by Lesley Kagen
The lucky-in-love brag table has stood the test of time the way she knew it would. It’d been a high-school tradition in those days for boys to have their way with their steadies then carve the initials of the girls they’d “drilled” into the redwood. Some things never change. Tess sweeps off the snow and runs her fingers across the barely legible scratching in the upper-left corner of the table: “D.D. loves T.G.”
She’d believed him.
Tess Finley Gallagher and Richard “Dickie” Detmeister started drinking early on that crisp, autumn evening of October 3, 1967. After the under-the-big-lights football game, her steady with the blah brown eyes and the nose hooked enough to hang a winter coat off of took her in his arms, told her how much he loved her, and that he would love her even more—they could even get married if she wanted to after they graduated—if she would only, please, please, please let him go all the way.
Tess wasn’t interested in Dickie’s marriage pitch for she had spent many years observing double L—Leon and Louise—locked in an unending battle. It was the part about being more loved that’d convinced her. The Pabst Blue Ribbon played a role too. “Okay,” she’d told him, “what the hell.”
This venture being the stuff adolescent boys dreams are made of, Dickie about dragged her out of the stadium stands to the confines of his mother’s beige station wagon. He laid rubber out of the Marquette High School lot so desperately excited about what they were about to do that he’d forgotten to figure out where they’d do it. He turned down the eight-track Beatles’ tape and asked, “Where should we go? Lighthouse Point Park?”
Tess sucked down the rest of the cold beer, tossed the can in the backseat over her shoulder, and said, “Sure.”
The thought that she’d be performing her first love act near where her father had lost his life didn’t cross her mind. She rarely thought about him anymore. Her daddy only came to her in dreams that she couldn’t remember and in tears that she didn’t understand.
The light of a harvest moon shone through the woods of the park as she stripped by the light of the glove compartment and Dickie struggled with his zipper with slippery beer fingers. Tess watched with interest as he jerked down his khakis and his tighty-whities past his knees.
The penis that she had thus far only felt through her boyfriend’s blue jeans was waving back and forth, looking the way it’d been described in True Confessions magazine: “A throbbing divining rod,” but when Tess moved her gaze farther south, where she was expecting to see: “Two fleshy orbs swollen with love juice,” she found nothing of the sort. The boy’s manhood was a figure of speech.
!
Of course, Dickie had anticipated her confusion and was prepared to field her questions about his missing testicle. “I wasn’t born this way. I’m not defective or anything,” he panted. “During a game four years ago, this kid came sliding into home and spiked me in the nuts. My right one blew up so bad they had to remove it.” He looked scared. Like he was expecting his steady of two years to say, Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. I’d rather lose my virginity to a boy who comes fully loaded.
But Tess being Tess, Dickie’s lack of sack only made her care for him more, so she told her beau in a tipsy May West voice, “Batter up, big boy.”
She moans, “Ow,” and looks down at the splinter sticking out from the finger she’d been running over the carved initials in the picnic table. She plucks it out and is thinking about Will and how much she misses their connubial bliss, when her attention is diverted by a woman and a young girl who have appeared out of the woods on the bluff.
They are an unusual pairing this side of the Mason-Dixon line. A child with skin so white against the hood of her pink snowsuit and a middle-aged black woman wearing a hound’s tooth coat. Tess can’t make out their faces, but the intense love they feel for one another is emanating from their very being in beams that melt the snow they are treading upon. The woman leans down to say something to the girl with the dark-blue eyes and deep-red hair and she nods and marches purposefully toward the picnic table. She lies down in the snow and begins to solemnly swing her arms and legs back and forth as if creating an angel is sacred work. When she has completed her task, she looks up with an expectant smile and pats the ground next to her.
It’s an invitation Tess is unable to resist. She is tentative at first, then faster and faster she goes until a feeling beyond happiness swells inside her chest, growing stronger with each arc of her arms and legs. But when she draws her tear-filled eyes off the sky and turns her head toward the little girl to thank her for the indescribable gift, she finds herself alone again.
