Mr. Lyons’s first name is Royal. Maddy thinks that’s hysterical. She wishes she could ask him what’s up with that. Royal. He’s got white hair and he’s a little fat. Maddy likes people who are a little fat; it seems to her that they are approachable. He’s a little fat and he’s got awfully pale skin and the links of his wristwatch are twisted like bad teeth. He doesn’t care about such things. He cares about words. He taught her one of her favorite words: hiraeth, a Welsh word that means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that maybe never was; it means nostalgia and yearning and grief for lost places. He used the word in a story that he read aloud to the class, and when he looked up, his eyes were full of tears. Nobody made fun of him after class, which was a miracle. Nobody said anything to her, anyway. Not that they would. She’s the girl who sits alone in the lunchroom, acting like her sandwich is fascinating. Or did. She skips lunch now.
She doesn’t exactly know why kids don’t like her. She’s good-looking enough. She has a sense of humor. She’s not dumb. She guesses it’s because they can sense how much she needs them. They are like kids in a circle holding sticks, picking on the weak thing. It is in people, to be entertained by cruelty.
Maddy slides low in her desk so that Mr. Lyons won’t call on her today. It’s an unspoken agreement they have, another reason she likes him so much. She’d come to school every day if it were just Mr. Lyons. Once she stayed after class to show him a photo she took lying under a tree and looking up. Mr. Lyons told her the photo was really good in a no-bullshit way. “Do you have a title for it?” he asked. Maddy shrugged and said, “ ‘Framed Sky’?” and Mr. Lyons smiled and said, “Lovely.”
Praise is hard for Maddy to hear; it makes her stomach tighten and blood rush to her head, it makes her overly aware of how tall she is. She’d listened to what Mr. Lyons said with no reaction beyond a quick thanks, but later that afternoon, when she was at home and lying on her bed, she looked at the photo again through his eyes. She looked at his comments this way and then that way. What he said could not be seen as anything but good. So…so there. She put the photo in the candy box she keeps at the back of her closet. It’s a Whitman’s Sampler box; her father told her that was her mother’s favorite candy, one of the few things he’d shared about her. Maddy never knew her mother; she died in a car crash two weeks after Maddy was born. She’d been on the way to a doctor’s appointment. Maddy’s father had come home early from work to drive her, but Maddy had a cold and her mother didn’t want to take her out. So she told Maddy’s father to stay home with Maddy, she’d drive herself. Someone who ran a red light drove into her.
Maddy has a photo of her mother in the candy box. It’s one she found stuck in the crevice of a bookshelf. She asked her father if she could have it and he stared at it for a long time, then gave it to Maddy. In the photo, Maddy’s mother is leaning against a fence post somewhere out in the country, her arms crossed, smiling. She has a red scarf tied in her hair, and she’s wearing jeans and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, untucked. “Where was she?” Maddy had asked her father, and her father had said, “With me.” “What were you doing?” Maddy had asked, and her father’d said, “Picnic.” Then he had walked away. Enough, he was saying. Her father will never talk much about her. Too hard.
Maddy looks like her mother: she has her dark hair, her wide blue eyes, her little cleft in the chin. What she wants to know is if she is like her mother.
Maddy writes poems and takes pictures. Lately, she takes pictures of little things and blows them up big so that she can really see them. In poems, she does the opposite: big things get made small so that she can see them. The interest in these things did not come from her father.
Mr. Lyons is talking about Hamlet. Maddy lets her mind wander. She already knows about Hamlet. They were given a week to read it and Maddy read it that night. To be, or not to be. Right. That is the question.
—
Arthur shuffles over to the stove and turns the heat on high under leftover beans. Then he walks back to the table and walks back to the stove. No shuffling. See, Nola?
He adds catsup to the beans, maple syrup, raw onion, Tabasco, and bacon bits from a jar, though they aren’t bacon at all. He cuts a piece of cornbread, butters it, and lays it on the plate, and, when the beans are warm enough, dumps them over the bread. He opens a bottle of beer and sits down to eat.
