The Monster Variations (8 page)

James opened the cereal but could not imagine eating. He had disobeyed his parents and they had caught him. His stomach churned and shook, and he needed to use the toilet. But he was not ready to give in, not quite yet.

“I was rather surprised to receive the call,” continued his mother, “because of course I thought you two were over at Willie’s.”

“Keep your eye on the donut,” his father said flatly, his eyes never leaving the numbers. He fished a pen from his ink-stained shirt pocket. “You screw up now, it’ll set you on the wrong path for high school, and that’s the launch pad for college. That’s all it is, kid, nothing more.”

James sighed, taking care to make it sound authentic. “I know.”

His mother arched an eyebrow as he busied himself with arranging the correct proportion of milk to cereal—without Louise around, it was easy to pour too much of both. His father continued computing his lists of numbers; James could see the mental mathematics tug at his eyes. This was nearly every weekend in the Wahl house: his father consumed with his work and his mother struggling to fill the domestic void left by Louise, who was off on weekends. James remembered when he was very little watching his mother try to hang laundry on a windy
day. It was a chore she had not been required to do as a youth, and as a young wife it was something at which she had no facility. James remembered the brisk wind and how the snapping sheets fought his mother’s grasping hands, spinning and thickening until she stood defeated before the twisted, anguished cords. Shortly thereafter they hired Louise, a trained nurse who just happened to be an excellent cook and housekeeper.

Weekends also meant no talking about the hit-and-run driver, Louise’s favorite topic. The ex-nurse was chatty by nature and happily oblivious to other people’s discomfort, and so during the week they often discussed over dinner the ongoing hunt for the killer. With Louise gone, it was verboten. James had the notion that his parents found the subject too vulgar for their table. Unless, of course, they were complaining about how much everyone else in town talked about it—that was fair game. James tried to understand. He knew that neither of his folks had living parents of their own; he had also formed the impression that before he was born there had been other babies who had died while still inside his mother. He was all they had, James knew it. There was no one else left to make them proud.

“So you feel like telling me where you were?” his mother asked.

James sighed again. He and Reggie had come up with an excuse on the way home and now was the time to try it. “Willie and me—”

“Willie and I,” his mother corrected.

“Willie and I ended up staying at Reggie’s,” he said, doing his best to appear sincere. His mother raised her eyebrow higher. “Don’t worry,” he added, “we were inside before curfew.”

James glanced at his father and was surprised to see that his father’s eyes had stopped moving. In fact, his entire face and body had gone rigid. This was alarming—although his dad was deadly serious about focusing on the donut, he also took pleasure in James’s occasional misbehavior, often comparing it with his own wild escapades, most of them set in college, before hastily changing his tone and adding an obligatory “mind your mother.” Normally his father would have shrugged off an offense like last night’s curfew-breaking, but this time something was different. Something about the mention of Reggie’s house had his father on edge.

James’s mother scrutinized her son’s face. He stared down at his cereal and lodged some more in his mouth, his stomach squirming.

“You can call Reggie’s mom and ask her,” he said between crunches. This was his secret weapon: he knew his mother hated calling Reggie’s mom. Not only did James’s mother think Reggie Fielder was a bad influence, but she also seemed to have a low opinion of his mother. Once James had overheard her saying that “every guy in town” knew Kay Fielder. James knew the reason was something more than the fact that she worked at a restaurant. He had seen plenty of boyfriends come and go from Ms. Fielder’s life, including two significant
enough to compel her to move both herself and Reggie into the men’s houses before moving back out a few months later.

James was not sure his gamble would pay off. His mother looked suspicious. Maybe it was because it was the weekend—his mother grew bolder in the absence of Louise—but all at once James could quite clearly envision his mom calling up Ms. Fielder, not caring for one second that she was probably waking her up. He felt a familiar panic that the road map of his life, so carefully drafted by his parents, was in jeopardy. He thought mournfully of his mother’s scrapbook. While his early years were thick with baby announcements, baptism notifications, school chorus programs, and tennis camp certificates, around age ten he appeared to have stagnated. Over the past couple of years only a handful of items had made the pages, leaving far too many blank for high school and college, more than he could ever fill. James felt that this was his fault—he was blowing it, he was losing traction, everything was falling down the damn hole.

