Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  He found a parking slot, at last, on an alley in front of a necktie shop. The shop was open for Saturday business, but empty except for a stout saleswoman, who was planted, angrily, in the doorway.

  “Bless you,” Allen told the parking meter as he read its orders. He drew a shade with his hand over his eyebrows, and squinted at the facades for his aunt’s apartment building. “Please, please be home,” he said to the upper-floor windows when he found them. “You must.” He adjusted his right foot in its penny loafer, and walked.

  The teenager in the cowboy hat had come out onto the broad sidewalk, and was watching as Allen approached.

  Allen stalled, and got his bearings under a lilac bush. He busied himself with his wristwatch, shaking it, and scowling at its face. It was eleven-forty.

  “Guess how much I used to weigh,” the teenager said. He held open the vest he wore instead of a shirt, and showed Allen his tiny waist and rib cage.

  “You’re crazy,” Allen said.

  “Yeah, but just guess,” the teenager said.

  “Four hundred and fifty pounds,” Allen said. He headed up the sidewalk, past the teenager, toward the entrance doors to the Cheshire.

  The cowboy followed, close on Allen’s heels. “You belong back in your room at the mental asylum,” Allen said. “You’re late now, so you better hurry if you want lunch. Let me by, this instant.”

  “There you go,” the teenager said. He took his hat, waved it with his hand, and did a low bow. “Monsieur.”

  Allen looked at the bent-over teenager, who had a zodiac pendant dangling from his throat. The boy wore archless sandals of stitched plastic.

  “You look about the right weight,” Allen said, and swallowed.

  “That’s what I think,” the teenager said. He straightened up, and took a soldierly stance. “It took willpower.”

  •

  Mindy was propped on her couch, on foam pillows the colors of Easter candy. She had a crocheted afghan spun twice around the calves of her legs.

  The old suite she rented had been restyled with lowered ceilings and a pink-beige carpet. There was a new folding door on the bathroom, and a line of little appliances in the kitchen.

  The central room was hushed after the street racket below, and the floor and furniture were striped with light that came through the window blind. Low on a wall, an air cooler was chugging.

  “Ooh, thank heavens, you’re here,” Allen said. “Do you have any idea what would have happened to me if you’d gone out to lunch or something?” He flopped down on the floor in front of Mindy, gripped the back of his neck, and let his head roll back on his hand. “Whew, I’ll tell you. I’d be at the police station, right now, filling out reports. That’s a tricky downtown, on a good day. But on a day like today—a Saturday, when everything’s thronged, the people get irritable enough to kill one another, and they don’t even know why. It’s because they’re hot.”

  Mindy was watching Allen without interest.

  “Aunt Min, I hope you can help me,” he said. “I need desperately for somebody to talk me out of doing something stupid.”

  Mindy creased the pages of the newspaper she had been reading, the Sun, and tossed them over her shoulder onto the floor behind the couch. She reached for a glass on the lamp table—a brown drink with a bobbing cherry.

  “Give me a minute to get my equilibrium,” Allen said. “Then I’ll unload the whole problem. Your place sure is coming along. It looks better and better, every time I come. Is that a new painting?”

  Mindy lifted herself, and craned her neck to see the wall behind her. “No,” she said. She relaxed back into place, and tapped the cherry that floated on the surface of her drink. “I got that at an estate sale, almost a year ago.”

  “What does it remind me of?” Allen said, thinking. “My head is full of names. I’ve been taking a course on the history of art—which I love. I was smart, for once, and got the jump on my graduating class. They don’t start college ’til fall quarter. Rousseau is the name that keeps sticking in my mind for some reason—in relation to that piece.” He nodded at the wall. “Someone, either the textbook or my T.A., says the whole pageant of art history stops right with Henri Rousseau. I think I already knew that, but, anyway, his work sort of reminds you of looking through a magnifying glass. He can take you out into a field or a jungle, say, and leave you standing there. Painting, I found out, is all done with the eyes.” Allen straightened his posture, and pulled his feet into a lotus position. “To prove what I mean, we saw these amazing films of Auguste Renoir, in his last and final days, where he was painting with brushes strapped onto the backs of his wrists—which were crippled up with something, but even that didn’t stop Renoir.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Mindy said.

