by Chris Lynch
But Lois didn’t move. She continued to stare at the door, over Joanne’s head, but now let the tears roll.
“The only thing I can do for you now is to tell you this, Jo. Don’t hold on so tight to being a young thing. Because while you may remain pretty and you may remain smart and you may get rich, the one thing in this world you can be absolutely sure about is that one day, maybe soon, you will not be young anymore. And everybody’s going to know it, and nothing else is going to matter.”
Joanne stood, quiet, waiting. “Ya, so?”
When Lois didn’t answer, Joanne just walked around her and went to her room.
“Ya, so . . . ,” Lois repeated.
When Joanne came out an hour later expecting to find her supper, she found instead Lois hugging Davey with both arms while he sat staring blankly at the TV. He wore her as calmly as if she were a parrot sitting on his shoulder. Joanne made macaroni and cheese for all of them and they ate in dead silence.
Lois was out of bed at dawn the next morning, reading out of an old yellow Betty Crocker cookbook as she tried to make real pancakes. Puffs of flour dust rose gently, then faded to the table or the floor as she first picked out the tiny brown mealybugs then poured carefully into the measuring cup. An eggshell fragment the size of a fingernail trimming was going to have to stay in the mix after Lois buried it deeper by chasing after it. With every flick of the whisk more batter spilled over the side of the bowl, but it was batter. She tasted it with her finger. She was good at this, some time ago, and the taste of the wet batter reminded her of that.
She pulled a half box of breakfast sausages from the freezer. She didn’t remember buying them. The box was wide open and the links were crusted in a quarter inch of spiny white frost. That wouldn’t matter, though, after the boiling. Lois always boiled sausages before browning them, to reduce the fat.
Lois had just nodded off at the table when the children crept stiffly into the kitchen. They didn’t sit down at first, stood there mesmerized at the mess of cooking stuff all over, and at the actual early-morning presence of their mother. Joanne raised her nose in the air and whiffed the sausages that were warming in the oven. Davey stuck his finger in the dripping bowl that sat on the table, tasted it, then pulled back like he’d seen something wiggling in there.
Lois’s eyes opened slowly, followed a few seconds later by full awareness. She was embarrassed. “Come on, sit down,” she said, jumping up and making herself busy. She slapped plates and silverware down, dropped one dollop, then four into the sizzling skillet, and in a few minutes served pancakes, sausages, and sectioned fresh oranges to her gape-mouthed baby birds. Joanne and Davey ate quickly, ravenously, not out of a great hunger, exactly, but out of a desire for this food right here. Between bites they would tip glances up at Lois, who was smiling as she watched, smiling satisfied, but smiling tired.
The meal finished, the kids sat back pregnant with round bellies and with feelings they didn’t know, things they couldn’t get out. Lois disappeared briefly into the bathroom and returned with a comb to attack the mop that was always on Davey’s head. The comb got impossibly stuck an inch above his forehead, and she pulled it out with a laugh. Joanne gave her mother a weak smile and tapped Davey on the shoulder, and they got up. “Thanks, Mum,” Davey said as Jo led him out to school. “Thanks, Mum.”
“You want me to take care of that, Davey?” Joanne said hurriedly, pointing at his tattoo. “I’m sure I could take that right out in no time. With cold cream.”
“No thanks,” he said, walking away with his hands clasped behind his back. He’d already touched up both tattoos to keep them alive a little longer, working with either hand, with a pen.
When they were gone, Lois looked around at the kind of domestic mess she hadn’t witnessed in years. Dirty dishes, heavy batter solidifying on the table, the floor, the stove. Every container she’d opened sitting open. Eggshells and orange peels sitting in the sink. The entire room seeming to be powdered in flour.
She stood up to work on it. The smile left her, the flutter of joy in her belly gone with it. The tiredness returned in its place. Lifelessly she picked up the batter bowl and trucked it toward the sink. The bowl slipped out of her buttery hand and exploded like a smashed windshield on the floor. Lois stared down at it, stood on it, and quietly began to cry again. She couldn’t do this. Not really, not for real, not for long, not even for one more meal, she already knew. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t do this.
