We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  DANVERS VS. WINTHROP

  Heather Houston should’ve known the end was nigh when she found the Mounds wrapper balled up in a tissue and tucked in a frozen-orange-juice can, which was itself buried in an empty plastic bag that had once held carrots, the whole shebang jammed arm-deep in the kitchen trash. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, she thought. False in one thing, false in everything. It was almost ten o’clock Sunday night, the house on the edge of sleep, the moon a hair short of full in the skylight. Heather was pawing through the garbage searching for a good spot to hide a peanut-butter Twix wrapper she’d forgotten to throw away earlier that morning at church. Normally, the frozen-orange-juice container would’ve been ideal, the carrot bag an added layer of security. But somebody had beaten her to the punch. From the looks of it, it was someone who also knew a thing or two about hiding secrets.

  Let’s be honest. Sometimes in life there are things we know that we don’t really want to know. Capisce? As she stood there hovering over the trash, Heather felt the implications of the empty Mounds wrapper flood her synapses. The jig was up. A dam had burst in her brain. Instantly the dark knowledge she’d tried so hard to keep out these past few months came pouring in, the sudden realization that she must’ve looked like a rube standing there all this time with her finger in the dike. Whole cities and towns were about to be swept away in the truth. She could no longer keep it from happening. Metaphorically the water was up to her knees and rising.

  What Heather Houston knew better than anyone: out of sight, out of mind. How completely you hide stuff in the trash is how completely you hide stuff from yourself. Now there was no denying it. Somebody in the sugar-free Houston household was living a double life. It should’ve come as a great relief, this revelation that Heather wasn’t the only one. But it didn’t.

  And how did that jingle even go? Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t. Almond Joy’s got nuts; Mounds don’t. Heather did the math. Mr. Houston hated coconut along with hard-boiled eggs. That ruled him out. The twins weren’t even in contention. From what she’d seen of their decade on planet Earth, both Carrie and Carmen had drunk the Houston family zero-sugar Kool-Aid. It was no use even entertaining the possibility that one of them had done it. Her younger sisters were true believers. Just two weeks ago neither twin had gone out trick-or-treating for Halloween candy. Instead, Carrie and Carmen had struck out around the neighborhood looking adorable decked out as a pea and carrot while collecting money for UNICEF, netting almost forty bucks, twenty-two more than Heather ever raked in. That, plus their lactose intolerance, meant neither twin would ever be sneaking anything milk chocolate, then stuffing the evidence deep in the trash. Like our nation’s first president, their gut flora could not tell a lie. If Carrie or Carmen ate anything with even trace amounts of milk in it, they would let loose a series of bubbly farts anytime they laughed, the sound like passing gas underwater, their effervescence made manifest, their flatulence sickening in its cuteness.

  Heather thought back to earlier that afternoon when her mother had once again been reduced to tears after listening to Heather practice a Vivaldi aria despite the fact that she botched it each time she hit the melisma on the word speranza. She just couldn’t seem to keep her soft palate up, plus she always found herself running out of air with no good place to breathe. It was frustrating. Tryouts for district chorus were coming up in a week next Saturday. In addition to preparing Vivaldi’s “Sposa, Son Disprezzata” for chorus tryouts, Heather was also prepping Handel’s largo in C Minor for Oboe for district orchestra. It’d never been done before. Nobody had ever sung in the all-star chorus, eastern Massachusetts’ vocal cream of the cream, then walked offstage and walked back on with the orchestra, the instrumental cream of the cream. She liked the idea of being the first. She would be the Bo Jackson of districts, a double threat in hot-pink glasses. There were no rules against it. She just had to be good enough two times over. Piece of cake.

  When she’d stormed downstairs, miffed for blowing the melisma yet again, her mother was sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. Mrs. Houston looked up from wiping her eyes. “ ‘L’amo ma egl’è infedel spero ma egl’è crudel,’ ” she said.

  “Mo-om,” said Heather, dragging out the word. Not this again.