  “O.K., you’re not interested,” Allen said. “But what brought all this up is I really do like your picture, if nothing else, just for the winter theme. I love winter, and I hate summer. You wouldn’t believe how lazy I am because of the humidity, recently. I just drop when it gets too bad, and Dad leaves our air conditioner off overnight, so you wake up, already sick. One morning, I was fixing cinnamon toast, or something, and I had to practically lie on the counter to keep from going into a complete faint.”

  “How is Paul?” Mindy said.

  “Fine,” Allen said. “So, what I do is I throw a whole tray full of ice cubes into the bathtub with me, first thing, and then I just stay in there until the air conditioner’s working enough to make some difference. I know it’s not good for you, to go from red hot to freezing cold—it’s probably why I’m so hoarse. Dad says I go around coughing twenty hours a day.”

  “Is Paul still thinking of remarrying?” Mindy said. She untangled her legs from the afghan, stood, and circled where Allen was positioned on the rug.

  “That’s the whole thing I came to talk to you about, Aunt Min.” Allen looked up, and turned slowly on his seat, following Mindy. “The woman, it turns out—I’ve never met her. I just heard about her from Dad, and, of course, he left out all the bad stuff. She’s older than he is. She’s been married before, at least once. She’s got four kids, which’re grown, thank God. He wants to move her—Laura Glinnis is, I guess, her name—into the house with us. You can imagine what that’d do to me. I’ve never had to live with a woman. Not since we lost Mom.”

  “You never lived with your mother, Allen. She died in childbirth.”

  “I know,” Allen said, looking sad for a moment. “Everyone always tells me not to blame myself for it.”

  Mindy said, “Your father never forgave me for missing Marguerite’s funeral. Though I was in Germany then, with Carl. We waited a day too long before flying home. I had no idea they’d bury her so quickly. And then Carl was dead within the year, and I found out how they do things.”

  “I’m sure Dad forgives you,” Allen said. “See, he’s forgot all about Mom. That’s what gets me.” Allen pulled a burr from his sock and threw it onto the carpet. “I had the Dodge out one night, driving around, and thinking over this whole thing. I got off the beltway at some exit, and went to a bar, and had a couple of mixed drinks. No one even asked for an ID. They just served me the drinks, one on top of another. I was completely exhausted by then. I didn’t care if Dad moved Mrs. Glinnis and her brood right smack into the dining room and fed them T-bone steaks. I started smashing my fist on the table top of the booth they had there. I didn’t hurt anything, really. Just my own hand. But I realized I have a capacity to be very destructive. It’s like there’s some monster inside me, that wants to kill everything in my way.”

  “Why don’t you get married, Allen?” Mindy said. She was between him and the couch, snapping at her manicured fingernails with her thumb. “Why don’t you get a wife somewhere, and marry her, and move away? Let your dad find a way out of his loneliness, if he can. Because you’d still have the idea of you and your father. I’m sure that’d be better than the real relationship.”

  “Hmm. Maybe I could,” Allen said. He
took Mindy’s drink, which she had refreshed, and sipped from it. “But you forget I’m underage.”

  “No, I remembered that, Allen. You could lie. Or you could get permission from your father.”

  “This is crazy, though, because I don’t have anyone to marry,” Allen said.

  “I know dozens of people.”

  “That’d marry me?”

  “In a minute,” Mindy said.

  “Yeah, O.K. Only, so many people make me nervous. There was a guy out front, today, for example …”

  “Tex? Tex is usually out front. You’d delight in him, Allen. He’s got just the right touch of …”

  “You must be thinking of someone else,” Allen said.

  Mindy was in a beanbag chair, in the corner, loading color film into her camera. “You know, I bought this camera with money I won in the football pools,” she said. “I always win. That’s why I love to gamble. I especially like circulating the floors of the office where I work, to see who else won, and what teams the poor losers bet on. Oops!”

  “What?” Allen said.

  “Nothing,” Mindy said. “Don’t worry.” Her chignon had come undone, and the left side of her hair—blonde, though she was fifty-one—had fallen onto the shoulder of her kimono. “I clicked off a couple that I didn’t mean to. It’ll be all right.”

