“Still,” Karla said, “it’s a nice looking shed.”
When she was gone, Mickey pushed all the furniture against the opposite wall and finished the bedroom. He swept the scraps into a trash bag, washed the floor with a pair of torn boxer shorts, and put the tools away. In the kitchen he dialed a faded number taped to the wall above the telephone.
“Pick up or delivery?” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“Pickup,” Mickey said. “Number two special.”
“One Mexican pizza with hot chili peppers, hamburger, refried beans, diced tomatoes, cheese -”
“Ten minutes,” Mickey interrupted, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
After supper, Mickey set the bedroom back in order. He showered and changed into a pair of light-colored Docker slacks and a pea green sports shirt with a crest on the pocket, a present from Karla on his 43rd birthday. He had never worn the shirt before.
In the bedroom, he lit a cone of sandalwood incense and watched as a wispy plume of chalky smoke curled toward the ceiling. On the bedroom dresser, he laid out a fistful of diazepam tablets with the distinctive V-shaped design. White, yellow, blue. Placing a blue, 10 mg pill under his tongue, he brushed the remaining pills back into the drawer and flicked the stereo on to 89.7 fm, WGBH. In a mournful legato, Sarah Vaughn was crooning Misty, bending and reharmonizing the tones in ways that only she could comprehend. Sucking in his gut, he stood in front of the full-length closet mirror.
Twenty years. Though the war ended two decades earlier, Mickey was trying to reach even further back, to retrieve some memory of how things were before the mortars and madness. By the second chorus, the tranquilizer kicked in. The modal music, the sweetly-scented sandalwood, and plum-colored wallpaper all conspired to lull him back through a narrow slip of a time while outside the sheeting rain continued with the same unbroken intensity.
Look at me.
I’m as helpless
as a kitten up a tree…
Psycho. The Bates Motel. In 1960, Mickey and a fellow 6th grader snuck into the Brandenburg Cinema to watch Janet Leigh strip down to her ivory slip. During the shower scene, Mickey dropped his head between his knees and simply waited out the ensuing horror. He was there for Ms Leigh’s milky thighs and a hint of cleavage, not the slash and gore.
On my own,
would I wander
through this wonderland alone ...
Rubic’s cubes, dashikis, spam and eggs, Daisy, pump-action bb rifles, Jade East cologne for men. Shoes with stiffened tongues in lieu of laces - tongues which slid back and forth on wire rails. After only a year or two, the style fell out of vogue. Maypo cereal. Brylcream (just a little dab’ll do ya). Bell bottom dungarees. Muumuus and tie-dyed shirts. Crook, rum-soaked cigars. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown and Bill Haley and the Comets (or was that earlier?).
never knowing my right hand
from my left,
my hat from my glove,
I get misty or too much in love.
Church. An altar boy through junior high, Mickey carried the cross; he held the heavy book as the priest read the convocational prayers; he rang the silver bell during Mass.
Mickey went into the bathroom and filled the sink with hot water. He washed and lathered his face. Twice. With an abandoned, old-fashioned double-edged razor that predated his nostalgia, he shaved his beard.
On Saturday they worked into the early afternoon covering the roof and stapling a protective layer of tarpaper over the bare plywood. Mickey slit open a bundle of gray shingles. Trimming the bottom flaps off several sheets with a utility knife, he nailed the first shingles to the lip of the overhang. Then he showed Rasmei how to alternate rows so the slits formed a broken line leading to the peak. “I’ll snap chalk lines on the tar paper so you can see what you’re doing.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“You’re fine; it’s the shitty shingles I don’t trust.” He climbed the ladder and threw a 40-pound bag on the pitched surface. Five hours later Rasmei ran a cap across the peak and the shed was finished.
“At Sherwin Williams next to the YMCA, get the top grade, opaque stain,” Mickey said. “Any color that matches the house. Two gallons. Tell them I sent you and they’ll charge it to my account and give you the contractor’s discount.” He blew his nose on a handkerchief that had seen better days. Now tell my why your father never smiles.”
Rasmei scowled and folded her hands in her lap. “On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge invaded Phom Penh and drove the entire population into the countryside. We took only what we could carry, some gold and jewelry. In a village 25 miles north near Prek Po my mother died of dysentery. Father, a school teacher, was forced into slave labor, harvesting rice seven days a week. We had very little food and people were disappearing, being relocated, every so many months.