Gordon jumps up on the table and stares fixedly at him. “Be my guest,” Arthur says, moving the plate closer to the cat, so they can share. Gordon sits with his front paws lined up exactly even and eats daintily from one side of the plate. Then he stops abruptly, shakes his head like someone has sprinkled water on him, jumps off the table, and pads away, his tail held high in disdain. “You try cooking then,” Arthur says, “you think it’s so easy.” Funny how an animal can hurt your feelings when you’re all alone.
He thinks about maybe watching television later, but he can’t much tolerate it anymore. What with the way people behave on there. He’ll probably just take a walk around the block after dinner and hope Lucille Howard is not sitting out on her porch. If she’s sitting on her porch, he’s a dead man. Lucille taught fourth grade for many years, and she seems to think the world is her classroom. She’s a bit didactic for Arthur’s tastes, a little condescending. Odd, then, that at the thought of seeing her, his weary old heart accelerates. He supposes it could be an erratic beat, he gets them, but he’d prefer to call it something else. So much of everything is what you call it.
He wets his hair at the kitchen sink, then pulls his comb out of his pocket and holds up a pot for a mirror. The bones of his face protrude; he’s gotten so skinny he could take a bath in a gun barrel. But good enough. Good enough.
The cat walks behind him as he makes his way to the door. “You coming?” he asks, holding the door open. Gordon is allowed out as long as it’s light outside. He’s proven his indifference to hunting, an anomaly Arthur appreciates. The cat doesn’t move. “Just seeing me out?” Gordon looks up at Arthur, but keeps still. “I’ll be back in half an hour,” he says. People say cats don’t care, but they do.
When Arthur passes Lucille’s house, he keeps his gaze focused straight ahead. No point in inviting it. But she’s sure enough out there, and he hears her calling him. “Arthur! Want to come and sit a bit?”
He hesitates, then turns and starts up her walk. Gives her a friendly smile, to boot. He wishes she wouldn’t wear a wig, or at least not one that sits so crookedly on her head. It’s a distraction. Sometimes he has to restrain himself from reaching over and giving it a little tug, then smacking her knee in a friendly way and saying, “There you go!” But why risk humiliating her?
Arthur thinks that, above all, aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance. He sees that as a good trade. And anyway, Lucille makes those snickerdoodles, and she always packs some up for him to take home, and he eats them in bed, which is another thing he can do now, oh, sorrowful gifts.
“Sit right there,” Lucille says, indicating the wicker chair Arthur always chooses when he visits with her.
He settles down among the floral pillows: one behind him, one on either side of him, one on his lap. It’s an undignified and unmanly way to sit, but what can you do? Arthur will never understand what seems to be a woman’s need for so many pillows. Nola had it, too. They had to dig their way into bed every night.
“Now!” Lucille says. There is an air of satisfaction in her voice that makes him wary.
“Isn’t this nice!” she says.
He nods. “Yes. Thank you.”
“My grandniece is pregnant, I just found out,” Lucille says.
“Oh, is that so?”
“Yes, and do you know, she’s forty years old!”
Arthur doesn’t know what to say to this. Congratulations? Uh-oh?
“These young people, these days,” Lucille says. “They just…Well, I just don’t understand them.”
In his lower
gut, Arthur feels a rumbling, sudden and acute. He shifts in his chair.
Lucille’s eyes dart over and she says, “Oh, I don’t mean to complain. No older generation understands the younger generation, isn’t that true? But don’t let’s complain. Let’s endeavor to be grateful and pleasant. Unlike them.”
And now the pain becomes more acute. What in the hell did he eat?
He rises, warily. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave,” he says. “Thanks for…Thanks for the visit.” His voice is pinched with his efforts to keep control.
“But you’ve only just gotten here!” Lucille says, and—oh, no, look, there are tears trembling in her eyes, magnified by her glasses.
“I forgot about something,” Arthur says.
“What?” Lucille demands.
“Oh…long story.” He really has to get to a bathroom.
He moves cautiously toward the steps.
