Sweet Talk (15 page)

U
ncle Roofer was a big, friendly, gap-toothed man, a little heavy in the handshake, hot-tempered and smiling all at once. He owned a car dealership, a filling station, and a used-car lot. He had once played football for Paul Brown. When they talked about Uncle Roofer’s drinking problem, the members of my family always said that Roofer had never got past football. “Once you’ve played football for Paul Brown, you can’t go back to northern Ohio and sell family cars,” they said.

Uncle Roofer was a diabetic who drank bourbon.

Uncle Roofer was an alcoholic who ate lithium for lunch.

One day Uncle Roofer and the bourbon and lithium got into the same car and drove to a Browns game in Cleveland. On the way back, they met a concrete retaining wall.

We were living in Oklahoma then and had to fly back to Ohio for the funeral. My grandmother was living alone in Killbuck, Ohio, at number 7 South Mad Anthony Street. The street was named for General Mad Anthony Wayne, who had won the Battle of Fallen Timbers and secured the Northwest Territory against the Indians so that white settlers could take the land. When the origin of the street name was explained to me as a child, I had always got the impression that Mad Anthony Wayne had fought that battle on behalf of our family as if the white frame house on South Mad Anthony were already standing above the brick street and awaiting the arrival of our people from the East.

The year that Uncle Roofer died my grandmother still had twenty years left of her life and was trying to figure out whether she could live alone with a bad hip, held together with steel pins, one leg now three inches shorter than the other and projecting slightly from her body at a strange angle. She had to take a bus to get to the town where my uncle had lived. When I think of her making that long rocking trip in autumn, over the hills that held the Killbuck Valley, into the fertile lake plain up north, when I think of her traveling by bus to the funeral of her only son, I think of how her leg must have stuck out into the aisle, of how she must have tried to pull it close to the seat whenever someone brushed by on the way to the bathroom. I think of how
in her lap was a large black purse, hugged to her body against the sway and saw of the bus. It was late October, and she had brought sugared marshmallow Halloween candy for the grandchildren she would see at the funeral. From time to time, she touched the big purse in her lap and opened it to see if the marshmallow had been squashed during the trip. When we met her at the bus station, she smiled with joy at seeing the living.

“Look here,” she said. “I’ve been thinking of you.” She smoothed the cellophane lids of the boxes and handed them to me and my brother, each box containing twelve orange-and-black marshmallow cats. In our hands, we could feel the heat of her body on those boxes. By then my brother and I no longer ate marshmallow cats. We looked at each other with a secret gaze that said we would just have to pretend that we were still young enough to love that sweet-sweet candy, brought so far and with such care, by our grandmother on the day she had come to bury her only son.

After the funeral, we drove my grandmother back to the Killbuck Valley in a Lincoln Continental we borrowed from Roofer’s bankrupt dealership. The car had push-button windows and leather seats, which made us feel prosperous. No one mentioned Roofer, his good looks and his promise, his rise and decline, the possibility that his death was a suicide, a form of giving up. Instead, we listened to my father explain the Wisconsin glaciation, how it scoured the topsoil from
Canada, gouged out the Great Lakes, and dropped all the good soil exactly where both sides of our family someday were going to live. Everyone nodded and listened and looked appreciatively out the windows, even my grandmother, who still was using two hands to hold the big black purse on her lap. Then my father got to the Ordinance of 1787, which drew straight lines where the roads would be, put a grid across swamps, sliced through hills, walked on water.

“Look at this roadcut,” my father said. “Only a man sitting in Washington would draw a road through here.”

He was detouring through the valley, taking the long way home, leaving the state road for a county road and a county road for a narrow curving road that followed a creek bed. “Now this road is a different story,” my father said. “This road follows an old Indian trail. This road was built by pioneers who had the good sense to read the land.”

“I guess you know we’re part Indian,” my grandmother said.

“No,” my mother said. “What part is that?”

“We’re part Wyandot,” my grandmother said.

“You never told me,” my mother said. “Who was Indian?”

“I’m full of surprises,” my grandmother said.

“Was this one of the Indians Mad Anthony Wayne ran out of Ohio?” my brother said.

“It was my great-great grandmother,” my grandmother said.

“I guess she wasn’t at the Battle of Fallen Timbers,” my brother said.

“I don’t know much about her,” my grandmother said. “She’s dead.”

“The Wyandots knew how to plan a good road,” my father said.

“Nobody ever tells me anything about my own family,” my mother said.

“I guess the Battle of Fallen Timbers was sort of like the Civil War,” my brother said. “Our own people took the land away from some of our other own people.”

“I always thought that it was Roofer who got the Indian blood,” my grandmother said.

“The Battle of Fallen Timbers was nothing at all like the Civil War,” my father said. “It was a skirmish on the frontier.”

“You could see it in his face,” my grandmother said. “He had high cheekbones. You could see it in his eyes sometimes.”

“He did have high cheekbones,” my mother said. “That’s what made him so handsome.”

Actually, Roofer had had chestnut-red hair and pink skin, an Irish look, but thinking of him as we swung across the valley and saw the tower of the courthouse appear through the trees, I began to think of Roofer as a Wyandot hunting bear and marking trails. There
seemed to be agreement all through the car that Roofer had had high cheekbones and might have got the Indian gene my grandmother carried. We were all nodding thoughtfully as we pulled up before number 7 South Mad Anthony and noticed the chipping and alligatored paint on the old house. I knew that my brother and I were going to hurry upstairs to look in the vanity mirror and try to discover whether we looked like Wyandots. We got out of the car in silence and in that moment we concluded forever our family discussion of who Roofer had once been. We consigned him to history, as remote and faint as an old Wyandot trail. In the future, whenever we invoked his name, it would be in a kind of terse code: “Oh, that’s the kind of car Roofer used to sell.” “That’s the kind of play Roofer used to run.” These sentences always implied a larger story, but for us, when we were in the company of family, Roofer’s story had become untellable.

