“I’m sorry. Boyfriends, not homos. I didn’t mean . . .”
“Gary’s my roommate.”
“Well, whatever. It’s no business of mine, right?”
“I mean, what an assumption!”
“I’m sorry. Are you mad at me? Pal?”
“No, I’m not mad at you but . . . Jesus Christ, Dolores!”
I waited past two traffic lights’ worth of silence. “I’m sorry I went to your house, okay? It’s just . . . I don’t think I can go to college. I know it would have made her happy, but I’m too scared.”
“Look at me,” he said. “Within one month you’ll be writing me a letter saying how happy you are—how glad you are you decided to go. How you’ve met this friend and that friend. I’ll bet you any amount of money.”
“I won’t make friends,” I said. “Everybody hates you if you’re fat.”
“No, they don’t. That’s an excuse you use. Don’t be hypocritical.”
“Well if you ask me, you’re the hypocrite. Buddy!”
“Stop it,” he snapped. “Cut it out!”
* * *
I sat on the front step where he’d dropped me off, composing the letter of apology I’d write. I’d write both him and Gary letters—in separate envelopes with separate stamps. Maybe they were just roommates. What did I care? I’d remind him that pals forgave pals—that my mother’s death was still messing up my head. I’d meant to tell him about that check I’d gotten from Arthur Music—that photograph of his Watchtower magazine family—but he’d rushed me out of there so fast. He’d tricked me all along with that word of his: pal. Some friendship! His white apartment—that sad singing—already seemed tunneled and distant, one more thing I’d lost.
Inside, the stairway wall had turned white and blank, with a network of veinlike cracks. Strips and pieces of the old paper littered the stairway and foyer, rustling like dead leaves under my feet.
The radio was off. “Hey?” I called. “Mister?”
I reached inside the telephone table, took out the corkscrew I’d hidden there and walked slowly toward the kitchen. If he jumped out at me from somewhere, I’d blind him.
He was sitting cross-legged like Buddha in the backyard sun. His eyes were closed; his lips moved slightly. If he was having a drug trip on our time, I’d just rip up Grandma’s check and call the cops.
Keeping an eye on him, I tiptoed around the kitchen, making myself a salami sandwich, blaming the three-quarter-inch wad of meat slices on everything I’d put up with: Mr. Pucci’s hypocrisy, the letter from Arthur Music, this freak in the backyard. I was on my second sandwich and a napkinful of Cheetos when he walked inside, bleary-eyed, without bothering to knock.
“Oh, hi,” he said. He looked at my sandwich, not me. “You got any peanut butter and a couple more slices of that bread? I been out there for fifteen minutes trying to meditate with my stomach growling.”
“How come you stopped working?” I snapped. “We’re not paying you to meditate.”
“You’re paying me by the job, not the hour,” he said, smiling. “The plaster’s got to dry before I can size it.”
I handed over the peanut-butter jar.
He ate his sandwich in the parlor, flipping the stations on Grandma’s TV. Then he came back in the kitchen and asked if he could make another one. He sang while he did it. “By the way, my name’s Larry Rosenfarb in case you’re interested.” A quarter of his new sandwich disappeared with the first bite. He chewed, smiled, swallowed. His hand disappeared inside the Cheeto bag. “Tell me your name and I’ll stop calling you ‘Yoo-hoo’ and ‘Excuse me.’”
I paused long enough for it to be uncomfortable for him. “Dolores,” I finally said.
He stopped chewing. “Like the mouthwash?”
“Do-lor-es.”
“Oh, okay. Thought you said Lavoris.” He laughed and whacked the side of his head, as if it were a broken TV.
He was irritating-weird, not psycho-weird, that much I could tell; I could pretty much see I needn’t have bothered with the knives.
The noontime news was about the Woodstock festival. Rock music had closed down the interstate. A helicopter view showed people’s heads, milling and clustering, like molecules in a science movie.
“Far fucking out!” Larry shouted. He flopped into Grandma’s parlor chair so hard it sent cushion dust flying. He leaned toward the television as he watched. “Me and my old lady were thinking of going up there, only our kid got an ear infection two nights ago and we missed our ride. The brakes on my truck are for shit or else I’d still try it. I could just see me rear-ending half of America—everyone under thirty walking around with one of those neck-brace things.”