“During the monsoon season, the earth became soaked and began spitting up the bodies of the murdered - political prisoners, school teachers, businessmen, woman and children. It was as though, denied a proper Buddhist burial, their immortal souls were swimming through the muck to reunite with loved ones. Of course, we, the living, knew better. Cambodia was one, huge concentration camp, the killing fields everywhere.
“Old news.” Mickey said gruffly. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“A year passed. So many men had died, there were two, perhaps three, women for every man. One day a neery, a female soldier, came to my father and said, ‘You shall be my husband.’ My father was horrified. The neery was filthy. She could neither read nor write. An AK-47 slung over her shoulder, she smelled like a dung heap. But as a Khmer Rouge fighter, she could choose anyone for a spouse. To deny her meant almost certain death.”
“An unimaginable nightmare. After losing all our worldly possessions and watching my mother waste away, my father was now being forced to marry his tormentor! An unwashed, jungle-bred neery. My future stepmother.
“A month past and a group wedding was arranged. Fifty couples - some willing, others less than enthused about their prospective mates. The day following his second marriage, my father feasted on a bowl of rice gruel spiced with python meat before going back into the paddies.”
“No rest for the downtrodden.”
“A month after they were married, the war in the East heated up and my father’s new bride was sent to do battle with the Viet Cong. We never saw or heard from her again. When the Vietnamese liberated our village, we fled to safety in Thailand and then to America.”
“And the neery?” Mickey asked
Rasmei shook her head. “Dead or hiding in the jungle with the remnant of Pol Pot’s army.”
“The woman sitting next to your father in the car the other day?”
“My mother’s sister. Her husband died during the reign of terror. She fled the country with us after the war; my father thought it only fitting that, to honor the dead, they spend the rest of their mortal lives together.”
“Your father’s a bigamist.”
“Polygamy, she bristled, “was an accepted practice among the rich and upper classes in Cambodia for many centuries. And, anyway, I doubt the neery - even if she were still alive - would contest my father’s third marriage.”
“Which explains why he never smiles.”
Rasmei shook her head gently up and down. “If you’d been through such an experience, would you?”
They were sitting on the peak of the newly finished roof looking out over a half acre of wild flowers and straw-colored grass. Previously a cow pasture, the land lay fallow for several years, the only regular tenant a fat ground hog which emerged at dusk to feed. As the sun slouched toward the horizon, they could feel the heat streaming off the fresh shingles.
A coffee can half filled with stubby roofing nails lay on the roof between them. Rasmei emptied the nails into the pouch on her cloth apron - the same one Mearadey had abandoned - and tossed the can to the ground. “My father bought a new washing machine,?
?? Rasmei said. “A Whirlpool. Dual speed, eight cycles. It even has a hand washable setting for silk and delicate fabrics.”
“Obviously, you studied the owner’s manual.”
“My stepmother doesn’t read English, and Mearadey is too scatterbrained to be trusted with laundry. She mixes whites with darker clothes that aren’t color-safe.”
“There must be a reason you’re telling me this,” he said.
“Near our prison village was a small river. My mother washed clothes, beating them on a flat stone.” The muscles around her mouth twitched sharply but her voice remained even. “It’s the last memory I have of her before she died.” Rasmei sighed and didn’t speak again for several minutes. “Take me out somewhere.”
Mickey’s eyes narrowed. “On a date?”
“Ashamed to be seen with an oriental?”
“I don’t go anywhere. I’ve no social life.”
“Saturday afternoon you go off.”
Mickey laughed, a derisive snuffling sound that hardly reached to his lungs. “I bike two miles down the road to Brandenburg Center. At the Bagels and Cream Delicatessen, I order the luncheon special and a medium coffee. Then I sit in the park and contemplate my navel.” He didn’t bother to tell her about the Maui-wowi.
“It was just a thought,” she said with a tart brevity that brought closure to the issue.
Fifty feet away in the field, there was a disturbance. Near a white dogwood tree, the high grass was thrashing fitfully in the opposite direction of a stiff breeze. A clump of blue columbine shuddered and suddenly dropped from sight like a plastic bobber dragged under by a large fish. Mickey put his hand over hers and squeezed the palm. “Gourmet coffee and New York style bagels.” he said just as the ground hog waddled into view from behind a thorny tangle of purple-throated jimsonweed and loganberries.
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