Joanne came back through the kitchen door, making Davey wait outside for her. She could do it, she thought after she’d left. She could tell her mother thank you. But Joanne was stunned all over again to find the abandoned kitchen, the untouched mess, to crush under her feet the smashed pieces of glass. She walked to her mother’s bedroom and found her lying under the blankets, coiled on her side, staring at her music box, which was open and tinkling “Nadia’s Theme.” As it would play for Lois all day long.
Joanne crept back out of the room. She cleaned the kitchen so thoroughly it was hard to remember the breakfast scene. Then she went out and collected Davey, who still waited, forty minutes and late for school, on the step.
THEY
They want to take Jo’s baby away. I don’t know who they are but they are making a mistake because they can’t have him. Because I don’t care I really don’t what they say or what they think or whatever about how maybe Jo does or can or doesn’t or can’t take care of the baby Dennis but it’s all just stupid as hell because I can take care of the baby Dennis and that’s that.
They said that maybe ’cause Jo isn’t there at the house all the time and because her old man like she calls him isn’t there at all and because the baby Dennis spent too much time with nobody stopping him from standing up in his little cracked painted crib that was mine a long time ago that Ma said Jo stole but if it was mine I say he can have it so never mind Ma and Jo and all their stuff. Staring out the window chewing enough of the paint off the side of the crib and some more off the windowsills when he goes there to stare some more that now he has to go to children’s hospital every week and let them look at his blood and he has to take some medicine they think that’s the reason that maybe he should get taken away.
But who doesn’t stare out the window is what I say. If I had a nickel for every hour I spent staring out the window at maybe a cloud that looks like my mother’s ice-white pretty face or at the rain that looks like the drops grow and grow into blobby clear water balloons as they get closer to the ground because I have eyes good enough that I can zero in on one single one from all that far away. Or at a star in the purple at night. For a million hours I could do that. Well if I had a nickel for all the times I did that I’d just have a lot of money is what I’d have.
And I make him take his medicine anyway. All the time just like he’s supposed to I make him swallow it even though he hates it and he gets crazy and he hates me for giving it to him and he slaps me and scratches me and kicks me and there is nothing nothing that can hurt me like my baby Dennis trying to hurt me. I used to come just some days but now I come practically every day because Jo isn’t so serious as maybe she ought to be about giving the baby Dennis his medicine and once she found out that I was very serious about it I think that just maybe she forgot a couple of times on purpose just to make sure I’d come and boom she could get out of the apartment like on a rocket ship. And giving me two glasses of wine now because she’s so happy to be going and I’m so happy to be staying.
But some of the things she does like they say because the law makes her like she does take him to children’s hospital all the time. I tell her maybe I should go with her sometimes so that I can understand things more and so she doesn’t maybe forget or not care enough about something the doctor might be telling her to do. She tells me to forget it and that once the doctors get a load of me they’ll take the baby Dennis and they’ll take me and they’ll throw her Joanne into jail for conducting experiments at home so I should shut up and drink my grape
and leave the fucking mothering to her is the end of what she tells me.
And when they told her she had to move out of that old house because it wasn’t safe for the baby Dennis she did but she moved to another house that had the same unsafe stuff in it because she found out about this thing where you don’t have to pay any rent if the landlord doesn’t take care of the problems so she does that not paying rent for a few months until she gets chased out and can find another unsafe place. So you keep the goddamn baby away from the goddamn windowsills Davey is what she says about it and is that so hard that it shouldn’t be a decent trade all that rent money that can go to food that will fill the baby up and he won’t want to be eating no windowsills like he does. Only I haven’t seen hundreds of bucks of new food going into the baby Dennis since all this started.