  “It will,” Allen said, in a low voice, to the cowboy-hatted teenager who sat on the couch with him. “She’s really more or less a professional. Her work’s appeared in a couple of the D.C. galleries—places you’d recognize, if I could remember the names.”

  “One gallery, and they just showed two of my self-portraits,” Mindy said. “A picture of me, at the stove. One of me, petting Abra.…”

  “Cat that ran away,” Allen told the teenager.

  Both young men had been drinking, earnestly. Allen tugged off his cotton shirt and laid it out on the floor. He removed his loafers, and his wristwatch. The teenager took off his vest.

  “What may I call you?” Allen asked.

  The teenager puffed his right cheek full of air, then noisily let the air out. “Baker,” he said.

  “First, or last?” Allen said. The teenager shrugged.

  “Baker, alone, is fine,” Allen said. “Easier to remember.”

  “One more minute,” Mindy said, from the corner. “I’m truly sorry this is taking so long. It isn’t my fault. The spool’s in backward or something. I wouldn’t have had Allen get you up here,” she said to the teenager, “if I’d known this was going to happen.”

  “These’ll be great photographs,” Allen said.

  “Yeah, if I can.… Oops,” Mindy said. “Damn.”

  “Now what’s the matter?” Allen said.

  Mindy said, “Oh, I did something, and now I can’t—do you know anything about cameras?”

  “I had a basic film theory and technique course,” Allen said.

  “Loading,” Mindy said. “L-o-a-d-i-n-g.”

  “Not for any camera,” Allen said.

  Mindy struggled out of the beanbag chair. She came toward them, stepping over the coffee table, and showing one of her legs from the thigh down. She dropped the camera. Its self-timer ticked off fifteen seconds against the floor carpet.

  Allen squeezed his forehead and sighed.

  “The joke is, I do make good photographs,” she said. “Maybe—who’s to say?—great ones. But you’ve got to do daily work to be great, and for that you need a darkroom in your house, and not way across the g.d. town.” She sat on the coffee table, with her skirt hitched up.

  “That’s true,” Allen said.

  “I had a camera,” Baker said.

  “Good for you, Tex,” Mindy said. “Seriously, I got two rolls of thirty-six people each.… What did I just say? Did I say, ‘thirty-six people each’? Isn’t that a scream? Thirty-six exposures each, on each of two rolls. They came up brilliant, brilliant. And the reason was those faces.”

  “Faces?” Allen said.

  “Yes, honey, that’s what the world is. There’s no world without faces to reflect it. Look at that face.”

  Allen and Mindy looked at Baker. He was whistling through a cavity in a front tooth. He wiggled his eyebrows at them, hard enough to move the brim of his cowboy hat up and down.

  “What’s in that face, Allen?” Mindy said.

  Allen narrowed his eyes at Baker, and asked him to turn his head left, then right.

  “Well?” Mindy said.

  “Well, because of the hat, he looks … I’d say Western.”

  “You’re a sharp boy,” Mindy said.

  “I wasn’t done,” Allen said. “It also looks like a face that’s recently lost weight.”

  “Yeah, I did,” Baker said.

  “You don’t see any pain in those eyes?” Mindy asked Allen.

  “Yes. Well, really, no. I don’t, frankly, Aunt Min.”

  “Good, because I don’t either. There isn’t any. How about fear? Do you see fear in his eyes? Never mind.” Mindy got up and headed for the bathroom.

  “Do you like it hot, like this?” Allen asked Baker. Baker looked around his feet, and then around the apartment.

  “I mean, do you like hot weather?”

  “Sure,” Baker said.

  Mindy came back and Allen stood. Baker gathered his vest and stood up as well.

  “Here’s a face. Sit down, both of you,” she said. She showed them a photograph of a young male whose head was shaved, and whose eyes were wild-looking. There were markings, or scratches, on the photo, above the dark eyes. “This one is disturbed. People call him ‘disturbed,’ but he made perfect sense to me the day I took shots of him. If you look deep enough, you see the calm behind the chaos. It’s one reason I wanted to photograph you two,” Mindy said.

  “Not that you’re retarded,” Allen said to Baker. “Or me—that I am.”

  “Oh, you’re retarded, all right,” Mindy said. “I don’t know how, Allen, but you stopped your emotional growth at the age of six.”

