by John Domini
She wasn’t so clear on just why. But it had gone on since Wade had first been accurately diagnosed. The first going-away present had been drugs, speed fresh from the lab. Of course the boy had expected Nellie to use it herself, eating your own was the party line. But she’d already sworn off the hard stuff by then and she’d needed the money more. Since that time, she’d received parting gifts of everything from carpentry around the trailer to free service at the Bug Works. She’d even picked up the occasional sale appliance. It was as if the guys couldn’t wave goodbye till their fingers were bruised from splitting wood or stained with axle grease. Everything from rails on either side of the toilet to a cable hookup for the trailer. Why on earth—? Not that Nellie was complaining, no way Jose. But the strictness of the give-and-take had caused her aggravation. Lately especially, it had led to rough stuff. Not that anyone had actually laid a hand on her, nobody had done that since before Wade was born. But there’d been trouble nonetheless, strange and private trouble, the kind of thing she didn’t care to let a drinking companion hear about.
Wade’s father for instance still came through Philomath now and again, selling office supplies, and lately even he’d made it hard on her. This past summer, they’d wound up going halfsies on a new wheelchair. And beforehand she’d laid it down plain as newsprint that the project this time would be Memory Lane. She plucked the gray hairs from his mustache and called him good old Rustyroo. She reminisced about the blues crowd they’d run with, the record contract he’d been forever on the verge of signing. “How many girls’d you score with that record contract?” But at the end, as they headed up to Salem to get the chair, he turned desperate. He insisted they stop at a motel off I-5. Red-flecked wallpaper straight out of The Wild, Wild West, neon that growled so loudly she couldn’t concentrate. And yet the sex wasn’t the thing for him. The sex was incidental. The whole time there all the father could talk about was following her home after the trip in order to help set the chair up in the trailer.
She was well over the speed limit the rest of the way. When she parked she propped the checkbook on the steering wheel and wrote out one for her half. As she hustled across the lot the screek of passing carts made the perfect soundtrack. Then once he arrived she wouldn’t let him in the store, he had to hear it right there on the entrance ramp. Take a hike, Russell.
“Lighten up, Nellie. Please.” By now he was pathetic, looking for help up and down the nearby rows of cars. It only made her realize that this was another thing she hated about Salem. What kind of a state capital was it, when even in the middle of the city you never heard shouting in public?
“Wade wasn’t any part of the deal, mister. Now just take your money and go.”
“Nellie, Nellie…I realize I’ve always played the bad guy, okay? It went over big with the sorority girls, you know what I mean. But now, please. I haven’t seen the boy in five years.”
“Why don’t you send him your record?” she said.
No, people like Jack and Fitzie didn’t have the whole story. Nellie suffered complications. She suffered breakdowns; she was getting nowhere fast with the Social Security. Her lawyer, forget it. The man at least had finally left his wife. But the next time he and Nellie had gotten together, she’d had to back him off with something almost as mean as what she’d told Rusty. Now whenever she called his office, the secretary said he was out. The last straw came when the girl tried to tell her he was over in Corvallis, watching the Beavers.
Nellie checked the kitchen clock. Not quite 10:30.
“I don’t mean he’s actually watching them play,” the secretary went on. But Nellie wasn’t interested, all she could think was: Basketball already? No more World Series?
“No no, of course he’s not watching the team play. He’s talking with the men in charge over there. He’s—“
Nellie hung up. The men in charge.
Four days remained before the réévaluation. She figured she could swear off the booze that long. She did a thorough fall housecleaning, even raking her turnoff (the trailer park was never more than half-full anyway; she’d taken an isolated lot in the back) and dumping her leaves in the woods. She bought Elmer’s and reglued the maple-colored stickum where it had peeled from the kitchen plywood, the cupboard-doors under the sink especially. And she crocheted. She’d never been able to take daytime TV, the soaps made her sneer and the game shows got her angry. Instead there’d been afghans, dress mesh tops, or magnet-holders like the anvils and cherries that held the calendar to the refrigerator door. There’d been the liner for the dog’s basket, designed so the section that lapped outside the opening bore his name, Lurid Romance. Now she started a new bedspread for Wade. She kept the stitching tight, so his fingers wouldn’t catch in the eyes. Of course it made her think of Christmas, a bedspread wasn’t much of a present, but then the dog got interested, that was fun. The animal would study her hands as they worked the hook and needle. Finally he’d lay one paw on her knee, heavily.
“Try my Mom, Lurid,” Nellie would say. “I think my Mom would let the cows play with the yarn, if they wanted.”
Still the day of the appointment she woke before five, and she couldn’t stand the mirror. Looked like she’d spent the night trying to fit her face in a vise. She decided to drop Wade at school herself, swapping a few one-liners with the boy always steadied her nerves. But he hadn’t slept well either. His eyes—Nellie recalled the doctor’s word, canthus. Another nitpick bastard. So after that first look she couldn’t seem to take the boy in, entirely. As if he’d grown bigger overnight. She saw how the coffee made him tremble, but she took his word for it when he said it was just that he’d never taken it black before.