But all the bad stuff was when I wasn’t here when I didn’t know but now I am and now I do so they can stay away now they can leave us alone now. But I know they won’t. But they don’t know me though. What I would do. What I would do if I ever knew that they were coming here to get my baby Dennis I would take him and put him on my bike the one that my dad left for me in my room at night the bike that is tougher and faster than anything and that nobody or no thing can touch me when I’m on it. I’d take my baby Dennis and I’d put him in the front of a milk crate wrapped in a heavy blanket just like Eliot and E.T. in the movie we’d touch our fingers together they would glow and I’d pedal hard and he would make the bike fly so we couldn’t be caught and I know Joanne would let me do it.
We’d be up there away from everybody my heart would glow right through my skin right through my shirt and the baby Dennis’s would too because we’re just like in E.T. the same he’s just like me and I’m just like him all connected up he feels everything I feel I feel everything he feels he feels everything I feel.
And I’d ride him all the way up to the star that both of us are always looking at out the window is what I would do.
GIMP
When the orders eventually changed from “Joanne, dammit, you stay in this house and take care of your brother” to “Joanne, dammit, would you get that Davey up and out of the house for a change,” Joanne was out the door like a heat-seeking missile, with Davey in tow.
She introduced him to her friends, who actually didn’t do much more with their time than Davey did, but they did it outside and in a large group. They spent their weekends and afternoons hanging out draped all over one another, boys and girls mostly ages twelve to fifteen, just like a pride of heat-prostrated lions, on the porch of a family whose parents seemed to be nonexistent and whose daughter Celeste was more or less the group’s leader. Joanne was scared, bringing her little brother to this place, but he was hers, and they were hers, so she was going to do it.
The problem was whenever somebody brought along a new hanger, the first order of business was typically to give him a beating before letting him stay. But that wouldn’t be a problem this time. Davey was just a kid, too young for that kind of stuff. And he was so sweet and no trouble to nobody. He was Davey. Anyway, not while Joanne was around. No way.
Big old Celeste, who some of the kids called “Brutus” when she wasn’t in earshot, came right toward Davey the first time Joanne brought him around. “Yo, Jo, who’s the gimp?” she said, getting it started.
There was nothing wrong with Davey, not really. Nothing physical. Nothing outside of a few too many hours spent alone. Lately in front of a TV of course, or on his bike riding furiously to nowhere, talking to no one, stopping for nothing, until he’d gone out ten, fifteen, twenty miles and only the fading light told him it was time to come back. The glaze came from not talking enough to other human beings. The prominent forehead and the height—Davey was, at nine, already five feet six inches—came from his father, Sneaky Pete. The crooked Prince-Valiant-meets-Julius-Caesar haircut that exaggerated it all was courtesy of Lois. “Goddammit, Davey, you look like a sheepdog, staring out of that bangwork, and you haven’t got the brains to even brush it out of your way.” So, one big snip. The overall look was a mistake, was all, too much head, too much height, too much quiet, too much dumb sweet. Just an unfair, unfortunate mistake.
“He’s my brother,” Joanne said coolly. “And he ain’t no gimp.”
“You never said nothin’ about havin’ no half-wit at home.” Celeste laughed, making others laugh too.
But Joanne knew how quickly, in a circle like hers, the casual remark became the permanent identity, so she did what she had to do. She walked right up and smacked her in the mouth.
“Go, Jo, go, Jo,” a handful of the kids yelled as they jumped to their feet to watch the two girls tumble down the stairs.
“Kill her, Celeste,” somebody yelled. “Snatch her bald. Rip her face off.”
They were all twined up, the two girls looking like a single alligator caught in a net and twisting, rolling, slapping on the ground. Joanne had Celeste’s long loose black hair wrapped around and around her fist like a cowboy roping a bronco. Celeste, from her position on her back, had both arms outstretched, both hands on Joanne’s face, both sets of long nails digging into the face. Celeste dug in and pulled at the flesh, her thumbnails catching inside Joanne’s mouth and pulling the lip up to make her look like a snarling dog. Joanne started listing one way, looking about to tumble over, as Celeste’s fingernails caught the lower rim of both eyes and started ripping down.