Freaks
When Tess steps through the backdoor of the house, she finds it empty except for steadfast Garbo, who greets her and me like we’re pounds of ground round. She checks the kitchen clock. Henry will be home from school soon, Will is feeding the tail end of the lunch bunch, and she wonders what Haddie is doing so far from home in a place where she is known as the Yankee Girl?
After she lets her dog out to do her duty in the backyard, the two of them climb the stairs. She looks forward to the times she can visit her children’s rooms when they’re not home. She can touch their things, and lay her cheek against their pillows, without them asking her, “Ya ever heard of this little thing called privacy?”
Henry’s bedroom walls are lined with Star Wars and poker posters. She’d given him the William S. Hart cowboys-playing-cards one for his most-recent birthday, and the Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker ones because they’d seen the movies together when he was a little boy and he still loved them so damn much. She runs her finger across the top of the narrow dresser she’d stained white when he was a baby, and checks on Phil, his pet snake. The garters up and die every couple of months, so if need be, Tess’ll dispose of it and buzz over to the Pet Palace to purchase another before her son can discover it’s passed on because she doesn’t want to upset him. The boy takes loss to heart. Same as her, he still misses his GG—great grandmother.
The evening she had broken the news of Gammy’s fatal heart attack to him, her son cried out, “But I just saw her on Saturday. How can she be here one minute and…God is such an asshole,” and she did not reprimand him. Will takes the kids to Mass every Sunday. She does not accompany them unless it’s one of the life-or-death holy days—Christmas or Easter. Her lack of attendance on a more regular basis has not helped her standing in the community. She regrets the discomfort it causes Will, but she’s got enough reasons to feel bad about herself and does not wish to add hypocrite to her list.
Tess wanders into her daughter’s room through the kids’ connecting bathroom. Stunning photographs hang off the bedroom’s pink walls, running trophies gather dust on the bureau, and the stuffed animals look like they’re missing her girl as much as she does. They used to lie in this bed together and giggle about boys. They’d share a bedtime snack of buttered graham crackers and hot cocoa back in the days her daughter didn’t care how much she weighed.
Down the hall past the linen closet is her and Will’s room. They made their babies in this bed, and until a few months ago, love, sweet, love, much, much more often than other couples their age. Her husband did almost all his talking between the sheets and Tess was an excellent listener.
She flops back onto the white down comforter, thinks about Will a bit more, their ardor, and smiles a little when she recalls the Finley sisters’ curiosity about the birds and the bees.
After eleven-year-old Tess was sure that Louise and Leon were too busy fighting with one another to bother Birdie and her, she’d slide their flashlight and one of their most-prized possessions out from beneath their mattress. A shiny turquoise-and-silver book entitled, Freaks of Nature that she’d “borrowed” permanently from the Finney Library.
The lava-spewing volcano on the cover reminded the girls how Louise’s anger could erupt without warning and destroy everything in her path, so they never stared at it too long. They’d flip straight to the pages where they’d find the sto
ries and pictures of the mysterious…the exotic…the strange. Lepers of Molokai, a six-hundred pound lady who hadn’t left her house in eight years, and a legless man who got around in a Radio Flyer wagon pulled by a Shetland pony named Muffin.
Since sex education hadn’t been invented yet, it made sense to trust the book—it had already taught the sisters so much about geography, nature, and how things could always be worse—to reveal answers to the subject that they’d been fervently wishing to learn more about that summer.
The girls had become fixated on “doin’ it,” when Tess discovered that it was so important to their mother that she get it done that she’d turned to their next-door neighbor and Elvis impersonator, Mr. Hauser, when Leon wouldn’t or couldn’t. She became privy to their tryst, when she’d heard Louise and Mr. Hauser going at it when she’d run out to the garage to fetch a sand bucket full of shells that she and Birdie had collected at the beach that afternoon. She followed the moaning sounds to the hedge that separated their yard from the Hausers’ in time to see the mister wiggling on top of her mother who cried out, “Oh, Gary, do it! Do it! Give me your hunka burnin’ love!”