Once they were out on Route 20, never mind that they had to keep his chair strapped to the wall behind the driver’s seat, Wade held up his end of the deal. Never mind, also, that he didn’t quite know the difference yet between the locker-room gonzo and the man of the house. He made sure she could see him in the rear-view. He worked up some pretty good faces, Bozo to Godzilla. Nellie however couldn’t think of a decent comeback. She couldn’t even be sure of her smile.
“Mom, come on,” he said at last. “Look on the bright side. In five years we’ll all be overrun by the Sandinistas anyway.”
But when he said “Sandinista” it was obvious that his throat muscles were giving him trouble again, it sounded to her like “son hysteria.” Even after she’d returned to the trailer, the winter mung in the floorboards reminded her too much of Wade in the bus. The chill had her aching for a drink. She lit a joint and poured coffee. She wound up out on the back stoop, staring up warily at the coastal hills.
This time of year you had fog every morning. It made the forest black at the horizon, roadless. After a few minutes, she recalled the guy who’d given her the dope. The guy had sketched directions to his place, grinning fiercely as the map took shape, grinning and telling her that every night was party night up in the hills. Every night, girl. After all the troopers might come rapping at your door any time, that’s why you kept the keys in the truck and the Dobermans hungry. Nellie discovered that she was murmuring the stuff’s name. “Red-haired Indica,” tongue-full words, they had her retasting her coffee. Strange that the landscape looked black but what they grew there was red. But her laughter sounded papery, her perspective was off. The hills had grown bigger at the peak than at the bottom. She tried repeating different words: my home, my comfort. There was a throb like a bus engine.
Then Nellie had gotten no farther than bending over the yarn bag when the knock came at the door. So soon? Her hands were still cold, the dog still outside. When she found out it was in fact the Social Security, she could only go for her purse, her compact and brush.
“I’m sorry I’m early, I don’t know the roads yet.” The man’s voice was tin, behind the shut door. “I expected it would take longer, everybody said the place was so far out.”
“Far out? What does that mean, far out?”
“At the office. The pe
ople there all—“
“Oh the office, the office!” Now she was starting to catch up. Her lips and mouth looked so young and hot, it made her remember that the compact mirror bulged a little, it made her realize how furious she was. “That’s all you people care about, is the office.”
“Wait a minute, Miss Therow. Please. If you’d just open the door—“
“The office and your goddamn regulations.” Next the hair, why not? Get one thing right this morning at least. “I mean you come out here with your regulations, and meantime I’m on this side doing what I can, on my own—but neither of us is really what this is all about, are we? Really, this is about Wade.”
“Uhh. Well he’s who the money’s intended for, yes.”
“So what are you doing here, then? What are you poking around in my private life for?” Her wave was coming out the way she liked, airy and full over her right ear. “Listen, my son has athetosic cerebral palsy. His muscle control come and goes. Sometimes it looks like he could almost go out for the Babe Ruth League, sometimes he has one of his seizures. It’s a birth defect, it happened when I was carrying him. Now what the hell else do you need to know? Honestly. What the hell brings all you people barging in on me all the time?”
“Miss Therow, come on. One thing for sure, I’m not here to blame you.”
“Blame me? Blame me?” Obviously the guy had it in for her. “Listen, brother. You ought to be here when Wade has one of his seizures. I’d like to see what you’d do when it gets that real. I’d like to see if you’d get so picky about dotting every ‘i’ and crossing every ‘t’ then.”
Wetting a fingertip, she did a last adjustment at the edges of her blush-on. If this joker was going to make her go to court to get her money, she was at least going to get the satisfaction of making him ache for what he couldn’t have.
“Now I ask you.” She whipped open the door. “Compared to Wade, what does, does either of us…”
The heat in her face changed. She’d come out shaking her fist, the one with the compact in it; now her hand dropped so limply that when the dog rushed in, the plastic grip was knocked away.
“Ernie?” she asked. “From over at the Drop By?”
He still had that great teenage smile. “I saw the name on the form. I had to come out here, see if it was really what I thought.”
University hours: he said he could stay through lunch if she wanted. “When you work for the state,” he said, “you can always give the apparatus a little fine-tuning.” And there it was, the other university thing about him, talk as slick as a game of Frisbee. A line like that in fact made the guy seem a little spooky. She took him on a tour of the trailer, stick to business, sure. She got the folder of Wade’s medical reports from the file in the bedroom closet. But though Ernie gabbed the whole way, it was all one-liners, nothing she could get a hold of. When they got back to the kitchen, he actually seemed more interested in the dog. She joked back, part red spaniel and part cannonball, but she figured that if they were going to get anywhere it was up to her. As she got out the butter cookies she brought up their last meeting, how long had it been. She tried to keep them headed in the right direction.
“Ahh, Nellie. I guess I might as well ’fess up. The night after I met you, she called me.”
“Still something there, huh?”
“Something—something won’t give, yeah. Oh it’s all on my side, whatever it is, I know that much. I know on her side, she’s just being nice to me.”
“Oh? You just have a birthday or something?”
That got him grinning differently. And the wheels were turning on her end as well, the hangup about his ex might come in handy some time, with Fitzie if not with the guy himself. But then: “Don’t try to be funny, Nellie. I’m the funny guy here. I practically get paid to be funny.”
