I wiped the tears from my face, took some deep breaths, fished the key from the pocket of my coat, and walked inside. My mother was eating a corned beef sandwich over the kitchen sink, the way people who live alone do.
I said, “I’m going to be Miss Bayonne and then Miss New Jersey and then probably Miss America and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“What?”
“I’m going to be Miss America.”
“And this is supposed to help things? To make things better?”
“Could things be much worse?”
“You’ll make a fool of yourself. They’ll ask you questions. Do you want to answer all of their questions?”
“Like what?”
“You know nothing. Go ahead. Do what you want.” She took another bite of her sandwich.
And so I decided that I would. I would do what I wanted, always. If she could make me disappear, then I could make her disappear. I watched her for a moment, the knot of her jaw tensing on the meat of her sandwich, clenching and unclenching, and then I looked past her, to the spice shelf, the cabinets loose in their hinges. I looked and looked—the same way I stared at myself in Wanda’s fake-gold mirror—until I saw through her. You see, last summer when my mother was in the hospital, she was gone. I’d already let her go.
Ezra
Rule #5: When things come undone, try to have your pants on.
As you might imagine, Bob Pinkering wasn’t happy with my gardening skills and even less happy with the fact that I’d spent my time at his house screwing his daughter. He called while my family was getting ready to head out to the hospital to see my grandmother—me and Mitzie eating Pop-Tarts, my mother upstairs dressing, Dilworth hidden behind the morning paper. When the phone rang, Mitzie hopped up. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! Hello, this is Mitzie Stocker.” (pause) “Yes, he’s here. One moment, please.”
She wrinkled her nose like the person on the other end was a stinker and handed the phone to Dilworth, who folded the newspaper on his lap. He said, “Hello,” and “Hey, Bob,” and then “Whoa, wait a minute. Slow down.” He glanced at me, confused. I glanced at him but without really moving my head. I was as still as possible, the theory, I guess, being to blend in, like a fern, an extra chair.
Dilworth stood up and walked out of the room as far as the phone’s long cord would allow him. I could hear him saying, “Well, now.” And “Honestly, that surprises me. I mean, not the part about your lawn, Bob. But, ah . . .”
Mitzie whispered, “What did you do?”
I shrugged and shook my head, “I think I’ve disrupted some order, but I think that’s what I’m supposed to do. Don’t you?”
“Sure,” she said. “Especially if you think it’s what you’re supposed to do. Then how could you be wrong?”
“Exactly, Mitzie! Absolutely!”
By the time Dilworth hung up the phone, rubbing the bridge of his nose where his reading glasses had made little red indents, my mother was standing in the kitchen, picking a piece of lint off her skirt, putting on her sunglasses. There wasn’t a hint of the undone quality I’d seen the night before.
Dilworth cleared his throat and lowered his voice. “Did you know that Ezra has been”—he paused as if coming up with some code that Mitzie wouldn’t understand—“umphing the Pinkering girl? That he hasn’t done one single thing to actually garden anything?”
“Yes,” my mother said. “Oh, well, yes to the umphing. No to the gardening.”
“And can you believe he expects to get paid for this? That he had the audacity to”—and here he lowered his voice again as if this were the dirtiest part—“fill out a time sheet?”
“Well, there he’s got the right idea,” my mother said. “We are a world of whores and pimps and johns. That’s how everything divides.” This was part of her grand speech, the one she always seemed to give to me, but that was directed at the old pageant protesters, the no-makeup, wool-wearing women she saw everywhere. “I always thought he’d be a pimp, what with all of this education, but I might prefer him as a whore, as long as he keeps his center, a pimpless whore is best.”
“Does umphing mean what I think it means?” Mitzie asked.
Dilworth was startled. “Mitzie, go to your room!” he shouted. He turned to my mother. “Jesus! What are you teaching her, for Chrissakes.”
Mitzie stood up.
