on to a guy with greasy hair in a man bun.” The next day, he showed up with his hair neatly trimmed, his scruff shaved. Before long, I'd created my own wilding squad: the newly minted Hartford division of NADS.