And with that he was off on a riff about his work, explaining how the job had been part of the trouble between him and his wife. Not that he wasn’t sending other signals at the same time. Whenever he paused, he’d stroke his chest, slowly. She still noticed his belly, that old-folkie turtleneck didn’t fool her. But she played along, hooking an arm over the back of her chair and keeping her chin high. Look me over. And yet she couldn’t be sure that was really what they had going here. Talking about the job and the wife was a way to get intimate, sure. But since when did a guy on the make ever come on so soft and nervous?
“Believe me, Nellie, I’m so sorry my wife never heard what I was trying to tell her.” Shrug, stroke the chest. “See, what other people would call being selfless? I would say that was all just part of my job. I mean just sticking to the rules of my job, I have to be selfless.” At the Drop By she’d liked his hands; now they seemed faggy. “That’s politics, right? According to the rules, you have to be this very nice, funny guy.” This was the second time Nellie had noticed him whipping round his wrist, snap snap, trying to spin his watch back face-up.
“And someone like my wife, she kept expecting that one day I’d break down and start screaming. Like I really hated welfare mothers or something. I swear to God, she wanted me to start screaming at the end.”
Welfare mothers? By the time the conversation shifted to Nellie’s job, she wasn’t sure how to play it. He’d started working his lips, smiling then pouting, but by now the sex question seemed like the last thing she should be worrying about. A parent couldn’t take home much above zero if they wanted to get the Supplemental. She told him the truth, she didn’t make anything near those girls at the university.
“Most weeks,” she said, “I carry my keys in my pocket just so I can feel a little weight in there.” But the joke did nothing for her, her chin had dropped. Here was the hard part. Laying out how little she had and how much she needed—her grin had gone mean, smoke-sour—it threw her so much that at first she missed what Ernie was saying.
“So, Nellie, you don’t even have to worry about that part of it.”
“What?” Though she believed she understood already, her head had come up again. “Ernie, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Well actually, by the time you finished showing me around I’d made my decision on that part. I’ll sign the approvals before, ah, before we’re through here.”
“S.S.I.?”
“You’ll continue to receive the full amount. Sure.”
Nellie got a little careless. She grinned so wide and happily that it gave him something on her, this was supposed to be business. Her hands wandered too. She was patting his forearm, total turnaround from fifteen seconds ago, while she fumbled her thanks. “Well well, Ernie, well hey….” Though of course the man didn’t have the kind of reactions you’d expect. It all just seemed to make him nervous. “Nellie, come on, I only wanted to get that part behind us.” That part? “Oh yeah?” she asked. “Well what’d you have in mind for the next part?” Why not, after the rest had been so herky-jerky-crazy? Ernie started wringing his watch into place again. “Ahh, I mean I just wanted to put your mind at rest, so far as the state’s concerned—“
At which the dog got into it. Lurid couldn’t take it any longer: Ernie held a cookie in his watch-hand. The mutt sprang and got one of the saucers as well. A blur of hair and teeth, a splatch of plastic, and then Ernie was out of his chair with his fingers curled at his neck and coffee seeping down his thighs.
“I know you weren’t expecting me,” he said.
And she was giggling, making it worse. She wouldn’t have had the strength to haul the animal to the door if the place hadn’t been so small.
“Lurid,” she managed, “Lurid! Get out of here.” Ernie trailed behind her, so close that when she shut the door on the dog she hardly had room to stand.
“You have a dog named Lourdes?” he asked. “Like the place in France, Lourdes?”
The real laughter, too much for an answer. She needed to hang on his neck a moment, a long moment, maybe an entire minute or so regaining her breath while in the contact from neck to knee she made clear to him that bef
ore he left today they were going to have to see this thing through. Too fast? She didn’t want to hear it, they weren’t in high school. She could put the impulse in its place—Red-haired Indica, sure sure—and likewise Ernie insisted that they sign the forms first. He even came out with this incredibly formal black pen. She had to ask, “Richard Nixon ever own one of these?” He laughed so wildly she was afraid he’d break her hash-pipe. She went back with that thing, pretty little Moroccan cherry wood. But as he choked down his next hit she believed she had her project for the man: “Who’s the funny guy here, Ernie? You think you’re the smart mouth? Well we’ll just see, we’ll just see.” The wimps who nitpicked about moving too fast, they thought control could mean only one thing. They didn’t realize how far a person could go.
He charmed their pants off at the Drop By. Some nights it might be just her and Fitzie and a couple of the lodge types, the kind of men who didn’t even bother to unbutton their jackets, and still as soon as Ernie hit the scene he’d make it seem like a party. The game everyone liked best was New York vs. Out West.
“Black bars, Ernie? You sayin’ you actually walked right into bars that had nothin’ but black people in ’em?”
“It’s all right. I had my welfare checks to protect me.”
“Ernie…are you tellin’ me people actually talk when they eat a meal, back there? They actually sit around the dinner table and talk?”
“That’s right, guys. Sometimes when I’m in a restaurant out here I start looking around for the sign. You know, the sign. ’Quiet Please. People Eating.’”