Lucille rises up to walk beside him, her hands kneading each other, and he detects a faint scent of vanilla. “Well, I just hope I didn’t offend you. We’re neighbors, Arthur, and we’re the only old ones left on the block and I just invite you over to pass the time and I made some orange blossom butter cookies for you and—”
“Another time,” Arthur says, and hotfoots it over to his house. He reaches the bathroom just in time. He sits on the john and lets go and here comes Gordon to sit on the threshold, his tail wrapped around him. Now there’s a friend.
When Arthur’s finished, he washes up and then stands there for a minute, doing a kind of internal surveillance, relishing the expansive relief that comes after recovery from illness, however short its duration. He’s okay then. So.
He goes into the living room to lift the blinds and looks over at Lucille’s porch. Gone in. Well, it would be foolish to go back now. He’s sorry for hurting her feelings, but it would be foolish to go back now. The blue of the sky has faded and the thin clouds are ash-colored. The first stars will be out soon. It comes to him that Nola once asked, “What if the souls of the dead become stars that can always watch over everyone?” That was right before she died, and Arthur answered in a way he still regrets. He kissed her hand—so light, by then, a kind of husk of a hand—and said, “We don’t know anything.” He doesn’t know why he said that except that it’s basically true. But he wishes he had answered more eloquently. He wishes he’d have said something to make her think that in the great unknown there was one constant: everything would be all right. He thinks that’s basically true, too.
He opens the back door and Gordon slips out. “Hey!” Arthur calls. “Get in here!”
The cat’s gone. There’s a worry. A man Arthur met on his walk the other day said he had seen a coyote walking along the sidewalk, pretty as you please, and Gordon is old now. How old? Arthur slowly calculates. Fifteen! How did that happen? Fifteen!
“Gordon!” he calls. A movement in the bushes and then Gordon darts out and runs to the driveway, where he lies on his back regarding Arthur.
“Come here,” Arthur says, patting his leg.
Nothing.
“Come here!” Arthur says. And then, rolling his eyes and lowering his voice to a near whisper, “Come, kitty, kitty.”
Nothing.
One last thing he can try. He goes into the house and gets Gordon’s bag of treats. He carries it outside and shakes it.
Gordon runs away.
Arthur lets the air out of his cheeks. If he ever gets another pet it will be a dog. Nola picked out Gordon at the shelter when the kitten was barely six weeks old. “Look at him!” she kept saying, on the ride home. Arthur wasn’t sure what he was supposed to look at, but he knew better than to ask. Gordon—unnamed at that point, though Nola had suggested Precious, which of course Arthur had to put the kibosh on—was just a white kitten with a brown tail. But each time Nola told him to look, he looked over and said, with a kind of false proprietary pride, “Yup!” You would have thought they were driving the baby they never could have home from the hospital.
Arthur goes inside, but leaves the door propped open. He’ll get into his pajamas and brush his teeth and wash his face and his glasses, then check again. If the cat doesn’t come back then, well, he’s on his own. Bon appétit, coyote.
Arthur finishes his preparations, then comes back downstairs. No sign of Gordon. He calls him once more, then closes and locks the door and heads upstairs. He opens the book he’s reading, but he can’t concentrate. He snaps out the light, lies down, and stares out into the blackness. When he feels a thud on the bed, he jumps and cries out, much to his shame. You’d think a bat had dropped from the ceiling. But it’s only Gordon, the devil.
“Where were you?” Arthur asks. Gordon comes closer, curls up next to him, and starts purring.
“You think I’m going to pet you now?” Arthur asks. “After what you put me through?”
But he does pet him. And then he sits up and snaps the light back on and reads a few pages from his Western before he goes to sleep, a feeling like an inflated balloon in his chest, the cat curled in his lap. Little mercies.
—
At midnight, Maddy calls Anderson. She keeps her voice low, so her father won’t hear. Anderson answers sleepily, and Maddy instantly regrets herself. But what can she do now except plunge in?
“Hey,” she says, but her voice is too girly, so she lowers it to say, “What are you doing?”
