Born Weird

by Andrew Kaufman

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t do it,” Paul whispered into Angie’s ear.

  “I’m sorry, those are the rules,” the flight attendant said.

  There are several explanations for what Angie said next. She had not slept well in many days. There were hormones racing through her body. She was literally inches away from achieving an impossible goal. But in truth, Angie simply couldn’t believe that a come-to-life self-righteous Barbie had this much power over her. The woman’s hair was too perfectly pulled into a bun. Her feet did not seem pinched in her high heels, which caused her no effort to stand in. Her white blouse had that one extra button open. The very tilt of her head said that this job was just something she was doing until someone rich made her his wife. And the height that her bra lifted her boobs made it clear that she wouldn’t be waiting long.

  “My dear girl …” Angie said.

  “Just don’t do it,” Paul repeated.

  Angie stopped. She regained her composure. The flight attendant blew yet another bubble. When it popped so did Angie. “Don’t be such a cunt!” Angie yelled, emphasizing the t.

  The flight attendant was speechless. A full second passed in which she did not react at all. Then she held up Angie’s boarding pass and ripped it in two. She tore the halves into quarters. She let the pieces fall from her hands. Angie watched the white paper squares flutter to the floor. And then, from the corner of her eye, she saw Kent rushing towards them.

  Two security guards tackled Kent before he even got close. His face hit the carpet. His lip burst open. Blood landed on the collar of his clean white shirt. The taller guard pressed a knee into the small of Kent’s back. The other one forced Kent’s arms behind him. At no time did Kent resist.

  “You let him go!” Abba screamed.

  “He’s done nothing wrong!” Richard yelled.

  “Right now! Let him go right now!” Lucy yelled.

  The guard put his giant right hand on the back of Kent’s head. Yet Kent easily looked up at Angie. The fabric of his shirt outlined the muscles in his arms. He started to stand, taking both guards with him.

  “Don’t, Kent,” Angie said “I’m so sorry. Please don’t make it worse.” Kent looked at Angie. “Please?”

  Kent nodded and then he lowered himself back to the carpet. The guards were confused. Then they quickly secured Kent’s hands behind his back.

  Angie turned to the flight attendant. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “We’ll just leave. All of us.”

  The security guards were happy to have Kent. They nodded their consent and the flight attendant acquiesced. Angie touched Lucy and Abba on the shoulder. She took Richard by the hand. Paul followed as they left Kent behind.

  For three hours they stood on the sidewalk in front of Lester B. Pearson International Airport. Planes flew overhead. Angie watched vapour trails criss-cross and dissolve. Just after noon she looked back at her family. Abba sat on the sidewalk with her hands folded in her lap. Lucy’s eyes were red-rimmed. Paul hovered several steps behind, as if awaiting instructions. Richard stood by himself, to the right, with a cigarette in his mouth and a Zippo in his hand, both of which were unlit. To Angie they looked like a painting in the Renaissance style. And then Kent walked into it.

  Kent stood so perfectly between Lucy and Richard that his appearance didn’t demand attention. It completed the picture. The two guards who’d escorted him stepped into the background. Kent took the lighter from Richard’s hand. He brushed it against his jeans. He held the flame to the end of the cigarette. Richard exhaled before he realized how odd this was.

  “Jesus!” Richard said.

  “It’s like, what, two days? Two days and a bit?” Kent asked. He capped the Zippo and handed it back to Richard. “If the Shark’s not kicking until the twentieth and we drive it in shifts, really fast, we can make it.”

  “He could be right,” Angie said.

  “We’ll just rent a car!” Lucy said. She was too impressed by Kent’s idea to be surprised by his presence.

  “A van!”

  “Why do you people always doubt me?”

  “Because you haven’t brushed your teeth in eight years?”

  “You just saw me do it!”

  “And before that?”

  “Be nice to Kent,” Angie said. “I think he just saved us.”

  “Fifty-one hours and fifty-four minutes, according to MapQuest,” Richard said, reading from his phone. “So, ya. We can make it.”

  “Where’s a car rental place?”

  “They’re inside,” Angie said.

  The security guards remained by the doors. Angie raised her hand. A taxi pulled in front of them. The trunk popped open and she put her carry-on inside it.

  “Not this one. There’s a dent on the side,” Lucy said.

  “We are in no position to be choosy,” Angie said.

  “The dent merely mirrors our current situation,” Richard said.

  “What about the rest of our luggage?” Abba asked.

  “Don’t be so attached to material things,” Kent said.

  “Shut up, Kent,” Lucy said.

  “Just because you’re too poor to have material things doesn’t make you holy,” Abba said.

  “We can buy new stuff when we get there,” Angie said.

  “Shotgun!” Kent called, and no one challenged him.

  At 2:35 p.m., having rented a white Ford Econoline van from Discount Car and Truck Rentals, they began driving west. The interior was grey and it had two bench seats.

  Angie and Paul sat in the middle. Lucy and Abba sat behind them. Richard drove and Kent retained shotgun. Twenty minutes passed and then, with the needle still pointing above the F, having just agreed that they would stop only for food and gas, Angie felt a desperate need to pee.

