The top file cabinet held a half-smoked pack of Chesterfields and two empty peppermint schnapps bottles. Wanda smoked Virginia Slims. I thought of her face. She had these tiny creases of dimples that you wouldn’t notice except when she laughed. Her chest was freckle laden down to the top of her bathing suit. Below that line she was white as a kitchen sink. Her pubic hair had been eight ball black and only slightly wavy, not curly like other women I’d known. Six months ago she’d shaved herself down there. Said it made her feel cleaner.
In the bottom drawer of the file cabinet I found a litter of used condoms. They lay amongst the colored cellophane of their torn wrappers. Some had leaked come out the top onto the dark green of the drawer. Others were tied off at the mouth, like balloons.
I closed the drawer quietly, walked over to the bed, and sat, facing the wall. She’d hand lettered meaningful quotes from writers and tacked them up at eye level.
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a personal orgy.
flaubert
We need myths to get by.
robert coover
Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.
j. p. donleavy
What did this intellectual dither have to do with screwing the pool man and God knows who else in my family’s home?
I worked open the window and looked down on my backyard, with its magnolias and Georgia hackberry trees sloping to the liver-shaped pool that I would probably never swim in again. The worst of it all was they stood in a circle and urinated on her. What was that supposed to signify?
I lifted Wanda’s Smith-Corona and carried it to the windowsill, where it balanced, keys facing inward. Ever since the third grade, when Lydia gave me her Royal portable, typewriters have been my sacred objects, magic machines that produce beauty a thousand times greater than the sum of their parts. A typewriter can actually give birth.
“Sayonara,” I said, then I pushed her out the window. She bounced off the roof of the screened-in veranda, broke into two sections, and tumbled down the sloping lawn, coming to a rest in the grass, well short of the swimming pool.
***
My own room had wagon-wheel lamps, a Two Grey Hills Navajo rug, a Molesworth desk, and twin antelope heads mounted on the wall. I lay on top of the Hudson Bay four-stripe bedspread with my shoes on and stared at the ceiling. I thought about baseball for ten minutes—the ’59 Dodgers, my favorite team of all time—then I rolled over and telephoned Lydia.
Hank answered, which was out of the ordinary. He’s usually out at the ranch, irrigating and pulling calves.
“Your mother is in jail,” he said.
Why wasn’t I surprised? “Who did Lydia kill?”
“She threatened the President’s dog.”
Lydia blamed Republicans for everything from urban blight to fluoride in skimmed milk, and she’d never bonded with dogs, but this was beyond cranky feminism.
“Ronald Reagan’s dog,” Hank added unnecessarily. “His name is Rex. She sent a telegram saying if Reagan didn’t appoint a female attorney general, she would assassinate Rex.”
I looked from one antelope head to the other. As a teenager, I’d written a short story in which my antelopes’ eyes hid cameras that recorded Lydia’s movements for a team of former Nazi scientists studying defective frontal lobes in white mothers. An editor at the
New Yorker
rejected the story with a personal note saying I lacked subtlety.
“Is anyone working on getting her out?” I asked.
‘‘Maurey won’t lift a finger—says a woman who threatens dogs deserves prison. Pud and I performed a ghost dance last night.”
“I mean bail. Lawyers. Reality.”
Hank made a deep chuckle sound. He and Lydia have been a couple for twenty years, a relationship held together by Hank taking whatever Lydia says or does as humor.
“They’d let her out on her own recognizance,” Hank said, “but she won’t go.”
“Because Thoreau refused to leave jail?”
“Because the women’s cell has a black-and-white TV and the men’s is color. Lydia organized a sisters hunger strike for equality.”
Here’s a problem I could deal with. There are so few, I like to jump on them when I can. “Look, Hank, call Sheriff Potter, tell him I’ll donate a color TV to the women’s cell.”
“Lydia will claim you cheated.”
“For God’s sake, don’t tell her.”
I telephoned Dyn-o-Mite Novelty Co. and ordered a custom bumper sticker that read
As God is my witness, I’ll never be monogamous again
. Then I extracted Wanda’s Dodge Dart from the garage full of golf carts. Wanda took my Datsun 240Z. She said I owed it to her.