He had to stop his mother from calling, and so he did something mean. He looked his mother in the eye, waited until he had her full attention, and then flicked his gaze at her scar. Immediately she covered her mouth with a hand and turned away, making a flat noise kind of like laughter, but not quite. It was the same noise she made when his father made a cruel comment about her looks, or an innocent comment that she took the wrong
way. James didn’t know how he felt being allied with his father in this fashion. All boys wanted to be grown up, he thought, but did it mean having to feel like this?

“No, I won’t call her,” his mother said. Her face looked caught, flustered, and she added as if to excuse herself, “She works late.”

She took a pinch of James’s shoulder.

“But you know how I feel about you staying there,” she said.

“Yes, Mom,” James said.

“It’s just not a good environment for children.”

“Yes, Mom,” James said.

“I know you don’t understand now, but there’s certain things you don’t need to be exposed to—”

“Goddammit.” It
was his father’s voice, loud and unexpected. “You mind your mother or I swear to you there will be grief.”

James’s mother’s hand slid from his shoulder.

“And why are you covering up your face?” he demanded of his wife. “Why do you always do that? Am I that terrible?”

There was a sound like rubber, his mother’s foot pivoting on the waxed floor. Then she was gone, moving swiftly through the house. Faraway stairs thumped, banisters creaked. James crunched his cereal for a moment, staring into the milky glow of his spoon. No one was calling anyone, he was safe, but he felt less secure than ever. He chanced a peek at his father.

His father was staring right at him. His hands were still positioned on either side of the numbers. His body had not moved an inch.

“You were at Reggie’s house last night,” he said. His voice was soft but direct.

James moved his jaw around the cereal. “Yes.”

“Reggie Fielder’s house,” his father said.

The cereal crackled inside James’s mouth.

“Last night,” his father said.

His father knew he was lying. James sat there with half-chewed cereal bloating on top of his tongue, trying to figure out where his plan had gone wrong and waiting for the trouble to start.

But his father said nothing. Instead, he lowered his head back at his numbers. After a moment he snatched up his pen and put it to paper. Ink moving too fast: it was the sound of a rattlesnake’s approach.

When James dared chew again, the noise was deafening.

* * *

When Reggie got home, his mother was on her back on the sofa, her small white feet hanging over the end. A pillow rested on top of her face. She still wore her waitress uniform; Reggie saw the multicolored splatters of other people’s food. A cigarette was dying on a dinner plate on the floor.

“Reg?” Her voice was muffled. This was how she
liked to sleep. Sometimes Reggie went for days without seeing her face.

“What.”

She yawned and weaseled her body deeper into the cushions.

“There’s chicken-fried steak in the fridge.”

Reggie looked longingly at the TV and the stereo. He wouldn’t be allowed to turn on either until his mom went back to work at eleven, a whole lifetime away. He tossed his backpack onto the grubby carpet—he barely even noticed the rustle of Mel Herman’s painting inside—and sat in the cushionless rocking chair. With his toe he shoved aside the clay ashtray he had made his mother in art class several years ago, and put his feet up on the busted heater that currently served as their coffee table. He stared at his mother’s body.

“I was at James’s house last night, in case you were wondering.”

She didn’t respond. Smoke hung in the air above her head like an empty comic book balloon.

“Actually, I was at Willie’s,” he said. He waited to see if this change in story would get a reaction.

Her toes curled, then straightened.

“Poor kid,” she mumbled through the pillow. Reggie didn’t know if she was referring to him or Willie. Over the past few years, as she had taken more shifts and responsibility at work, her interest in Reggie’s life had seemed to drift away. She resumed a momentary interest
following Willie’s accident, and for a few weeks had talked about the hit-and-run driver incessantly, badgering Reggie with questions that he was only too happy to try to answer. Reggie even brought Willie by at the beginning of the summer so his mom could gasp and shriek and ask him an almost unending series of inappropriate questions. “What was it like waking up without an arm?” “Do you feel sometimes like it’s still there?” “How much does an arm weigh? I mean, how much weight did you lose after it came off?”

