Thumbsucker (6 page)

Knox gelatin drink for stronger, healthier nails held an essay contest that winter on the subject of “My Most Attractive Feature.” Audrey decided to enter—as a joke, she said. First prize was a “Miami dream date” with the actor Don Johnson, “America’s swingingest vice cop.” The package included round-trip airfare, deluxe accommodations, a Palm Beach shopping spree, and dinner and drinks at a South Beach nightclub. Audrey said Mike would go crazy if she won.

The whole idea spooked me. I wanted her to lose.

One afternoon while Mike was at work demonstrating a new wide-bodied tennis racket that he’d won the exclusive regional rights to, Audrey sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad and a violet Flair pen. Instead of starting her essay, she doodled circles and swirls and diamond shapes and gazed at Johnson’s picture on the Knox box. He had dimples. His hair was a sweaty, devilish mess. He reminded me of photos I’d seen of Mike during his playing days at Michigan, except that Johnson’s eyes were narrower. The man looked untrustworthy, dangerous. A threat.

When Audrey’s coffee cooled, she poured a fresh cup, and then let that cup cool. Her doodles grew hard and spiky, angry-looking.

“Help your stupid mother,” she said. “You’ve always had a knack for things like this.”

I stood over the sink and poured myself another ruby spoonful of codeine cough syrup. I was home from school with a case of made-up flu, but the hacking cough I’d been faking since waking up had given me a genuine sore throat. The air around me boiled with filmy clouds, an effect of the syrup. My arms felt long and apelike.

“I’m sick,” I said. “I can’t think.”

“Oh, be a sport.”

Audrey was right: I was good at things like this. Once, the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
had published a letter I’d written to the editor arguing that habitual drug offenders ought to be put to work in mental hospitals. The
idea was Mike’s, from a comment I’d heard him make after his store was robbed by an employee high on angel dust; I thought he’d be pleased to see his views in print. When the letter was published, though, Mike was in Sioux City at a fishing tackle trade show, and I was too shy to show it to him later. My gym teacher read it, however, and seemed impressed, so I began to write letters on other issues, from welfare mothers to nuclear disarmament. Having no opinions of my own, I took random positions, pro and con.

Audrey flipped to a fresh sheet of paper. “I have to find something distinctive about myself. And not some cliché like my eyes or sense of humor.”

I pictured Johnson in his trademark shades helping Audrey out of a black limo. Red neon splashed his face and her bare shoulders. Around them milled a crowd of nightclub-goers in tippy high heels and loose Italian jackets.

“Your smile,” I said.

“That’s worse than sense of humor. This contest’s nationwide—we need a gimmick. Something to set me apart from all the other gals.”

It struck me that Audrey knew what she was doing and might end up meeting Don Johnson, after all.

“It’s five,” I said. “Mike could come home at any minute.”

“Shush. I’m thinking.” Audrey started writing. Her letters were steeply slanted, almost flat, and she held her
chin just inches above the page. The cane in her chair seat creaked as she bore down, but once she’d filled half a page she lost momentum.

“Aren’t you making dinner tonight?” I said.

Audrey scratched a sentence out. “I’m having Mike grab a pizza at Giorgio’s. I told him I’m weak from giving blood. Don’t snitch.”

I broke into a codeine-muffled panic. Only once had Mike let us eat pizza for dinner—a brittle, tasteless store-bought pie bought because Audrey was groggy after having her wisdom teeth removed. A rich, sticky restaurant pizza might spoil us and upset the budget Mike was trying to keep us on. Joel, who seemed to be eating for both of us now that I could barely manage a bite, would probably want one every night, and Audrey might lose interest in her kitchen duties. Even her language,
grabbing a pizza
, had taken on an alarming breeziness.

“Listen,” said Audrey, “and tell me what you think.” She flattened out the page so she could read it. “A woman’s beauty isn’t just external. Faces and figures fade. What counts is
inside
.”

“It’s good. It’s on the mark.” I felt relieved. Such corniness, I was convinced, would never win.

“Nevertheless,” Audrey continued, “the outside often
reflects
the inside, lending a shape to invisible qualities. The body is a mirror of the spirit. So it is with my scars. It’s true: my scars. I consider my scars my most attractive feature, for each one tells a tale about my life.”

My neck prickled and my earlobes heated up. This scar idea was ingenious. A winner, maybe.

“My plan,” Audrey said, “is to tell where each scar came from. For example, the time when Joel fell through the ice and I cut my legs up wading in to rescue him. Or the scar from when I was changing an IV and the patient woke up delirious and bit me.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s pretty strange. Maybe you should just write about your hair.”

“What do you mean? My hair is limp. It’s ordinary.”

“Do you have to send photos?”

“No photos.”

“So exaggerate.”

Audrey pushed out her lower lip and made a grumpy, dimpled chin. The ease with which I’d discouraged her surprised me. She set down her Flair on the pad and gazed again at Johnson’s lethal grin. “I know this seems stupid to you, but it’s important. I want to see the expression on Mike’s face. Maybe if you’re still sick tomorrow,” she said, “you could help me take another stab at it? We could drive to St. Paul, have lunch, go shopping. Brainstorm.”