“It’s the least you can do after everything I gave up to support your vapid dreams the last fourteen months,” she said.
“What did you give up?”
Wanda tossed me a look of intense pity and sped off into the Carolina humidity.
I drove the Dart up Wendover Avenue through a high school parking lot to an open-ended football stadium where boys in full uniforms and helmets were running steps. Football practice is what I do whenever I’m worked up over life. I sit at the top of the bleachers and imagine the players raping Lydia. I choose five typical teenage boys and picture them on top of her, behind her, in her mouth. I picture them urinating on her nude body.
The coach stood at the bottom, wearing gym shorts and a cast on his left arm, shouting epithets of failure at the players. I got the idea they’d lost a game the night before and had been sentenced to a Saturday afternoon of running up and down the stadium stairs. The coach called the boys “girls,” meaning it as an insult.
A fat kid dripping sweat missed a step going up and fell, barking the holy hell out of his shin. He rolled on his back in intense pain, then sat on a wooden bleacher seat and looked glumly down at his bleeding leg.
The coach threw a wall-eyed hissy fit. Charged up the steps and got right in the kid’s face guard and screamed at the top of his lungs.
“You stupid homosexual pussy!” the coach screamed. “You pitiful excuse for whale shit!”
The kid didn’t react. Just sat there looking at his leg. If I’d been the fat kid I would have pushed the coach backward down the stairs and broken his other arm.
The coach slapped him. “Look at me when I talk!”
“Hey,” I said. I was sitting twenty feet or so away, atop the bleachers. “That’s no way to treat a human.”
The coach stared up at me. “This is none of your business.”
“Touch the kid again and I’ll make it my business.”
Now the kid was staring like I was a Martian.
The coach’s face wrinkled up. “Are you in administration?”
“I’m in humanity and you’re impolite. You’re an ape.”
The fat kid made it upright. “Don’t call my dad an ape.”
“Your dad?”
“He yells because I deserve it.”
My eyes passed between the two. There was a nasal resemblance. “You’re his father?” I asked.
The coach beamed with pride. “I don’t show no favoritism.”
***
A funeral procession blocked the intersection at Battleground Avenue, so I turned off my engine and waited. The cars were all big, new, and American, except for a couple of Mercedes being driven by women. I have a religious belief that dead people can read nearby minds for four days after they die, which means I’m careful at funerals. If this dead person was reading my mind as the hearse drove by, he or she, or by now it, I suppose, overheard some pretty confusing thought processes.
I was parked next to a Christian bookstore with a Kinko’s copy shop on one side and a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor on the other. Two pregnant teenagers sat on a bench in front of Baskin-Robbins, eating goop out of banana split boats. We’re talking third trimester here—beached whales.
I turned right into the Baskin-Robbins parking lot but missed the drive and jumped the curb and knocked off my muffler, which caused the girls to burst into spontaneous giggles and the Dart to roar like a sick lawn mower.
As I retrieved the bent muffler, one of the girls said, “We oughtta call the Mothers Against Drunk Driving hot line.”
The other one stopped her spoon in midair to check me for signs of drunkenness. “We’re not mothers yet.”
“I’m still against drunk driving. Have been for over four months.”
They were both short and gave the impression they had been chubby well before pregnancy. They had silver hair with black roots and dimples at the elbows that winked as they spooned triple sundaes. The only difference was complexion—the girl against drunk driving was pink and the other one came off as a dull bamboo color.
“I’m not drunk,” I said.
This made the girls laugh, and I liked them immediately. For being so large, they seemed in remarkably good moods.
“If you’re not drunk, you got no excuse,” the pink one said.
I walked over to the guardrail Baskin-Robbins had put up to keep people from driving through their plate-glass window. “I don’t have any excuse.”
“What if I’d been standing on that curb,” the pale one said. “You’d have hit me and I might have gone into premature labor.”
“Shoot, Lynette, I don’t know about you, but I’d be happy as a peach to go into premature labor.”
“Babs.”
“I’m tired of being pregnant.”