S
ometimes Marguerite likes to sit in the closet. It’s late afternoon and Francis isn’t home yet. John and Barbie are on their elbows in front of the TV screen, the casserole’s in the oven, the walk’s shoveled, there’s salt on the driveway, and Marguerite is sitting in the back of the closet on an old feather tick and enjoying the smell of oranges stuck with cloves. This morning there was a blizzard, which kept the children home from school, and when it stopped snowing it was still too cold to let them go out to play.

“Why can’t we?”

“You want your feet to turn to ice?” Marguerite said. “You want your nose to fall off?”

First they argued about slap jack, and Barbie screamed because John hit her hand every time she reached for the stack of cards. Then they fought over
the talking Kalculating Kat, and John screamed because Barbie lifted the register grille and dropped the Kalculating Kat into the aluminum furnace duct. Barbie had to go to her room for an hour, and John spilled a five-pound sack of flour on the kitchen floor when he tried to make chocolate-butterscotch-raspberry-mint pancakes. Marguerite at the time was in the basement taking apart the aluminum duct. So it went. But now John and Barbie are laughing in front of the TV as cartoon birds are flattened by falling safes and cartoon dogs are blown apart by bombs that look like bowling balls. Marguerite can hear the sounds of wonderful catastrophe coming from the living room. It is good to be upstairs, sitting in the tropical darkness of the closet.

“Hey, Mom!”

What she wanted was a ten-minute snooze of an interlude. Instead she scuffles along under the palmy fringe of hanging pants and the door opens before she can stand up.

“Hi, sweetie,” she says to John. “What do you want?”

“What are you doing in the closet?”

“Just looking for an old pair of boots.”

“No, you’re not.” John opens his eyes wide like a storybook wolf. “You’re hiding.”

“What do you want, honey?”

“I caught you.
You were hiding and I caught you
.”

“Did you want anything in particular, sweetheart?” Marguerite is still on her hands and knees, looking up like a dog at her seven-year-old son.

John frowns with unusual seriousness and says, “You better come quick. Barbie cut off her toe.”

“How could you? How could you do this to your own mother?”

The blood is red poster paint, and the amputated toe is a piece of cat dung they pulled out of the litter box. There is a wail in Marguerite’s voice, something fierce and primeval. Barbie begins to cry. She rubs paint into her eyes and cries harder.

“I’ll get the sponge,” says John, already on his way to the kitchen.

“You certainly will.”

She takes Barbie up the stairs to the bathroom. Barbie is four years old, not easy to carry anymore. When they get to the landing, Barbie stops crying and says, “Mommy, look what you did.”

Marguerite turns around. There is a wiggly red streak, from the bottom of the steps to the landing, where Barbie’s painted foot has brushed against the wall. “Fine. Now we’ve got painted wallpaper to go with our painted carpet.”

Marguerite is twenty-nine years old. She is not quite tall, not quite thin, and not quite blond. In high school
she played second clarinet in the concert band. In college, she was treasurer of the Environmental Action Society. When she tries to think of the achievements in her life, she can think of nothing to boast about, not even some little thing that it would be pleasing to have slip out at a party. (“I didn’t know that Marguerite was a
skydiver
!”)

“The phone,” says John. “Daddy.”

“Will you go in there with Barbie and see if she can keep her head above water for two minutes?”

Standing by the wall phone in the kitchen, Marguerite looks through the window and watches the wind shake the stiff branches of an oak tree. The snow is gray, the sky is gray, and on the low gray hill that used to be part of a pasture, she can see the skeletal frames of four new houses. When she was a child, her parents’ backyard adjoined a small woods where she used to play. The woods is now a shopping mall. The parking lot of the shopping mall is famous for its drug deals.

“Generally a lousy day,” Francis is saying, but there are no broken nerve ends in his voice, no frayed tendons. “I’m calling to tell you where I am.”

“Acapulco?” she says. “Brazil?”

Francis laughs. “I’m at a place called Mighty Mike’s Mobil Station and Auto Parts.” Francis loves all gas stations and all auto parts. His voice sounds lush and green even though he is about to describe a car breakdown. He was driving one of the men home from work
when the car died at an intersection. They had to push it two blocks to get to Mighty Mike’s, but when they got there, the two mechanics were out on calls, so he and the man, Dean Brown, are going to see whether they can fix the car themselves out in the parking lot.

“I’ll hold dinner,” she says.

“That’s okay. We can eat out of the machines here.”

“It’s lasagna,” she says. “It’ll still be fine when you get here.”

“No, really,” he says. “I’ll be fine here.”

After they hang up, she says to herself, “And how was your day, Marguerite?” “Well,” she says to the window. “The cat climbed up the draperies and left a trail of loopy threads all the way to the top. That made my heart beat. The handle fell off the snow shovel that I had purchased at great savings from K-Mart during the Blue Light Special. There was the Kalculating Kat problem, the floor fiasco, and the imaginary missing bloody toe. If I had somebody to tell these things to, I think I could make them into good stories.”

Here is the cheerful almost-family scene. John, Barbie, and Marguerite are playing Parcheesi at the kitchen table. Everyone had two helpings of lasagna and no one has a cold. The cat is in the fourth chair, fat and sleepy, seventeen pounds of Kitty Meat Bites. Outside it is dark and the wind skims down the hill and throws puffs of grainy snow at the windows, but here a warm
light glows near the yellow walls and begonias bloom red on the windowsill as two children in homemade robes grow sleepy over a Parcheesi board.

“You
cheated
,” John says to Marguerite. “You moved your man eleven spaces and you only rolled a ten.”