It was embarrassing for Reggie, but Willie didn’t seem to mind. Then she was off to work, and had barely mentioned the hit-and-run driver since, though this could be because she heard it nonstop from diners at the restaurant. She might just be sick of it.

Reggie stood up and moved to her side. He watched his mother’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall. She was smaller than almost any mother Reggie had ever seen, and younger, too. Reggie was born when his mother was only seventeen, which meant she wasn’t yet thirty. Reggie supposed she was pretty as moms go, which explained the attraction for James and Willie, but he wished she would eat more. She got skinnier and skinnier, which made no sense—she worked at a restaurant! Reggie figured if he worked there he’d be eating burgers and fries and chocolate malts all day long.

Beneath the pillow, he could see the blond waves of her hair. She spent a lot of time in the mirror messing with it. She’d put junk in it and tie it up above her head.
Then she’d let it back down and toss it around her shoulders. Her hair was always flickering about, probably because she had a bouncy step and wore shoes with remarkable heels. When Reggie was younger and she couldn’t find a babysitter, she’d bring him to the restaurant and plunk him down in a corner booth with a stack of coloring books. Reggie, though, would spend most of the evening watching her as she bounced around the restaurant with her blond locks swinging. Reggie couldn’t believe how happy she looked, how widely she smiled at complete strangers, how loudly she laughed when they made jokes. After a while, Reggie started laughing, too. But in the car after work, there was no laughter. She sat in the driver’s seat, counting change.

“I must be an awful waitress,” she muttered.

“I think you’re really good,” Reggie ventured.

“What do you know about waitressing?” she snapped, stuffing the money into her purse. It had been a great effort for her, getting a job at one of the nicer restaurants in town. Reggie knew she worked her ass off trying to get better shifts. She spent spare time studying library books about wine. She even tried to convince her boss to class up the joint by retiring those tacky uniforms. But it seemed to Reggie that every month there was a setback—some boss dangling the position of assistant manager only to give it to someone else, some shift supervisor patting her on the butt, that hostess position they would not give to her no matter how badly she begged.

In the V-neck of the uniform, Reggie could see her chest bones. Resting on her sternum was a golden heart-shaped locket. It was green in spots. One of her hands rested alongside the locket and the fingernails were painted pink, but the polish was chipped. She wore three rings but none of them was a wedding band. She had left Reggie’s father before Reggie was old enough to remember. Now he knew only that his father was in prison and that he was never to speak of him to anyone, least of all her boyfriends, whom she went through at a relatively set pace—about one per year. She brought these men home with increasing infrequency, which Reggie appreciated even while it made him nervous: he no longer knew how serious she was getting with any of them. Now his fear was that at any moment she would announce that they were once again moving all their junk into some strange man’s house. Reggie promised himself that the next time she made such an unfair demand, he would refuse. It was that simple. He could live on his own if necessary. He could sleep in the tree house. James and Willie would bring him food. It could work.

Both of his best friends still inquired about his mom, like you would ask after an old friend who moved away. His mother had been something of a celebrity to James and Willie ever since they were little because she had treated them like equals instead of brats. She asked them about their classmates and their teachers, and didn’t hesitate to call either group Miserable Bastards or Giant
Bitches. She would let them look on as she arranged her hair, as she picked out her makeup; she’d ask them what color she should go with before squatting with them on the carpet and painting her toenails. She told James and Reggie to call her Kay, and every time they called her Ms. Fielder she crossed her eyes and pretended to gag.

Reggie hated it. He hated watching his mother, still wet from the shower and wrapped in bath towels, as she adorned herself in the clothes and hair of a movie star. It simply was not what moms were supposed to do. The whole thing was humiliating for him, but it was the “Kay” that upset him the most. She was a mother, she was “Mom,” and she was all Reggie had, and by calling her Kay, James and Willie stole even that away from him. If she really was Kay, then Mom must be dead and gone. James and Willie did not get it—they even nicknamed her Call-Me-Kay, which Kay herself found adorable—and so Reggie had no other option but to keep his friends away from the house as much as possible. James’s place, Willie’s tree house, the junkyard: all of these were better options, because Call-Me-Kay would not be there.