Thumbsucker (7 page)

On the drive to St. Paul we discussed the Johnson essay.

“I want to work in the word ‘gamine,’ ” said Audrey. It was snowing and we were driving behind a sand truck whose amber warning light strobed her face and hair and made her look like an actress in a suspense film.

“I prefer ‘petite.’ ”

“Petite’s a commonplace.”

“Miniature?”

“Too technical. Too awkward.”

“Wee?” I said. “Pint-size? Trim?”

“You’re just confusing me.”

Confusing her was the essence of my plan. Last night, I’d let myself picture Audrey’s dream date in greater detail than before, and I was terrified. I could see the blue tropical cocktails on the bar as Johnson led Audrey across the nightclub’s dance floor through a crowd of partying celebrities: Burt Reynolds kissing a teenage fashion model, Joey Heatherton hugging an NFL receiver.

“We’re taking the wrong approach,” she said. “Instead
of getting hung up on language, Justin, imagine you’ve never seen me. We’ve never met. You round a corner and there I am, in front of you. And what strikes you first is …?”

The exercise was difficult. I tilted my head to change my perspective and tried to see Audrey anew, as a stranger. Her skin, I noticed, was darker than I realized, as though she had a trace of Indian blood, as well as surprisingly moist and shiny. Pores loomed. Freckles. Blackheads. Oily spots. In school I’d been taught that the skin is an organ—a kind of stretched-out liver or kidney—but only now did this idea make sense to me.

“Talk,” Audrey said. “Describe. Immortalize.”

I was thinking of fancy words for Audrey’s skin tone when I noticed the tendons in her hands, fanned like the wire ribs of an umbrella. Her fingers were beautiful, too. Like the idealized fingers on the Knox box, they curved and tapered perfectly, ending in bladelike crimson nails that I could see my reflection in.

I knew it then: the winning essay would focus on hands and fingers. It was obvious.

“You’ve got it,” Audrey said. “You’ve solved the puzzle.”

“It’s just a thought. It’s stupid.”

“Go ahead.”

“When are we going to find a pharmacy?”

“As soon as you stop stalling me. Let’s hear it.”

Grit from the sand truck rained against the windshield.
I pictured Audrey sitting on a hotel bed as Johnson splashed on cologne in his beach house, preparing for their evening out. A towel was tied loosely around his narrow waist and even the tops of his feet were darkly tanned.

“Fine. No cough syrup,” Audrey said.

I stiffened. Everything inside me reversed itself.

“I think you ought to write about your hands.”

“What about them?” Her voice was low, excited.

“You have to promise me that if you win you won’t forget who helped you.”

“Promise,” she said.

A minute later, I’d told her everything, betraying myself for a mild narcotic. Idiot.

We wrote the essay at lunch in a department store. The cheese in my French onion soup disintegrated as Audrey took my dictation. I was flying. I’d snuck some cough syrup into my Pepsi and suddenly I felt lyrical, fearless, my brain a lubricated spool of words. I described Audrey’s hands folding laundry, forming piecrusts, stroking hospital patients. They turned pages in hymnals and helped deliver newborns.

“Let’s change hymnals to novels,” Audrey said. “We don’t go to church.”

“Write ‘hymnals.’ Take my word for it. A little religion makes a person sound modest.”

The waitress whisked away my untouched soup and set down two Reuben sandwich platters. Audrey laid her pen aside and drew out the frilly toothpick from a sandwich half. Our table was on a balcony overlooking the perfume floor, and I could smell lilies, cinnamon, and vanilla mixed with the salty odor of corned beef.

“It doesn’t sound like me,” said Audrey. “That’s the whole point, the whole dream: that he’d like
me
.”

“Johnson’s not judging the contest. Knox is.”

“Good point. I forget that. I’ll owe you one for this.”

“No problem,” I said.

“I mean it. This must feel strange, helping your mother refine her image.”

“It does.”

Audrey picked up a sandwich half and nibbled at the overhanging sauerkraut. According to my changed idea of things, helping her with her entry was in my interest, regardless of the outcome. If she lost, as was likely, she’d know I’d stood behind her. And in the event she won, which seemed impossible, she’d know that the credit belonged to me, her son, and not to herself for being smart or special. She’d feel humbled, grateful, in my debt.

“The point,” I said, “is to show your hands in action and not just describe their appearance. That’s our gimmick.”

“I still like my scar idea. This seems conventional.”

“Trust me on this. I’ve really thought about it.”

Audrey wedged a nail between her teeth and picked out a bit of sauerkraut and nodded. She pushed away her plate and got the pen.

After Audrey submitted her essay, I started seeing Don Johnson everywhere: profiled in magazines, posing on billboards, pitching aftershave on TV commercials. I’d always assumed, without giving it much thought, that somewhere in America there was a border between famous people like him and people like us, but I wasn’t sure how far away it lay or how easy it was to cross. If Audrey made it to the other side, there was no telling when she’d come back, if ever. The only person I knew who’d made the trip was a gorgeous blonde high school senior named Jeanna Meade who’d left for Los Angeles three years ago, appeared in a soap opera for a couple of months, and never been heard from since. Her parents had closed their motel and gone to find her and they had vanished, too.