  “I need to pee,” she told them. “Desperately.”

  The van did not slow. Neither Richard nor Kent took their eyes from the road.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. But I need to pee.”

  Richard’s foot kept the gas pedal depressed. Kent turned around in the passenger seat. “Can’t you just hold it?” he asked her.

  “I’m eight and a half months pregnant!”

  “Which is why we had to rent this van.”

  “That does not change the fact that I really need to pee.”

  “Since you were six!” Abba called from the back row.

  “You get in a car and you think you need to pee!” Lucy said. “It’s in your head!”

  “It’s in my uterus! On top of my bladder!”

  “Vote,” Kent called.

  “A vote will not change how desperately I need to pee.”

  “All for stopping?” Richard called. He looked through the rear-view mirror. Angie’s and Paul’s were the only hands that were raised.

  “And against?” Richard asked. The rest of Angie’s siblings put up their hands.

  “The nays have it.”

  “I’m going to pee my pants and then the whole van will smell like pee …”

  “No you won’t.”

  “Just hold it!”

  “Don’t be such a suck.”

  “… smelly pregnant-woman pee!”

  “To pull over now would be a repudiation of democracy. Is that what you want?”

  “Angie’s a commie!”

  “Pull this goddamn van over right now!” Paul said. Having grown up with six sisters, Paul’s vocal skills were estimable. His version of the Tone, while not quite as powerful as the Shark’s, was more than persuasive enough. “Right now,” Paul repeated, quietly.

  “Okay, okay,” Richard said. “Where?”

  “Right here!”

  “Here?”

  “Good enough.”

  The van slowed. Richard let a white Honda Civic pass on the right and then he pulled onto the unpaved shoulder. Angie slid the van door open and jumped out. She stood at the side of the road. There were no bushes or trees. The grass had been recently mowed. Cars a
nd eighteen-wheelers zoomed behind her.

  “Damn it,” Angie said. Then she turned around and she saw Paul climb out of the van. He held his jacket by the shoulders, turning it into a curtain. With little choice and less time Angie squatted. Several moments passed before either of them spoke.

  “You really have a lot in there,” Paul said.

  “Try not to think about it.”

  “I love you.”

  “Jesus, Paul. Not now.”

  “We’re gonna make great parents.”

  “No, fuck, Paul. No, we are not.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just …”

  “Find me some toilet paper!”

  “Okay.”

  “Now! Right now!”

  “Okay,” Paul repeated. He wrapped his jacket around her shoulders. Angie continued to squat by the side of the road. She held his coat by the lapels. She waited until Paul was back inside the van and then she pressed her face against the fabric and she breathed in deeply.

  BESNARD WEIRD, IN THE YEARS preceding his sudden absence, had many possessions but only one that was sacred: his maroon 1947 Maserati A6 Pininfarina Berlinetta. Besides him, only his daughters had ever driven it. On each of these occasions, the car had been damaged.

  Lucy was the first to drive it. Although it had taken her days, she’d mustered the nerve both to ask her father for the keys and Angus Kieffer out on a date. She’d been surprised when both had said yes. She returned Angus unharmed, but her father’s car had suffered a minuscule ding in the right door. Besnard easily found this almost invisible mark and forbade her from ever driving the car again.

  Six days after her sixteenth birthday Abba took the keys from her father’s bedside table and then went on a drive into the country. When she returned the car was without its right side-view mirror. How this happened, she never explained.

  Angie was the last of the Weird daughters to drive the Maserati. She found the keys in the right front pocket of a pair of her father’s navy-blue dress pants. In this same pocket she also found a tube of lipstick, cherry red. This was a shade her mother would have found crass. While by no means irrefutable evidence of adultery, Angie knew. She just knew.

  She left the lipstick but took the keys. Backing out of the coach house she struck a telephone pole at considerable speed. The left tail light burst into a million tiny pieces.

  Because of these accidents, the boys never got a chance to drive the car. But much more cruel, at least from their teenage perspectives, was that Besnard never fixed any of the damage his daughters had caused. He did not remove the dent from the door. He didn’t replace the side-view mirror or the shattered tail light. He left all three as visual reminders that his authority wasn’t arbitrary. That it existed for reasons of protection, which should never be questioned.

  The siblings just thought he was being an asshole. Except Angie, of course, who forgave him, instantly.

  Here’s something else that Angie did her best never to think about: she was the last person to talk to their father. It was shortly before eleven on November 22, 2001. She and Zach had just rushed out of the coach house. They made it to the porch at 10:57 p.m. But the front door was closed. The porch light was off and her father wasn’t there.

  Angie gave Zach a peck on the cheek and said goodnight. She went inside. “Dad?” she called. There was no answer. She knew that her mother, Abba and Lucy had gone to a play. Richard was at his girlfriend’s. Kent was likely up in his room, doing something she didn’t want to know about. The house was silent. If it hadn’t been, she would never have heard the garage door of the coach house being pulled open.

  Angie panicked. Believing that her father had seen her out there with Zach she became filled with anxiety. This grew into dread, which became so heavy that she decided to get it over with as quickly as she could. She went out to the coach house and found her father unlocking the driver’s side door of the station wagon.