  Mrs. Houston continued, raising a pale hand to her forehead for dramatic effect. “ ‘I love him, but he’s unfaithful,’ ” she lamented. “ ‘I hope, but he’s cruel—will he let me die?’ ” Heather had to hand it to her mother. The woman was good. It was hard to tell what was genuine and what was an act. My mom: these past few months :: a teenage girl: mercurial, Heather thought, SAT analogy–style.

  Susan Houston had majored in theater at Wellesley, where she’d sung all the major pants roles plus played Hamlet. Post-Wellesley, she’d planned on giving herself five years in the Big Apple to get her name in lights, but after a decade of eating canned tuna and ramen and living with a succession of cockroaches both human and insect, the big time never called her up onstage. Defeated, she slunk back to Massachusetts, where she met Stephen Houston, who was ten years her senior and the second flautist for the BSO. Unlike Mr. Houston, Mrs. Houston’s days weren’t spent in the company of great men like Seiji Ozawa and John Williams while playing the theme songs to all the best Spielberg flicks. Instead, Mrs. Houston’s world shrank down to Heather and her younger sisters. Once the twins started school, she got a job as an administrative assistant at Salem State. Now at fifty, she was among the oldest moms at Danvers High. The other mothers acted like she was on the verge of breaking a hip. Sometimes she tried to use her “life experience” to lord it over the PTA, but mostly they just listened politely and then did what they were going to do anyway, even if she was their president.

  Thanks to the PTA and pretty much everything else in her life, it was fairly obvious within seconds of meeting her that Susan Houston was frustrated six ways from Sunday. Clues included the Working Girl VHS tape she’d worn out as well as the shoulder pads she sported bigger than anything the New England Patriots’ offensive line ever wore. It didn’t help that money in the Houston household wasn’t exactly tight, but it wasn’t what Mrs. Houston had grown up with down in Sudbury. The only one who didn’t seem to know his wife was a walking time bomb in a pair of black Easy Spirit pumps was Mr. Houston, who floated around the house lost in Debussy and Tchaikovsky and the murky depths of Jaws, his fingers caressing a set of silvery keys even when he wasn’t holding a flute.

  Mrs. Houston first met Mrs. Kaling when their two girls entered junior high. It was not love at first sight. When Mrs. Kaling asked what she did, Susan Houston responded tartly, “I’m an administrative assistant to the chair in the Department of English at Salem State.”

  Mrs. Kaling had looked momentarily perplexed, as if an unpleasant smell she couldn’t identify had just entered the room. Then she softened. “Oh, you’re a secretary,” she said. The air in the auditorium where the PTA was meeting seemed to visibly curdle around the two of them, space-time warping in new ways. It was on. After that, Heather and Julie Minh made every effort to keep their mothers apart—Mrs. Kaling the full-time religious homemaker, Mrs. Houston the career woman who insisted on being referred to with a hyphen. Nobody ever complied. Even when the annual greeting went out from the PTA, whoever typed the letter always loused it up, which meant her signature never matched the closing:

  Best wishes for a successful school year!

  Sincerely,

  Mrs. Stephen Houston, PTA President

  Heather could feel a darkness rising in her heart, the smell of processed coconut clouding her emotions. Overhead, the moon hung like a gallstone in the skylight. She definitely didn’t have time for this. In addition to district tryouts, she needed to finish drafting her college essays so she could get feedback on them from Cressida, the college adviser her parents had hired. And now she was having to sort out her mother’s unsortables. Crying in t
he middle of the day over Baroque arias. Banning ketchup from the house because it contained high-fructose corn syrup. Claiming the PTA had business at least two nights a week including Sundays. And all because three months ago, the then chair of the English department at Salem State didn’t take her with him as his personal assistant after he ascended to the Provost’s office, resulting in Susan Douglass-Houston questioning the very purpose of her life.

  But this was the final straw. A Mounds wrapper in the trash.