The newscaster said Woodstock had been proclaimed a disaster area—that nothing quite like this had ever happened before.
“And here you and me sit in the living room in Rhode Island,” Larry said. “It figures. Fuck a duck.”
“You and me,” he’d said—as if we were a twosome. When I’d answered the door that morning, my fat hadn’t even shocked him.
“Is your kid a boy or a girl?” I asked.
“A girl. Tia. Tia the Terrible.”
“How old is she?”
“Year and four months. She just learned how to walk. Got into my eight-tracks the other day and yanked out about nine yards’ worth of Disraeli Gears. Lucky for her she’s cute, the little shit. Looks just like Ruthie—my wife.”
I saw his wife as Yoko Ono: floppy hat, hair in her eyes, lying in bed for peace. “I wanted to name her Free! Check it out: F-R-E-E-exclamation mark. Like the punctuation is part of the name, right? Ruthie didn’t like it, though. Said all’s she could think of was like ‘Free Sample.’ That’s not what I meant, though. I meant, you know—unencumbered. Only after she said it, all I could think of was free sample, too.”
He went out to the hallway to check the drying. “Nope,” he said. Then he was back at the television, flipping channels. “Mind if we watch ‘Jeopardy’?” he asked. The show was on the screen before I could answer.
He sat on the rug and shouted correct answers to the contestants. His wild hair blocked off a corner of the screen.
“You’re pretty smart,” I said during a commercial.
“And you thought all I could do was hang wallpaper.” He laughed. “You’re just catching me during one of my fallow periods, that’s all. One of my compost years. I’m expecting a creative leap pretty soon now.” He turned to the TV screen. “What is a cygnet, asshole?” he shouted at a floundering contestant.
“What is a cygnet?” Art Fleming repeated.
“Can I use your phone?”
I watched him through the doorway. He paced back and forth, stretching the cord further than I thought it would go. “Hi,” he said. “How’s the fleas?”
Grandma talked secrets into the telephone; Larry shouted. “Okay, okay, calm down. Call the vet. We’ll get the fucker dipped again and we’ll spray the shit out of the house and camp down at Burlingame. . . . I should be through by noon tomorrow. Then, fuck it, we’ll just drive up there with our shitty brakes and see what’s cooking.”
When he returned, he said, “We’ve been dog-sitting for this ugly mutt named Chuck for these friends of ours who are going cross-country? So two days ago our whole apartment starts breaking out with fleas? I’m talking zillions, man—Poppy Seed City all over your feet. Ruthie’s good and freaked—afraid if we spray, the grandchildren will mutate or something. You should see how ugly this dog is, man. Chuck. Old Chucker the Fucker.”
“You could stay here,” I said. “The three of you. Sleep here overnight.” I wanted to see that little girl.
“Yeah?” he said. “Nah.”
“I don’t mind. I’d like it.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll cook supper.”
He shrugged, smiling. “We’ll all cook supper,” he said. “Have us a party.”
* * *
When he left at four to pick them up, I wondered i
f he’d come back. An hour went by. An hour and a half. My fat must have occurred to him belatedly, I thought. I started on a bag of crinkle-cut chips.
Then they were there in the alley, gabbing and slamming doors. Larry’s curls were wet and stringy. He’d changed into bell-bottom jeans and a paisley blouse, the kind Linc wore on “Mod Squad.” A dashiki. “You stay here, Flea Bag,” Larry called into the truck.
His wife was short and squat with hoop earrings and brown hair woven into a fat braid. Larry was holding onto soup-pot handles with potholders. His wife was loaded down with bags, packages, the baby on her hip, and a fold-up high chair hooked to her wrist, the legs banging behind her. “Have a kid some day and your traveling days will be over,” she said to me as she entered. Her voice was low and smooth—the kind of voice you don’t question.
She dropped her belongings in the middle of Grandma’s parlor and began moving knickknacks and breakables to higher ground. “This is so nice of you,” she said. “I’ve been snapping fleas and crying all day.”