Davey watched, like everybody else. Inside, in his stomach and in his chest and in his temples, he was sick. He was screaming. He was wielding an aluminum baseball bat, raising it high over his head, and bringing it crashing down on Celeste’s head. He could see it like it was happening, Celeste falling with no life in her rolled-back eyes, falling with her face right on Davey’s shoes, the soak of blood warming his toes. And the disgusting animals beside him, across from him, behind him, in the fight-circle that had formed on the sidewalk, all backing away giving Davey his due as he helped his wounded sister off the ground. Inside, it all happened. Outside, he did nothing but look on, hyperventilate so shallowly that you had to put an ear to his lips to tell, and wipe his eye once.
As she was about to fall, to land on her back with Celeste on top—the certain death spot—Joanne pumped her fist one hard time. The fist with the hair in it. Everyone heard it, the scrape and bang sound like a baseball landing in a parking lot. Celeste stopped clawing momentarily, stunned. So Joanne did it again, BANG. Celeste just tried to push Joanne away now, or hold her off, rather than attack, but it was no use. Joanne finally got her other hand close enough to grab more hair and, with two good grips, pounded and pounded and pounded Celeste’s head on the pavement. People stopped cheering. Blood started showing, a spot, a blot, a puddle, on the sidewalk behind Celeste’s head as well as on her face, dripping from Joanne’s mouth. Out of the crowd, one boy grabbed Joanne’s left arm, one her right.
And it was over just like that. Joanne got up peacefully, as if a timer had sounded or a referee had declared it over. Gradually the whole pride went back to flopping in their spots. Two girls and a boy helped Celeste up and took her, crying lowly and spitting, into the house. Joanne pulled Davey by the hand and sat on the bottom step. Shaking, but silent, looking everybody in the eye.
The blood, a red cloud floating on the white concrete, was the only sign that anything had happened.
There was a slap on Joanne’s shoulder, then another, and she started feeling a little good. Nobody said anything about it, but she knew what she’d done. Celeste, hated though she was, was still the queen, but she was more of a figurehead now. Joanne had the real stuff. Then she felt Davey’s hand lightly touching her face. He reached out and laid two fingers on the hurt part just below one eye, ran the fingers down slowly over the long skid marks of nail that ran straight to her mouth where the gums were still bleeding. She grabbed his hand there, put it back in his own lap, turned away, and spat some blood.
She looked at him. But what had she done for him? This is what she knew. She k
new, before she’d even put a hand on Celeste, that there was nothing she could really do about the gimp thing or the half-wit thing or any other thing anybody wanted to pull on Davey. But what she had done, the one and only thing she always knew she could do for him, was that she made sure it wouldn’t happen while she was around. She had that one nugget of the universe to hold, and she’d held it. It wasn’t much, but it was the one thing she could truly, surely do for him.
Joanne’s hulking, mumbling, grimy sometimes boyfriend Phil came over and wedged his big butt between Davey and Joanne on the step. “Pretty tough, babe,” he said, kissing her on the bloody lip, then licking it off. “But, ah, but you know, you know how it is here, don’tcha?”
She straightened up, fear finally in her face.
“Well, what, Jo?” he said, as if the situation were honestly out of his hands. “Did you think you could go around it? Jus’ ’cause you say no?”
“No, Phil,” she pleaded, grabbing his hand. “He’s only little.”
“Ain’t neither, babe. He’s big as you. Not too much behind me, even.”
“But, Phil, he’s only—”
Phil held up his great big hand, walling her off. “But I tell you what we can do. Because it’s you, Joanne. Maybe we can make a sorta axception.”
Joanne relaxed.
“Hold on a second,” Phil said, turning away from Joanne toward Davey. Davey looked up at Phil, the wide eyes waiting, like always.
With a quick flick of his forearm, Phil punched Davey. Cracked him in the eye a half-speed poke about like a Ping-Pong stroke. He didn’t follow through, pulled his meaty fist back as soon as it landed. His concession to Davey and Joanne.
Everyone sat frozen, even Joanne. Phil stood up over Davey, who had fallen backward and now lay over two steps, holding his eye.