  The twins were already asleep. Mr. Houston wasn’t back yet from a performance in the city at Symphony Hall. Mrs. Houston was still out at an informal PTA potluck at Tina Hooper’s to discuss the case of Coach Mullins and what in the meantime should be done to protect the virtue of their daughters. Heather marched back upstairs, through the master bedroom, and straight into her parents’ bath. She flipped on the light. Everything was in its place, the vanity ordered like a laboratory. Lined up on the bathroom sink were baskets filled with lotions and spritzers, towels of every size hanging from their assigned hooks. Her father’s shaving things were thrown in a scummy bucket, which was the most Mrs. Houston could get him to pitch in, his stuff looking rusty and dull.

  Heather picked up her mother’s Goody. It was obvious she cleaned it every few days. Still, a few raven strands remained threaded around the bristles. Just this past September when the Chair had moved on to the Provost’s office without her, Mrs. Houston had started coloring her hair. It’s just henna, she’d said. Nothing artificial. The twins looked dubious, asked if it was fit for human consumption. “Absolutely,” said Mrs. Houston, licking a smidgen off her finger. “More,” they demanded, mini FDAs. Mrs. Houston ran her finger through the tub as if it were frosting. She popped said finger in her mouth and smiled wide, her eyes watering.

  Heather carried the hair to her room and pulled out the Artois Book of Shadows, the midnight-blue tome with the silver pentacle on the cover that she’d bought from the mysterious woman on Pickering Wharf Halloween night. She flipped to the index. There were endless possibilities under her chosen subject. “How to fall in,” “how to make,” “understanding,” “how to fall out of,” “what is.” Finally she found what she was looking for. “How to Tell If Your Lover Is Constant.” She didn’t let herself get snagged on technicalities, like that her mother wasn’t her lover. Heck, it was close enough. She read the instructions. She was going to have to improvise as she didn’t have any jimsonweed and the moon wouldn’t be full until Wednesday. Ingredients: an intimate article belonging to the potential deceiver. Well, that was one thing she wouldn’t have to hack. She marched back into her parents’ room and opened her mother’s underwear drawer. O Dio, manca il valor, valor e la costanza, she hummed to herself. O God, valor is missing, valor and constancy.

  When she saw them lying there in among the Hanes and the Fruit of the Loom, she tossed the hair she’d collected from her mother’s hairbrush in the trash. In a way, the spell had already worked. She had her answer.

  Heather took a big cleansing diaphragmatic breath. Just this morning in Sex-Ed class at the Unitarian church the teachers had passed around a series of sex toys. There had been a big black anal plug Heather couldn’t imagine anyone worming into their own body, a couple of rubber dildos covered with ugly veins. (Did the genuine article really look like that? If so, God help us!) Then Gary produced a pair of panties with no bottoms, the panties black and mostly just a tangle of string. Martha explained they were crotchless. “That way, you can leave them on while having intercourse,” she said. Heather tried not to gag on the image of Martha wearing a pair. Quickly she turned her mind off by imagining the general formula for a quadratic equation.

  Most of what Heather saw sitting in her mother’s underwear drawer looked pretty tame. The majority were cotton and practical. There weren’t any unexpected holes cut for the sake of convenience, nothing covered with lace or stitched together from a skein of thread. Each pair looked as if it could be pulled up past her mother’s belly button, maybe even all the way up to her neck.

  Heather felt the melisma bubble up on her lips. “ ‘Il mio sposo, il mio amor, la mia speranza.’ ” This time she sailed through it, a bird on the wind. She picked up the pair that had caught her eye and ran them across her wrist to gauge their softness. Why not? Nobody was watching. My husband. My love. My hope.

  The fabric was red satin. Stoplight Red. Fire Engine Red. Lipstick Red. Little Red Riding Hood Walking Through the Woods on the Way to Grandmother’s House Red. And there were two pairs of them. The year before, Heather had gotten an A+ in her chosen elective, Marketing 101. She knew what two meant. Two in the hand meant three in the bush. It was typical Madison Avenue packaging. Things came in threes so that you felt as if you were getting a deal when in reality you were getting two more than you needed. Two pair of red satin panties in her mother’s underwear drawer meant that very instant a third satiny sibling was somewhere painting the town Cherry Red.