I sat on the rail with the muffler in my lap. “Can I ask you a question?”
The girls spooned ice cream and considered how to deal with me. Lynette was eating hot fudge on three various forms of chocolate while Babs had separate toppings—butterscotch, caramel, and something red—on what appeared to be strawberry, butter pecan, and creme de menthe. I immediately critiqued their personalities based on ice-cream choices and decided I’d rather be involved in Babs’s problems over Lynette’s, but they were both interesting.
“I’ll give you each fifty dollars to help me with an ethical dilemma.”
“Cash or check?” Babs asked.
“Check, but it’s good. Here, look at this.”
I talked while they studied my check guarantee card, then me. “You see, there’s this decision I have to make where I must choose right over wrong and not doing anything is a decision unto itself. I’m usually real firm about right and wrong, but this time I can’t figure out which is which. I’m lost.”
“Are you selling insurance?” Babs asked.
“Good Lord, no.”
Lynette said, “Insurance agents always start off with that innocent question stuff and before you know it they’re in your kitchen.”
“Insurance agents don’t pay fifty dollars for an answer,” I said.
That gave them cause to think. An ambulance blew by on Battleground going the opposite direction the funeral procession had taken.
“Just don’t tell Rory,” Babs said. I had no idea what that meant, but it seemed like agreement.
I folded both hands on the muffler and tried to figure a way to word the problem. “Let’s pretend the fathers of your babies did something awful. They’re both no good sons of bitches.”
Lynette could relate. “That don’t take no pretending. B. B. Swain is the evilest snake in Broward County.”
“Great. Now pretend he doesn’t know you’re pregnant.”
That’s when I lost Babs. “But Rory knows I’m pregnant. He married me in church.”
“Just pretend.”
“That’s easy for Lynette, but my Rory is an angel. He rubs my feet when I’m tired.”
Lynette’s lower lip swelled up. “She’s so smug about her having a husband and I don’t, it makes me want to throw up.” She turned on Babs. “It’s your fault I’m preggers in the first place.”
“Don’t blame me. You’re the one sold yourself cheap.”
“B. B. would have been perfectly happy with a hand job till he heard you going at it like a cat.” Lynette made her voice high and truly.
“More, more, I’m ready. I’ll do anything for you, Rory.”
“You should have used protection,” I said. I’m big on protection. Some call me promiscuous, but no one calls me a thoughtless lay.
Lynette blinked real fast. “B. B. told me he was impotent.”
Babs made a gesture like waving flies off her ice cream. “Never believe anything a boy with a hard-on says.”
“That’s God’s own truth,” I said.
Lynette started to sniffle and her eyes glistened up. “Now you got me so sad I’ll have to buy another sundae.” She stared accusingly at me. “We were having a perfectly nice time till you had to jump the curb.”
Babs said, “Yeah.”
“Let’s make it an even hundred. Each.”
Babs put her arm around Lynette. It took a minute, but Lynette finally made a sound like sucking tears back into herself and said, “Okay. We’re pretending our babies have rotten fathers.”
“And the fathers don’t know about the babies.”
“Why not?” Babs asked.
“’Cause you never told them.”
“That don’t make no sense.”
“Just pretend.”
“This is easier for me than Babs,” Lynette said. “I have an imagination.”
“I have an imagination too.”
“No, you don’t.”
Trying to talk to two women at once is exponentially harder than trying to talk to one. The nuances go on forever.
I interrupted. “Now pretend your baby has grown up.”
“How old?” Babs asked.
“Thirty-three.”
“That’s how old Jesus was when he died.”
“Hank Williams was thirty.”
“Your baby is thirty-three.”
They stopped and looked at me funny. “No need to raise your voice,” Babs said.
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re pregnant. Not deaf.” I’d heard that before.
“Here’s the question.”
Lynette tipped her boat so the melted chocolate slop ran to one end. “I thought we’d never get round to the question.”
“Should your baby who is thirty-three reveal himself or herself to his or her father?”
Lynette slurped down the goop while Babs screwed her mouth into a thoughtful line. I was charmed by them both.