  “Where are you going?” she asked him.

  “It’s …” he said, looking down, “a work thing.”

  “You’re taking the wagon?” she asked.

  Besnard hated the station wagon. He did not like being seen in it. When the whole family had to go somewhere all at once, he sometimes agreed to sit in the passenger seat. But more often he’d follow behind in the Maserati. “Oh. Ya. Right,” he said. He gave a small embarrassed laugh. He moved away from the station wagon and unlocked the Maserati. He opened the driver’s side door and then he looked at her. “You know,” he said. He paused. He flicked through his keys one at a time. “I love you.”

  This was the first time he’d ever told her this. It would also be the last thing he ever said to her.

  TEN HOURS OUT OF TORONTO, seven from Thunder Bay and seventeen from Winnipeg, Angie flicked on her low beams as the first car they’d met in sixty minutes drove past. She watched its tail lights fade in the rear-view mirror. She turned the high beams back on and tried to imagine what life would be like without her blursing, but the only thing illuminated was the landscape.

  Needing time alone—or as close to it as she could get—Angie had volunteered to do the overnight shift. The baby usually kept her awake during those hours anyway. But the drive hadn’t been solitary. While the others slept, Abba and Lucy continued a conversation they’d been having since the radio had lost all reception.

  “But … as queen, specifically, what is required of you?” Lucy asked.

  “There are a lot of official functions. Ceremonies, that sort of thing,” Abba answered.

  “Do you attend Parliament? Do you sign things into law?”

  “No. The king did that.”

  “Exactly. Okay. But after he died … he passed in 2007?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who took over that sort of thing?”

  “What are you trying to get at?” Abba asked. Lucy did not immediately answer. The pause was long enough that all three of them noticed the car. It came up behind them, quickly. Then it was beside them. There it stayed for five or six seconds before it sped off. With so few cars on the road it would have caught their attention even if it hadn’t been a red Maserati.

  “What ever happened to Dad’s car?” Abba asked.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know,” Angie said.

  “I don’t remember seeing it in the coach house,” Lucy said.

  “It wasn’t there. I would have seen it getting the camping stuff.”

  “Or when we built the bed.”

  “But it wasn’t in the driveway either.”

  “Maybe Kent sold it?” Abba asked.

  The probability of Kent arranging and negotiating this sale, let alone permitting it, was so low that they felt no need to wake him. Plus, he was still fucking mad that they’d unanimously voted against letting him drive. The Maserati pulled farther away. Angie stepped on the gas.

  “The left tail light’s missing,” Abba said.

  “I noticed that too.”

  “Was it the left or the right?”

  “It was the left,” Angie said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What about the side-view?”

  “It’s too dark to tell.”

  “Then get closer,” Abba said.

  The needle pointed to 120 km/h. Angie further depressed the gas pedal. The engine began to make a high-pitched whine. The single red tail light got farther away.

  “Angie, don’t be chicken-shit!”

  “Catch up to it!”

  “I’m trying,” she said. The tail light continued to recede. Angie drove faster still. The whine got louder. It got higher in pitch. Then the tail light disappeared.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  “The turnoff,” Lucy shouted, pointing. “The turnoff!”

  Angie steered sharply to the right. She tried to slow down. As she hit the off-ramp at 90 km/h, the van began to tilt. Angie braked. They came to a sudden sto
p. Their bodies were thrown forwards and then jarred back. This woke everyone up.

  No one said anything. Beside them was a stop sign. On top of it was a flashing red light. The inside of the van glowed red. Then it didn’t. And then it did again.

  “There it is,” Abba said and she pointed to the right. A single red tail light sped away. They watched it until they couldn’t see it. In the passenger seat Paul turned and looked at Angie. His face was red and then it wasn’t and then it was again.

  “Are you okay?” Paul asked.

  “Where are we?” Richard asked.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  “We’re chasing ghosts,” Lucy said. Abba and Angie could only nod their heads in agreement.

  AT 4:30 P.M., THE AFTERNOON AFTER they’d chased the Maserati, having finally crossed the Ontario/Manitoba border and started over the Prairies, the sun was neither golden nor setting as Lucy pulled in front of the Golden Sunsets Retirement Community. From the middle bench Angie looked in the rear-view mirror. Lucy was already looking at her.

  “I don’t think we have time for this,” Angie said, quietly.

  “It’s about time. It’s About Time,” Lucy answered. She did not look away until Angie did. The driver’s door opened. Then it slammed closed, waking everybody else up.

  “Where are we?” Kent asked. “Why did we stop?”

  “I believe,” Richard said, looking out the window and recognizing the building from the brochure, “we’re at Winnipeg’s fourth best retirement community.”

  They all got out of the van. When Paul did too, Angie stopped him. “Please stay here?” she asked.

  “What? No. I want to meet your mother.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do!”

  “I don’t want you to,” she said. She saw that this hurt him. “Please?”

  “Why?”

  Angie looked over her shoulder. Her siblings were already inside. She didn’t have enough time to make something up so she told him the truth. “I don’t want you to start thinking that I’ll turn into my mother. Especially now that I’m just about to become one.”