  Yup. Heather didn’t need to cast a spell. It was obvious. The Mounds wrapper belonged to her mother. Mrs. Houston was eating candy in what she herself had declared a sugar-free home. And she was carrying on an affair with someone who swept her out of the house two nights a week and made her cry as she listened to Vivaldi, all while wearing a splash of red satin under the beigiest of shoulder-padded suits.

  Slowly Heather closed the drawer and went back to her room. She wasn’t sure which was worse. The underwear or the sugar.

  * * *

  —

  Monday after practice, intrepid Falcon Fire reporter Nicky Higgins and the Chin asked for five minutes of our time. We made them wait out in the gym while we talked it over in our locker room.

  “Five minutes?” said Little Smitty. “What? She gonna try and sell us a time-share?”

  “I think we should hear her out,” said Heather Houston. “You know, keep your friends close, your enemies even closer.”

  “Who was ever dumb enough to say that?” said Abby Putnam. Today like a guinea pig she was happily munching away on celery, only instead of eating a few pre-cut sticks the way a normal person would, she was holding an entire bunch on her lap and ripping off the stalks, then eating them one by one including the leaves. You had to hand it to her. The amount of green fibers stuck in her teeth was impressive. The next time she went to the bathroom she could’ve probably shit a sweater.

  Heather took off her glasses and began cleaning the lenses as if they had somehow been besmirched by Abby’s words. “I dunno. Sun Tzu. Machiavelli.”

  “Hitler,” said AJ Johnson, her braids rattling like castanets.

  “Yeah, it’s terrible advice,” said Abby in between bites. “I vote no.”

  “Maybe she just wants to do a profile on us,” suggested Julie Minh.

  “Nope, she’s been snooping around,” said Boy Cory. “Sticking that chin of hers in places where it doesn’t belong.”

  “Nuh-uh. You’re not allowed to comment on a girl’s looks,” said Becca Bjelica. Boy Cory looked around for a little help but, irresistible or not, nobody had his back.

  “I vote for entertainment,” wheezed le Splotch. For some reason It was out of breath. AJ thought It sounded as if It had just done a series of wind sprints, while Heather thought It looked more like It had run twenty-six miles to bring us the news that the Persians had just landed in Marathon.

  “What does that mean? How could this be entertaining?” said Girl Cory. “Philip” had recently sent her two tickets to the prom with the salmon dinner selected. It wasn’t an accident. Everyone knew Girl Cory had a serious fish allergy. There was a gold-plated medical-alert bracelet hanging from the rearview mirror of her Mercedes.

  “It means let’s live a little,” said Mel Boucher. “Spin the wheel, take a chance.”

  “I vote for the wheel,” said Jen Fiorenza. The Claw gave a thumbs-up, putting Its best face forward. We all knew it was
just for show. The Claw couldn’t win in a head-to-head against le Splotch. Le Splotch was primordial. It was there when the heavens formed and Emilio first came out of the clouds. There was no point in the Claw even having an opinion. Bishop takes knight.

  “This isn’t an oligarchy,” said Abby Putnam. Earlier she’d gotten the word wrong on her Civics test and was now eager to prove she knew what it meant. “We need to vote.”

  “Good God,” said Sue Yoon. “We’ve already wasted more than the five minutes she was asking for.” She got up and went out to find Nicky. Nobody stopped her. Abby ripped off a long celery stalk and mandibularly took out her disappointment on it.

  When Nicky came in, we realized what a work of art the Chin truly was. There was nowhere else to look. It cast a long peninsular shadow on the wall. Michelangelo himself couldn’t have sculpted It any better if he’d been a plastic surgeon in Miami. That afternoon, It looked a little shiny, as if she’d just eaten a piece of pizza, but judging from the angle It made with the rest of her face, the shine was perfectly understandable as the Chin must have taken twice as much sun as the rest of her. The shape of It called to mind the false beards of the Egyptian pharaohs, the thing a handle. Already le Splotch was highly entertained.

  Nicky whipped out her notebook. “Okay,” she said. She seemed a bit nervous. Julie Minh was about to suggest someone get her some water, but the Claw preemptively shook Its head. “This is what I know for sure,” said Nicky. She took a deep breath and launched into it.