I glanced at the level inside the codeine bottle: there wasn’t enough to last another sick day. Still, I felt I couldn’t run the risk of letting Audrey write the essay herself.

“If I go, can we stop at the pharmacy?” I said.

Sometimes, after a late-night ambulance call, if the call had been especially sad or bloody or if someone young had been involved, Audrey would come to my room when she got home and sit on the edge of my bed with a drink and talk about her life, her memories. It was always worth staying awake for, what she said, and if I felt my eyes closing I’d pinch myself; there was no other way to learn about her past. She hadn’t kept pictures, both her parents were dead, and her only sibling, a sister, lived in Florida and didn’t keep in touch. Her father, who’d been the team physician for the Michigan football program, hadn’t been kind to his daughters, I’d gathered, and going their separate ways when they grew up was their way of forgetting their time with him. As for their mother, they’d never really known her; she’d died of breast cancer when they were small.

The story Audrey told most often was the story of how she’d met my father. They’d come together at a Rose Bowl party when Michigan beat USC in Pasadena. Mike was a linebacker nicknamed “the Hatchet” for his low and devastating tackles. Audrey was a nursing student. Her father had brought her along to see the game, wangling her a seat on the team plane, where Mike first caught her eye. Sitting next to Woody Wolff himself and obviously a leader and a star, he wore a buzzcut, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and was actually exercising in his seat; curling a pair of dumbbells with his eyes shut. She’d never seen such concentration, she told me, or such a lean and tightly made male body. “He interested
me as a specimen,” she said. “I know that sounds cold, but I was cold back then.” She asked her father about him before the party and learned that Mike had the slowest pulse and largest lung capacity he’d ever come across.

The victory party was held outside, under the first real palm trees Audrey had ever seen. She never forgot to mention the trees. Mike couldn’t dance, so she had him to herself, and as they drank and talked he let a secret slip: he’d heard something tear in his knee during the game and was finding it hard to stand up. “That did it,” she told me. “The thought of such a perfect man in pain sent me around the bend somehow. I swooned. Here I’d been muddling along through nursing school as a way to please my dad, and suddenly up pops this god who needs my help.” In fact, Audrey told me, she sensed immediately what Mike would only decide after his surgery—his football career was finished—and it thrilled her. A man who might have cast her off if his future had played out as planned had ended up dependent on her care. They married before Mike’s senior year was out, while he was still on crutches.

I found it hard to look Audrey in the eye during these late-night chats in my bedroom. I couldn’t stand her beauty. It made me fidget. To have such a good-looking woman for a mother didn’t seem fair to me; it raised expectations for my future love life that I feared would never be fulfilled. When Audrey was my age, I felt, she wouldn’t have noticed me; the only way someone like me
could hold the gaze of someone like her was to be her child. Her son.

“You’ll always be my baby,” she sometimes said, rising from my bed after our talks, and nothing made me madder. I felt cheated. Unlike Mike and the other young men she’d known, who’d had the chance to make winning first impressions, I’d met her when I was helpless, speechless, tiny.

Wrecking her essay was my chance to get even—with her, with idols like Johnson, with the Hatchet. I wasn’t proud of myself, but there it was.

At breakfast the next morning I played sick again. I coughed into a tissue and pretended I couldn’t eat my bowl of Oat Rings, a cheap bulk cereal Mike made Audrey buy instead of Cheerios. As a retailer himself, Mike knew the cost of building national brand names, and he refused to pay the premium. He forbade us to wear Levi’s or brush with Crest or relieve our headaches with Excedrin.

Mike sipped coffee and scanned the front page as Audrey checked my glands. I couldn’t help comparing his looks to Johnson’s. Mike had the same cleft chin, a straighter nose, and his cheekbones were, if anything, more prominent, but unfortunately he hadn’t learned the trick of skipping shaving to let his stubble grow out. Touches like that were what made Johnson a star.

“They’re inflamed,” Audrey lied. “No school for you today.”

Joel shot me a jealous look and sulked. He hated school as much as I did and only attended because of sports, it seemed. He played them all, with an ease and natural grace that pointed to great achievements down the line, maybe even greater than Mike’s had been.

“I think what Justin needs is
air
,” Mike said. “He’s been indoors for two days running now.”

Audrey gave Mike a cutting look; this was an old argument between them. According to Mike, fresh air cured everything, while Audrey maintained that rest was the best medicine. All of my parents’ other disagreements, from where to go on vacation to whom to vote for, seemed to me to be versions of this one. Reagan, because he rode horses, had been the outside candidate; Carter, a scientist, the indoor man.

The debate about how to make me better continued as Mike got up from the table and put his coat on. I opened the bottle of codeine, held it high, and poured, but all that came out was a paltry thread of syrup.

“By the way,” Audrey said, “I’ll be busy all day today, so maybe you could get a bucket of chicken.”

Mike bent down to tie his shoes. “I see a pattern here. Have you stopped cooking?”

“Twice is not a pattern,” Audrey said. “Fried chicken or pizza again, it’s up to you.”

Mike snapped on his rubbers and straightened up.
“There’s another divorce on the way. The Andersons. Anna’s run off to Chicago with some gigolo.”

“The man is an accomplished sculptor, Mike. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Staying together takes sacrifice. It’s work. Certain people seem to be forgetting that.”