One night Mike and Audrey attended a seminar on marketing upscale vitamins and supplements and Joel and I stayed up late and watched a talk show. Johnson was a guest. Women shrieked as he strode onstage, his collar open, his trousers loose and flowing, and when he sat down beside the other guest—a female singer with a double chin and long false eyelashes that looked like bat wings—she hiked up her skirt and fiddled with her blouse buttons.

“Do you always have this effect?” the host asked Johnson.

Johnson shrugged. The actress clutched her heart. She rolled her eyes and pretended to be fainting.

“Medic!” the host yelled. “We need a medic here!”

As the waiting period went on, Audrey developed a certain swagger, as if merely mailing the essay had transformed her. She made pizza night a weekly ritual. Tasks that I knew she’d been putting off, she suddenly dove into, such as talking to Joel about sex. Instead of teaching him as she’d taught me—with the help of college nursing texts that made the sexual organs look like plants—she used the new
Penthouse
. I wondered where she’d bought it.

I grew bluer and moodier by the day. Though I’d come to believe that Audrey would lose the contest, one scene that I’d imagined from her dream date seemed bound to haunt me always: Johnson filling glasses of champagne while Audrey applied mascara in a compact mirror. Whether this moment ever came to pass didn’t matter now that I knew the truth: Audrey’s life with us was a compromise, a sham.

To ease her dissatisfaction, I pampered her. At night, when we watched TV, I rubbed her shoulders, digging into the muscles with my thumbs. I watered her plants and washed and waxed her car and plumped up the sofa cushions before she sat on them.

One day she said, “You’re all over me. Get off.”

“Your neck looks tight. I thought I’d rub it down.”

“I can rub down my own neck. Get away.”

I went to the kitchen, where Mike was cleaning walleyes. He’d been ice fishing on Elkhorn Lake. His thermal undershirt glittered with bloody scales as he poked a fillet knife into one fish’s throat, then pulled straight back. Dark guts came tumbling out.

“You’re spilling blood on Audrey’s clean tile,” I said.

Mike dropped a paper towel on the floor and wiped it around with his foot.

“You’re making it worse.”

Mike rinsed his bloody hands in the sink and dried them on a white dishcloth.

“You’re going to lose her.”

Mike hung the cloth on its hook and stared at me. “What’s going on?”

“You’ve given up,” I said. “You talk about all these couples getting divorces and then you treat your own wife like she’s a cleaning lady.”

I said nothing more, but Mike seemed to get my message. A few days later, for no special reason, he came home with flowers and a box of candy and took Audrey out to the Hund, a German restaurant with a strolling accordion player. They returned after midnight, which thrilled me. I’d waited up. I listened to their voices in the hallway.

“Well, I think he’s cute.”

“He’s a homo.”

“Women love him.”

“My mother loves Liberace, for God’s sake. If anything, that’s
proof
the guy’s a fruit.”

I heard my parents’ bedroom door close and then, a few minutes later, it opened again. Mike appeared in my bedroom, shirtless, shaking. He stood at my footboard and glared, his hands in fists.

“Get up,” he said. “I know what you’ve been up to.”

“She asked for my help. I had no choice. You’re drunk.”

“You bet I’m drunk. I have a right to be.”

I shrunk back against the headboard as Mike sat down and slapped the edge of my mattress with one hand.

“You’re right, I don’t deserve her. Never did.” He unraveled a thread from my blanket’s satin border and wound it around one finger like a tourniquet. “I played on her sympathy. She felt sorry for me. A linebacker with a limp. She ate it up. Then the limp went away and I had nothing to offer her.”

“It’s not just you,” I said. “It’s Joel and me. We have to make more of an effort.”

“She dreams,” Mike said. He tightened the thread. His fingertip turned white. “Still, you’d have thought she’d have better taste.
Don Johnson?
”

“He dresses well.”

“It’s my fault. I’ll do better. Maybe she was right to play this game with me. Maybe I’ve let things slip further than I realized.”

Mike opened his arms and leaned his weight against me. The hug was hot and soggy. I didn’t like it. I pushed him back but he only held me tighter, squeezing the air from my lungs. Such force, such mass. I wondered sometimes how my mother stood it.

The manila envelope looked official. In its cellophane window I read the words: “Audrey Cobb, You’re a Winner! Claim Your Prize!”

I stashed it unopened in a dresser drawer and tried to continue normally with my day, but every time I looked at Audrey my mind said good-bye. I watched her do the laundry, measuring out detergent and setting dials. She matched up my socks and tucked them into balls and tossed them free-throw style into a basket. I happened to know from reading certain magazines that women were tired of performing such chores for men and that the day was coming when they’d quit doing them.

When I finally handed over the contest envelope, resigned to yet another defeat from a world that seemed determine to strip me bare, I saw Audrey’s eyes go dewy. She ripped it open.

“I don’t believe this!” She slid the letter out. She flattened it on the table and started reading.