“I’m ready to go see my mother. I’m perfectly prepared,” my mother said. “Mitzie, get in the car.”
Mitzie looked at the back door and then back at her father. I was motionless. My mother unsnapped her pocketbook, checked the contents, snapped it shut, and walked out the door to the car. Mitzie followed, leaving me alone with Dilworth, who was just standing there.
“I didn’t know you had it in you.” He shook his head with his chin to his chest, the way my mother had looked at me in that flashing image I had of her while having sex with Janie Pinkering for the first time, and I thought he was smiling. It was hard to tell, because the chins of skin looked like smiles piled on top of each other. But then he looked up and his eyes were squinting, proud almost. I was uncomfortable. It was a new twist to our relationship. I wasn’t sure what to do with his admiration. I wasn’t sure if it made me indebted to him somehow.
“What do you mean you didn’t know I had it in me?” I asked, because that sounded like an insult wrapped up in a compliment and I didn’t trust him.
He shook his head again and sighed, “Deflowering the Pinkering girl.”
“I don’t think I deflowered her,” I said.
“Oh, no,” Dilworth said. “That would be too much like gardening. God forbid you actually work.”
“Janie Pinkering is work,” I said, wondering when I’d get to see her again, if ever. It was clear to me now that she wouldn’t be coming over to meet my mother.
And with that Dilworth got very serious. “All women are work.” And I agreed with him. He smiled at me, sadly, and I smiled too, and I felt, for just that second, that we were both men, which meant we both knew some secret. It was just a flicker of emotion, as if we suddenly existed inside of a brief, flimsy bubble of solidarity that popped as quickly as it had come to surround us.
The nurse was young and nice, and despite the hospital’s overwhelming smell of Lysol and, beneath that, urine, she smelled lilac-sweet and reminded me for a second of Janie Pinkering’s mother’s basket of bath products. I’d spent the ride to the hospital devising a plan to get Janie to the bungalow. I thought maybe I’d call, and if her mother or father answered, I’d pretend to be Kermit Willis, but then I didn’t want to hear any disappointment in her voice when she answered the phone and found out it was me. I thought about pretending to speak in a Spanish accent, to be Manuel looking for Elsie Finner or something like that. Down the tiled hall, a man’s voice was calling out in pain, but most of the doors were closed, and those that were open blocked my view with white screens on rollers. The halls were white and the music that was pumped from some unseen place over our heads was sickeningly sweet, heavy on the harp, like they were trying to tap into heaven’s radio station.
Before ushering us into my grandmother’s private room, the nurse warned us about the partial paralysis of one side of her face and told us that it was very likely she’d regain total use. She spoke quietly. “I think you’ll find that she’s not really been herself. Most families do, and that’s normal. Strokes are very strange and affect people in very different ways. She’ll probably be back to her old self soon.” And then, with her eyebrows pinched in sympathy, she added, “She’ll confuse words and things and she may not recognize you.”
My mother touched her sleeve and said, “That could only work in my favor.”
When we saw my grandmother propped up in the bed, she looked very small, like a doll version of herself. One side of her cheek sagged just slightly and one of the nurses, probably the lilac-sweet one, had put rouge on her cheeks and a smudge of pink lipstick on her lips, which were in constant motion, a litt
le whisper, like she was chewing words. Her hair was down, flat, but neatly combed away from her face. The ceiling-mounted TV was blaring. She didn’t look like she was at the beginning of the end as my mother had been told or made up in her own mind. But she certainly seemed all wrong.
She looked around the room at the four of us, Mitzie in her bow, Dilworth in a loud yellow shirt and tie, my mother perfectly groomed, and me, shuffling in last. She was startled, as if she thought for a moment that the television characters had stepped out of the television for a visit, or, by the suspicious look on her face, to sell her something.
“Yes?” she said, expectantly. “Are you all more churches? I don’t need another.” But the sentence didn’t end there. Words continued on. I could make out only a few—teaspoon, zigzag, soup bone.