I’m normal, I thought. A normal person meeting new friends.
“By the way, I’m Ruth,” she said, shaking my hand.
Tia had red-painted toenails and pierced ears. Her diaper was a calendar dish towel.
In the kitchen, cabinets opened and pans clattered. “Aw, shit,” Larry said.
“What’s the matter?” Ruth called.
“I forgot the coriander.”
“In the diaper bag,” Ruth said. She had a wide, shiny forehead and a big rear end that stuck out from her granny dress.
Tia slapped Ruth’s leg and whined.
“How did you guys meet, anyway?” I asked.
“Larry and me? We were in VISTA together—assigned as partners.” Something snapped, and, suddenly, there was Ruth’s whole shoulder, her fat breast. I looked away, then back again. “Blackroot, West Virginia. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you,’ et cetera, et cetera.”
Ruth’s breast, laced with veins, was dripping milk; I could tell it had a heaviness to it from the way she lifted it to Tia, who opened her mouth and latched on to the purple nipple. Ruth pressed her lips together in pain, then relaxed and smiled and kissed the top of Tia’s head.
They always ran the VISTA ads on middle-of-the-night television: blond all-American types in khaki shorts, yucking it up with grateful Navajos. No one in those ads looked like Ruth or Larry.
“Did you like it there?” I asked.
“Blackroot? Loved it for a while. We were organizing a Head Start program for preschoolers. You know, shrink a little of the disadvantage, give them a better shot. The locals thought it was kind of silly, but they were pretty polite. We were a novelty. The women liked Larry. The men liked my boobs. I could get them to do anything for me, except look up.” She passed her fingers through Tia’s curly hair, hunting for fleas.
Her eyes met mine. “Your hair is gorgeous,” she said.
I tried not to smile. “No it isn’t. How long were you in West Virginia?”
“Eleven months. Then the bottom fell out.”
“Do you guys own a vegetable peeler?” Larry yelled in.
“It’s in the metal cabinet, middle drawer,” I called back to him. “What do you mean, the bottom fell out?”
“First I got pregnant with Tia. Then some of the local kids got drunk and beat up Larry.”
“How come?”
“Well, to begin with, he made the mistake of telling someone he was opposed to hunting. Therefore, he was queer.”
I pictured Mr. Pucci and Gary, sitting together on their white sofa.
“Then they saw how much he liked playing with the four-year-olds in our program—full-out, down-on-the-floor-with-them enjoyed himself. So someone got the idea he was probably molesting them—‘diddling’ them, they called it. He almost lost his left eye in that fight. Not to mention his idealism. It was pretty awful. We got married in a hospital in Baltimore. Kazoo music, Popsicles. Larry wore an eye patch and yellow pajamas. A male nurse sang ‘Chapel of Love.’ My parents were horrified.”
“Because you were pregnant?”
“Oh, they didn’t know I was pregnant yet. They were just freaked about the ceremony. Not exactly something you’d invite the Lenox and ‘Oh Promise Me’ crowd to, you know? Tia, hold on a second,” Ruth said, changing breasts. “Who do you think I am—Elsie the Cow?”
Too much was happening! I wanted to watch him cook. I wanted her to keep talking.
“Plus I had dropped out of law school less than a year before. Mother and Daddy hadn’t trusted VISTA from the beginning. You should have seen them both the day of the wedding: the I-told-you-so looks were flying around like spears. Poor Mother.”
“I’m going to college in three weeks,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Why maybe?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll probably hate it.”
“Oh, go anyway. I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love, you know?”
Larry came in with a bottle of wine and three of Grandma’s china cups. The wine tasted sour and exciting.
“I tell you,” Larry said, “I’ve spent one day here and I’ve seen enough flamingos to last me a decade. How did you folks manage to live with that wallpaper so long?”
“Don’t blame me. This is my grandmother’s house.” I took another sip of the wine. “She’s a real bitch.”
Saying it made me blush, but no one seemed to notice. Larry was making faces at Tia, coaxing giggles out of her. “I think I’ll take a stroll out to the glove compartment,” he said.
Ruth rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think you’d better ask first?”