“I’m fucking sleeping,” Anderson says. “Duh.”
“Well, I’m sorry to wake you but you said you were going to call tonight, so…”
“Did I? Sorry. But I just saw you, right? And I…got busy.”
Doing what? she wants to ask, but best not to push. He did apologize.
She starts to ask him about his day but things have gotten to such a bad place. So she asks in what she hopes is a jaunty, playful way, “Want me to sneak out and meet you?”
“I don’t know, Maddy,” he says, and the distance in his voice terrifies her.
“I learned a new trick,” she says, and he laughs and says, “Oh yeah? What trick is that?”
“It’s a surprise.”
He’s quiet, and she says, “Meet me at the corner. We’ll go somewhere. I’ll do it to you in the car.”
He sighs. “I gotta work in the morning. We need to make it fast, okay? Nothing after.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll be out there in fifteen minutes. Come and get me.”
She hangs up and contemplates what to wear. Something easy to slip off. This is exciting. It is, isn’t it? She feels like she’s in a television show. But now she needs to think of a trick.
She takes off her pajamas and pulls on a T-shirt. No bra. Jeans, no underpants. Then she uses her phone to google Variations on oral sex, female to male.
When it’s time, she raises her bedroom window, climbs out into the foundation shrubbery, and crouches down, listening, making sure she has not awakened her father. No; she hears nothing. She walks to the corner to wait. She stands there seven minutes, she counts every second with a despairing kind of dread, but then here come his headlights and the car pulls up next to her. His arm is hanging out through the open window and the smoke from his cigarette is rising up and it’s so sexy, it’s so right, he’s so manly, nothing like the dumb boys in her school, whose idea of a good time is trying to slam locker doors on each other’s hands.
She wets her lips, runs to the passenger side, and leaps in. He nods but says nothing, just drives off to a forest preserve a couple of miles away. He pulls into one of the parking spaces, cuts the engine, and turns to face her.
“Hey,” he says, and he rubs at the corner of one eye. The gesture is endearing to her, somehow, and she leans over to kiss him. But he pulls away, saying, “I gotta get back soon, I gotta get up early. So, you know. What’s up?”
“What’s up?” she says.
“Yeah, what’s the trick?”
“Oh,” she says. “Well, so…Want me to show you?”
“Yeah.”
&nbs
p; No need for her to get undressed after all. No time.
She puts her hand to his crotch, unbuttons his jeans, and carefully pulls the zipper down. Apparently there’s this little place back there where you can rub when you do it. Apparently they love that. Awkwardly, she gets on her knees on the floor in front of him.
He leans his head back, closes his eyes. Tosses his cigarette out the window. She looks at his handsome face, then begins.
Afterward, she says, “So…?”
“Yeah, it was great. Thanks.”
Thanks? “You’re welcome,” she says. She moves back to her side of the seat.
“Listen, Maddy,” he says, looking down, and her insides jump at the sight of his long lashes, the planes of his cheekbones, the way his hair falls into his face.
He looks at her to say, “I gotta tell you. I think we need to cut back on seeing each other.”
She freezes. Cannot speak. Does not breathe.
“Okay? I mean, I’m busy at work, and I’m trying…you know, I’m trying to do some other stuff.”
“What stuff? Something I can help with? I could help you.”
“No, it’s nothing….” He looks out the side window, then back at her. “Aw, Maddy, I can’t lie to you. You’re a good kid. You’re a pretty girl, we had some good times, right? But you…Okay, I’m just going to say it right out because I respect you, okay? Like, I’m not going to lie to you. I found someone….She’s more my age, okay?”
“Who is it?” Maddy has no idea why she has asked this question. Or how. She doesn’t want to hear a single word about whoever this person might be.
“She works at the store, we run into each other a lot.”
We. It burns. Maddy presses her lips together tightly. Must not cry. Really must not cry.
He laughs. “At first we hated each other. It’s really funny, it’s like a sitcom, right? We like really hated each other. This one time she came into—”
“It’s okay,” Maddy says. “I don’t want to hear any more.”