We looked around at each other. “No,” my mother said. “Family. We’re family. We are your family.” She spread her arms around the room, showing her all of us. Dilworth popped a Tic Tac and waved. Mitzie curtsied. I nodded, stepped forward, said, “Hi.” I was still trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, hoping the Janie announcement this morning wasn’t going to bring on more heat for me.
“I think you look pretty,” Mitzie said.
“Oh, you. I know you,” my grandmother said, a little horrified, responding to Mitzie’s voice, I figured. “Fever,” she said, “croaking, wheezing box.”
“You don’t look like you’re going to die,” Mitzie said.
“Die?” my grandmother whispered. “Is that what they say? Chirping all around me. White like moving buildings in and out all day and night.”
“No,” my mother said. “Of course you’re not going to die!” She glared at Mitzie.
But my grandmother was already agitated. “It was a white burn,” she said, “and half my body drawn up to it, like too much sun and then dark, dark, words filling it like white splotches, the memory of sun, like snow, but wet, words like water, like drowning.” There was pain etched deeply into the lines of her face where the makeup seemed to cake, making her wrinkles stand out pink so that her face almost looked striped.
“You’ll be fine,” my mother said. “The nurse told us on our way in.”
Dilworth, the only Catholic in the group, said, “Well, you’re lucky to have done so well with this. God must really be watching over you.”
“Who? Who?” she said. “There’s nobody there for me, except some jealous God, spiteful,” my grandmother said. “We’re all evil, created like they say, from wet muck and we learned to breathe.” And then she stared at my mother and pounded her fist into the bed. “The tile here’s too white, like the butcher’s shop. Remember the butcher with his blood-stiffened apron? Did he ask about me?” My grandmother’s face opened for a second. I remember that my grandmother had mentioned a butcher, a sweetheart. I wondered if I’d remember Janie when I got old and addled.
“Who?” my mother asked. “Mr. Graziano’s been dead for years.”
With that, my grandmother’s face shrank back to its tight knots. “The lights here are too bright. I close my eyes and the bright bulbs seem like they’re on the underside of earth, the lamp on my father’s mining hat, like a swung lantern going down, or like looking up from underwater to the surface. My eyes opened, it’s an explosion, too bright.” She looked around the room, her face suddenly vacant. “Where’s my Clifford?”
“He’s no longer with us. You know that,” my mother said.
“Go away,” she said. “What’s done is done.” My grandmother’s words kept coming. “Hemline, parsnip, hive. Can you hear them, humming, fedora, Formica, whipstitch. Like those Chinese women, their teeth, clattering. My birds. Where are my birds?”
“Helga is taking care of them,” my mother said. “They’re fine.” I couldn’t imagine Helga taking care of birds. She hated birds, called them “flyink rats.”
“Let’s go,” Dilworth said. “C’mon. We’re just upsetting her.” But it was clear that Dilworth wasn’t really being considerate, just uncomfortable, antsy, and I felt guilty because I wanted to go too. I couldn’t stand to see the old woman this way.
My mother stood there for a minute, locking eyes with her mother.
“Can’t you hear?” my grandmother asked.
“No,” my mother said, “Hear what?”
“Go away,” my grandmother said. “Go.”
Dilworth took my mother’s elbow, carefully, like a stranger helping an old lady across a street, Mitzie and I close behind, and we walked out the door, which swung closed behind us.
No one spoke until we were at the car.
Then Mitzie said, “I think she looked pretty. I thought that she was going to be ugly because she’s going to die. But she doesn’t look like she’s going to die ever.”
“No,” my mother said. “I don’t think she’s ever going to die.” And I wondered if someday I’d feel that way about my mother, if there’d ever be a time when she would seem unstoppable, and I imagined the hearts of my grandmother, my mother, even Mitzie’s, beating on and on, like the old Baptist buses you see on the highway with engines that keep at it forever.