He turned to me. “What do you say, Dolores? Want to engage in a little predinner reefer madness? Double your pleasure, double your fun?”
“What?”
“Do a number? Get high?”
I couldn’t recall Grandma’s face. “Go ahead,” I told him. “It’s fine with me.”
Larry rolled the joints in little tissue-paper squares, then lit one, taking a series of weird little drags. It popped and glowed and a spark flew to the rug. The four of us watched it die beneath Ruth’s big toe.
He took the joint out of his mouth and stared at it so closely that his eyes crossed. “This stuff is cosmic,” he said. “Dolores?”
I shook my head. “Maybe later,” I said. “How about Ruth?”
“Oh, I can’t,” she said. “The breast-feeding. So how come your grandmother’s a bitch?”
I took another gulp of wine. “She just is. She’s had a shitty life.”
Tia’s head flopped back and her whole body went limp against Ruth. I sat there aching for Ma, wondering if she had ever breast-fed me.
“Is it just the two of you who live here?” Ruth asked.
“Yup,” I said. I reached for the joint, surprising myself. “Maybe I will try this.”
“My grandmother’s cool,” Ruth said. She smiled down at Tia, tracing a finger against her eyebrow. “Eighty-three and she still runs her own farm, does all the canning, everything.”
I imitated Larry’s sipping of the joint, but exhaled the sweet smoke too quickly. “Hold it in, hold it in!” Larry coaxed. “We got us a novice here, Ruthie.” When I got it right, he smiled and pointed a thumb at Ruth. “Her grandmother’s real Zen. It’s her mother who’s the bitch.”
Ruth frowned. “She is not.”
“All those polite little notes at holiday time. All those Neiman Marcus stuffed animals for Tia. But that’s okay. I forgive you.”
He leaned over and kissed her. They kissed for so long, I stopped looking away. I took another drag. Held it in. Let it out.
“I can be a bitch sometimes,” I said softly, but neither of them heard. They were still kissing.
* * *
“Are you high?” Larry asked, stirring his soup.
“No,” I said. Then the stove warped. Ruth’s shiny forehead struck me as hilarious. “A little, maybe. I’m not sure.”
/> Ruth frowned. “Larry, that isn’t the zombie stuff you got from Steve, is it? I don’t trust that guy.”
“Ruthie, give it a rest,” Larry smiled. “It’s Woodstock weekend.” He reached up under his dashiki and scratched himself. A fleck of ash floated from his beard into the soup.
Ruth shook her head and sighed.
Supper was a feast: honeydew melon, Ruth’s molasses bread, funeral meatballs from the freezer, Larry’s creole eggplant stew. I ate slowly, letting the new tastes explode in my mouth. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, Larry got up from the table and did a flamingo imitation so funny I couldn’t breathe. This is all really happening! I thought. I dunked another slice of Ruth’s sweet bread into my stew.
“Look at that shit-eatin’ grin,” Larry said. I looked around for it, then realized they were both staring at me, smiling in approval. “Who, me?” I asked, delighted.
Then the radio was on and we were at the sink doing dishes, Ruth’s big rear end swaying to the music as she washed.
I’m a man, yes I am
And I can’t help but love you so
Larry grabbed two of Grandma’s prescription vials and shook them like castanets. He was rolling his hips to the rhythm in a way I couldn’t stop watching. “You know what?” I said.
“No, what?”
“You’re sexy.” Then I blushed and covered my face with a dish towel.
Ruth closed her eyes when she danced, and rocked in a private, sexy way. Then I was dancing! They insisted. Timid at first, I risked nothing more than a few tentative steps, a swinging of arms. Larry took my wrists, guiding me, and then the music was inside of me, coaxing my body into the dancing. I felt free—a weightless astronaut, Carol Burnett without her fat suit. My long, gorgeous hair rocked from side to side.
Larry went out somewhere for ice cream. That dog had gotten into the house, was licking spilled wine off the kitchen floor. I thought of the dog-pound dogs the day Jack had raped me. Felt his ramming. That truck ramming Ma.
“My mother got killed last month,” I said.
Ruth looked up and waited, confused.
“In an accident. There was this truck.”