“That is a question,” Babs said.
Lynette spoke with a chocolate mustache. “I’d want my baby to beat the tar out of B. B. Swain.”
“How about you, Babs?”
“Is your father rich?”
“It’s not for me. It’s an imaginary person.”
That got the girls back into a good mood. Women love to catch a man in a lie.
“Okay, it is me and I don’t know if my father is rich or not. The whole deal is complicated.”
A light came on in Babs’s face. She’d found a way to relate to the problem. “On
One Life to Live
a boy got hit by a race car and he needed a transfusion and the only person he could get it from was his real daddy.” She turned to Lynette. “Remember?”
“He was a blood type only one in a million people have.”
“Only his mama had never told anyone, not even his real daddy, who he was.”
Lynette jumped in. “So she had to tell and everyone got totally PO’ed and the real daddy’s real wife ran off to France with the man who up till that day thought he was the real daddy.”
“They were having an affair beforehand,” Babs said.
“But the boy died anyway.”
“Does that answer your question?”
“Yes.”
***
The drive home was so loud I had to roll up my windows, but then fumes seeped in from under the Dodge and I rolled them down again. People pointed at me. Children stuck fingers in their ears.
I found Gus in the kitchen, listening to the phone. From her benignly amused expression, I knew who was on the other end.
“Lydia?”
Gus nodded.
“Is she out of jail?”
Gus flared her nostrils, which is a trick I’ve tried and failed to learn for years. “You be nice to your mama.”
“I’m always nice to my mama.”
Lydia doesn’t say hello. Her way of starting a conversation is to dive in like a hawk on roadkill. “They’ll be breaking down the door soon,” she said. “Why aren’t you here to defend your mother’s honor?”
Mother’s honor—the classic oxymoron. “Did you tell me everything you know about my fathers?”
“You’d have been so proud, sugar booger. I stood up for women’s rights and the male-dominated hierarchy capitulated.”
“The TV thing?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“The reason I’m asking about the fathers is Shannon found those photographs you kept hidden in the panty box when I was a kid.”
“Sam, you are not listening. Your mother is on the lam. I expect federal agents will crash through the door at any instant.”
“Hank said they let you out on your own recognizance.”
“That was before they heard about my little social blunder.”
I waited. Lydia’s social blunders range from minor affronts to major felonies, but what they all have in common is sooner or later they cost me money.
“It’s your friend Maurey’s fault. Right from the start I said ‘Do not trust that Maurey Pierce.’ Instability runs in her family.”
“Pot calling the kettle black. What’d Maurey do?”
“She tattletaled.”
“People over twenty-one don’t tattletale. They rat.”
“She ratted. I’m an innocent victim, trying in my own meek way to transform the Earth into a better, more feminine planet.”
I changed the phone to the other ear. “Are you going to tell me what you did that was so innocent?”
“Nothing. I did nothing.”
“Okay, don’t tell me.” Lydia generally won’t release information until someone tells her not to.
“As a joke, I FedEx’ed Rex a poison chew toy.”
“Rex, the dog?”
“Hank told Maurey and Maurey called the Secret Service.”
I considered the implications—cost times bother times time, “How do you poison a chew toy?”
“Soak it in Raid for two days, then sprinkle on some crushed d-Con.”
What could I say? My mother thinks she can improve the world by assassinating famous dogs. “This is all very interesting, Lydia, but about my fathers.”
“Forget the phantom fathers, your actual mother needs sympathy. Now.”
“Remember when you drove Maurey and me up from Rock Springs after she almost aborted Shannon, you told us this story where Caspar was supposed to come home Christmas Eve, only he didn’t, so you invited some boys over for a party and they got drunk and raped you over and over and urinated on you and that’s how I was conceived.”
There was a long silence, which is weird for Lydia. Lydia abhors silence. “What’s the point?” she said.
“What I want to know is, did you know the names of the boys who raped you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You told us one was the brother of a school friend,” I said, “so you must have known their names.”
“God, Sam, it happened over thirty years ago. How am I supposed to remember the names of stoolheads I only met once thirty years ago.”