  “Hey, that’s the bottle talking,” Allen said.

  “This was nice,” the teenager said to Mindy. “I’d like to visit you again, sometime, in the future.”

  •

  Mindy had felt sick, grabbed up Allen’s shirt, and gone swiftly into the bathroom, with the shirt held against her mouth. For a long while, Allen heard faucet water running. Eventually, he tried pushing open the folding door. “Aunt Min?” The door moved a few inches, and caught on Mindy, who lay over the floor tiles, with Allen’s shirt balled under her cheek for a pillow.

  Allen pulled the door shut. He paced around the apartment, in just his slacks, hissing and swearing to himself. He perched on the back of Mindy’s couch, and brought the telephone to his lap. He dialed 1, and then his home phone number.

  “Hello,” said a woman’s voice, startling Allen.

  “Is this my house?” he said. “Who is this?”

  “I’m Laura Glinnis,” the woman said.

  “Well, put Dad on, if he’s there. I need to talk with him, immediately.”

  “Just a second, Allen,” Mrs. Glinnis said. “Paul?”

  “What do you want, now?” Allen’s father said into the phone.

  “Just to let you know what I’m up to,” Allen said.

  “Is it serious?”

  “I feel that, this time, I’m in deep water, Dad. Things are completely out of my control. I’m sauced, for one thing. There might even be an ambulance case in the bathroom. I’m so messed up,” Allen said.

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Allen heard the whispery scrape of a cupped palm over the phone’s speaker. His father’s voice came back, slowly, saying, “Relax, boy. Run this thing down for me, step by step.”

  “O.K., the first thing you should know is I came here to tell Aunt Mindy about what’s been happening—my side of the story.”

  “Who’s in the bathroom, hurt?” Allen’s father said. “Is it Mindy? Tell me straight. Take it slow now, son.”


  “Aunt Mindy’ll be fine. I’m not worried about her,” Allen said. “She’s used to being drunk.” He laughed once.

  “Allen?” the voice said. “Do you know how you make me feel?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Allen said, and smacked down the phone’s receiver.

  He straightened the apartment a little, tidied the kitchen, and perked coffee. He opened the bathroom door the few inches it would go. He hoped the coffee aroma would revive Mindy.

  “You know Charles,” Mindy said in her sleep.

  Allen got the camera off the floor, and sat down, and tried until he was sweating to get the roll of film untangled.

  “I feel so … regretful,” Mindy called.

  Allen looked in on her. She was awake, but in the same prone position. Water still splashed from the opened faucet. “This is disgusting, I know,” she said. “It must be disgusting for you to see, Allen. A young boy. I’m really so, so sorry.”

  “You’re forgiven,” Allen said.

  “Do you mean it? You’re not really angry?”

  “Hell, no. Not at all,” Allen said.

  Whistling to himself, he borrowed a tailored blouse from a hanger in Mindy’s closet. He rolled the cuffs, where there were pearl, flower-shaped buttons. He turned the collar under, uncomfortably.

  In the kitchen, Allen poured coffee into one of his aunt’s pretty tea cups. He sat in the tiny dining annex, with his legs crossed, and sipped coffee, and considered his day. He thought he’d drive out around the Baltimore zoo—maybe buy himself dinner.

  16

  I Am Twenty-One

  I HEARD RINGING, AND I realized that what I had done was continued my answer to Essay Question I—“What effect did the discovery of the barrel vault have on the architecture of thirteenth-century cathedrals?”—writing clockwise in the left, top, and right-hand margins of page one in my exam book. I had forgotten to move along to page two or to Essay Question II. The ringing was coming from in me—probably from overdoing it with diet pills or from the green tea all last night and from reading so much all the time.

  I was doing C work in all courses but this one—“The Transition from Romanesque to Gothic.” I needed to blast this course on its butt, and that was possible because for this course I knew it all. I needed only time and space to tell it. My study notes were 253 pencil sketches from slides we had seen and from plates in books at the Fine Arts Library and some were from our text. I had sixty-seven pages of lecture notes that I had copied over once for clarity. Everything Professor Williamson had said in class was recorded in my notes—practically even his throat clearings and asides about the weather. It got to the point where if he rambled, I thought, yeah, yeah, cut the commercial and get back to the program.