Tess had heard the other kids in the neighborhood call what she’d caught them at, “having the sex,” “the birds and the bees,” “screwing,” and now “doin’ it,” but how did it all work? It certainly seemed to make their moody mother happy. That would be a handy skill for the sisters to have. They needed to know more.
Semi-enlightenment arrived on one of the many nights their oaky summer-stained legs were wrapped around each other’s in between the bed sheets. Birdie yipped, “I think I finally found something!” Beneath the Eveready flashlight’s circle glow, her bitten-to-the-quick fingernail pointed to a scorpion resting on top of another scorpion.
Since she was still struggling with her reading skills, she handed the book off to her sister, who read aloud a short paragraph entitled: INSECT REPRODUCTION. Tess explained as she went along: “Before they mate—that means do it—the female of the species—that’s the lady—performs what is known as the Scorpion Dance of Love. Once the offspring arrive—that’s another word for babies—they must raise themselves and not be a burden—that means a bother—to the mother because if they are—” she swallows hard when she realized that she should’ve stopped while she was ahead.
Picturing Louise, Birdie said, “What does the mother do if the babies bother her?”
Tessie didn’t want to tell her, but she knew her stubborn sister wouldn’t let her fall asleep if she didn’t and she barely got enough shut-eye as it was. “She…ah…eats them.”
“Beats them?”
“Ummm….” Tess was tempted to go with that, but while she protected her sister, she rarely lied to her. “She eats them.”
Birdie flipped onto her back and moaned loudly, “Oh, sweet Mother of God, please save us!”
Desperate to hush Birdie up before Louise or Leon heard, Tess cupped her hand over her sister’s mouth and began reading to herself the next paragraph that she’d hoped would hold much more cheerful information than mothers devouring their bothersome children.
“What?” Birdie asked after Tess slammed the book shut and rolled over.
“Nothin’.”
After her sister begged in her baby voice to tell her more, Tess had no choice but to rattle out, “Sometimes after the scorpions do their love dancing, the lady eats the man too. Now go to sleep.”
Birdie didn’t say anything at first, but then she whispered out of the dark, “Maybe that’s why Leon can’t do it anymore.” The walls of the duplex were thin, so the girls couldn’t help but hear their mother berating their stepfather for his inability to become aroused. “He’s too afraid that Louise is gonna eat his wiener if he does.”
“She wouldn’t do that.”
“Ya can’t know what she’ll do,” Birdie said with a shiver beneath the sheet.
“That’s true, but….” Tess imagined their mother at the kitchen table complaining how little meat was on Leon’ s wiener the same way she always complained about the pork chops she got from the butcher. “She would have to cut it off first and that would make a mess and you know how neat she is.” That was a fact. Louise had a place for everything. Except them.
Without the help of Sea Hunt, it might’ve taken years before the girls got a better look at what they’d been dying to learn more about. Every Thursday after school, they’d scoot up close to the black-and-white television in the duplex’s living room. Goose bumps would sprout up on their thin little arms when they’d hear the ominous theme music that signaled Mike Nelson’s departure over the side of the Argonaut.
It’s not that they were enamored with underwater adventure, you understand. Far from it. Their father had drowned, after all. Tess and Birdie watched the show for one reason and one reason only. They wanted to study Mr. Nelson’s wiener in his form-fitting scuba outfit. Maybe getting a gander at it would give them a clue as to why their mother wanted one so damn bad. How much did it look like an Oscar Mayer one? They’d heard from the boys at school that it could grow. Was it like one of those sponge toys you could get at the Five & Dime? The kind you put in a bowl of water overnight that tripled in size by the next day?
Since it was a sin to be sexually curious, the girls would run up to Blessed Children of God church to confess after every episode. Father John, who’d begun to recognize the sisters’ voices after their many visits, was uncomfortable hearing the Sea Hunt sin because he also found Mr. Nelson unusually attractive. Perhaps that’s why his most-recent reminder that not only looking at Mr. Nelson’s manhood was a sin, just thinking about looking at it was so fervent. “Final warning,” he said from behind the confessional screen. “Banish these impure thoughts immediately or you’ll burn in Hell for all eternity!”