There’s no phone in the pool bungalow, so I was forced to call Janie from the kitchen. With the long cord, I could make it into the study and shut the door, just barely. From there, I was on a very short leash, my face six inches from the door. I’d decided to go with being Manuel. Something about the accent, which I’d practiced a good bit in my bedroom mirror, gave me confidence.
The phone rang three times and then a woman’s voice said, “Yes?”
But I couldn’t make out whether it was Janie or her mother. I decided to be safe, “Is dis Chanie Pinkering?”
“Yes,” she said. “Who’s this?”
“Oh,” I said, dropping the accent. “It’s me. Ezra.”
“What’s with that voice?”
“Joking,” I said. “I was joking. It was a joke.”
“Oh,” she said and there was a pause. “Well, at least you got your sense of humor back.”
“I was wondering if everything’s, you know, blown over.”
“God! I mean do they hate you!”
“Really?” It sounded like a compliment.
“And I don’t know what your father’s done to their teeth over the years, but he’s no favorite anymore either. They’re switching practices.”
I wanted to say step-father, but kids with their original parents still together had trouble catching on to this kind of distinction. I just said, “Oh.” I felt bad about Dilworth’s losing his dental patients.
“I’ve got to do a lot of quality-time stuff with my mom everyday. And my dad is taking me fishing. We’ve got to bond.” She said it like she hated the idea, but at the same time she wasn’t convincing.
“And so when am I going to see you again?”
There was a pause. “Bonding takes up a lot of time,” she said. “And, well, can I be frank, Ezra? You didn’t transform the way I thought you might.”
“Oh,” I said. I realized that I was a failed project, a botched experiment, but that maybe a botched experiment was what Janie had wanted, one that would really singe her parents’ eyebrows and burn the lab to the ground. “Is Elsie still dating Manuel?” I asked.
“God, no! That was a fling!”
“And Kermit. Is he still with the college girl?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m almost a college girl myself, you know. Seniors have to think that way. Look, I’ve got to go. Maybe we’ll go for a swim sometime before summer’s over. The water’s perfectly warm now.”
Pixie
How It Ends: One Day You Stop Telling the Story of Your Life to Yourself
This was the end of the story. It’s where I decided to stop.
I got a letter from Cliff, his last. His battalion had moved down to secure a village called Phu Hoa Dong. There was a firefight, VC somewhere. It was after curfew, and there were gunshots in the forest just outside of the village and everyone started firing. Then right
behind him he heard noises. He turned and shot off his M16, but it wasn’t VC. It was a kid in his backyard, trying to pull a dog into his hut. The boy fell, his thin brown arm pinned under him, the dog skidding out and running away. Another hut caught fire, and later after the firefight, after some VC were shot dead, Jamison went in to see who’d been burned. He pulled out a woman and her baby and an old man, their charred bodies lined up in front of the smoldering house. That night Cliff could smell death, felt like he was eating it with his rations, bite after bite until he threw up. He said that Jamison had climbed a tree and sat there not coming down, just humming in this tree, like his little brother, the autistic kid who could sing like an angel, songs nobody’s ever heard before, songs without words, just long beautiful o’s and e’s. The dog came back, Cliff said, a skinny stray, and his buddies were feeding it rocks, tossing them up and watching it snap. One guy told Cliff that the kid he shot was probably going to eat the dog, put it in a pot. Cliff found the dog later, a bitch on her back, her stomach filled with stones. She was moaning, and he shot her in the head. His hands were bloody, he told me, and that blood wouldn’t ever come off.
Two days after I got Cliff’s letter, Wanda called. She sounded agitated. She wanted me to come over as soon as I could. I hadn’t been to her house in weeks because she’d been too tired and busy. I thought it’d be good to see her, because I didn’t want to think about Cliff, and I knew that Wanda wouldn’t let me talk about him anyway. It made me sick to think of him, because I knew I would always hate him as much as I loved him.