After he assigned their penance, Tess whispered to Birdie in between Hail Marys in the church pew, “I can’t take sayin’ the rosary so much. My knees are getting creaky, and I don’t want to burn forever. We better stop thinking about Mike’s, ya know, like Father said.”
Birdie agreed at the time, but the more she tried not to, the more she thought about Mr. Nelson and his wet-suited wiener. She had to come up with something else to block the damning thoughts out of her mind, which is when the counting started.
Sea Hunt was on Channel 4 at 4 p.m. every Thursday, the fourth day of the week.
Nowadays, without her medication, Birdie needs to return to her apartment four times to make sure the iron is turned off and touch her clock four times before she can get in or out of bed and scrub her hands four times before and after she touches food and all important things must be said four times, ’cause besides her eating problems and delusions and other emotional maladies, she’s lugging around a wicked case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not the kind folks tell you they have in order to sound more interesting. Birdie’s condition is—as Father John had righteously prophesied—hellish.
Tess shakes off the flashback and the thoughts of her troubled sister, picks up her husband’s pillow, and brings it to her nose. Tabu. He has to be “doin’ it” with Connie, she thinks, there is no other explanation. Will’s sex drive is so unusually high that she doesn’t believe he’s capable of not making love for this length of time without spontaneously combusting.
She nabs the portable phone off the bedside table and punches in the diner’s number unsure if she wants to profess her undying love or ask him for a divorce.
“Count Your Blessings,” Will answers. “Be right with you.” His father had taught him that putting customers on hold was bad business in a small town, so as she waits, Tess can hear him tapping the register keys, wait staff shouting orders to the guys in the kitchen, kids playing the pinball machines in the game room, Duane Eddy wailing on the jukebox, and her husband telling a customer, “Please come again.”
“Why, Will Blessing, what a wonderful suggestion!” says sexpot Babs Hoover. She must’ve finished her do-gooder shift at St. Mary’s City Hospit
al and rushed right back to town in time to lunch with her friends who would lavish praise upon her once again for her humanitarian efforts.
When Will laughs at Bab’s dumb joke, Tess thinks that maybe she’s not kidding. It might not be Connie he’s sleeping with. Maybe Babs has gotten her claws into him.
“Sorry about the wait,” her hubby says when he picks up the phone. “How can I help you?”
“I’ve got cancer.”
Will’s gasp is loud and quick. Finally, Tess thinks with a small smile of satisfaction on the other end of the line. He’d been so sure this tumor talk had been nothing more than one of her erroneous assumptions, one of her Chicken Little moments.
He stutters out, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay…I’ll…I’ll come home and we can…ah…would a BLT hit your spot, or maybe…?”
Before he can ask her if she’d rather have a Blessing burger, a disappointed-yet-again Tess hangs up and dials the number on the card that Jill the nurse had given her.
A woman with a stuffy nose answers on the second ring, “Dr. Robert Whaley’s office.”
“Hi, this is Theresa….” Not everybody in Ruby Falls knows her, but many do. Is this woman required to keep these things to herself the way a doctor is supposed to? She’s not sure, so she gives the receptionist her maiden name. “I’d like to make an appointment for a consultation.”
The woman sniffles as she flips through an appointment book. “How about this Wednesday at eleven forty-five?”
Tess quickly confirms when she hears the ring of the jingle bells that hang on the backdoor of the house. She’d used them when she potty trained Garbo and had never taken them down because it made the family’s comings and goings seem jollier. It had to be Henry back from another grueling day of harassing Ruby Falls High faculty.
She hurries downstairs to find him already sprawled in front of the computer in the den concentrating on Internet Poker—Ubet. She says, “Hey,” and places her hand on his long back—the one he inherited from her uncle. He still let her rub it when he was in the mood. God, she adored every inch of this boy. The way he flaunted authority might be a red flag to another mother, but not to anxiety-ridden Tess who greatly admires his indomitable spirit. She used to be so much like him when she was a kid. She tip-toes her fingers through his curls. “How was school?”