by Homes, A. M.
“Happy Birthday Brother.”
I sign up for Spanish lessons at the local Casa Española. The other people in my class are a McDonald’s manager, a guy who runs a landscape company, and a woman who “married well” and wants to communicate better with the “help.”
The nurse from Ashley’s school phones to say, “Nothing to worry about but…Ashley has a skin infection, and we’ve talked with Dr. Faustus and want to get your permission to go ahead and give her a course of antibiotics.”
“Sure,” I say. “Do I need to do anything else?”
“Not at the moment,” the nurse says cryptically.
When Ashley and I speak, I don’t ask about the infection; instead, we talk about Romeo and Juliet and her ongoing study of the soap operas.
“It’s good,” she says. “I watch from one to three in the afternoon, and take notes. I’m working on a paper about the narrative of the soap as modern theater, played in the public square—the TV square is like theater.”
“Sounds pretty sophisticated,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “The thing is, they tailor assignments to each student’s interests—and you know how, like, if you’re really interested in something, you can really go far? I mean, this is, like, eighth-grade level.”
Near the end of the conversation she says, “Okay, so there’s a letter that’s going to come in the mail; just so you have the real story, I better tell you a couple of things.” She pauses. “It wasn’t a tattoo ‘club,’ there were three of us, and we gave each other homemade tattoos—not a big deal—but then another group of girls went into town on the weekend and got real tattoos. So Georgia, from my group, decided that ours were supposed to be ugly on purpose and all about scarification. She looked up ancient scarification traditions, and the three of us had a ritual and all rubbed dirt from the compost onto the wounds, which is how I got the infection. It was so not my idea. Anyway, the parents who found out about the ‘clubs’ got all freaked out, and so this letter is being sent out saying, like, no new tattoos for both students and staff and blah, blah, blah.”
“What was your tattoo of?” I ask.
“A unicorn,” she says, like it’s a given.
I spend the evening glued to the television set. Amanda’s story about Heather Ryan’s murderer checks out. Her parents have identified the guy who bought her bed, and her diary was found in the guy’s car, along with chunks of Heather’s hair.
Pretending to be a librarian following up on a book she’s put on hold, I call Amanda. Her mother answers. “Good evening, I’m calling from the circulation desk for Amanda. Is she in?”
“One moment, please.”
“Who is it?” I hear Amanda ask in the background.
“Your husband,” her mother says, handing her the phone.
“Hello?” she asks, baffled.
“What was for dinner tonight?”
“I deviated,” she says. “I served Wednesday on Tuesday, just to see if they would notice. Chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese. Not a peep except that when they sat down my father said, ‘We want to confirm that there are snickerdoodles with this meal.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, even though I’d planned to serve them angel-food cake. I’m flexible.”
“I have an idea: let’s put up a tent in your parents’ backyard and have a sleepover.”
“For my parents?”
“For ourselves—we could sleep together, in the tent.”
“I’ve never slept outside,” she says.
“Me either.”
“I was always afraid to,” she says.
“Even in the backyard?”
“My sister and I would start off brave with flashlights and mayonnaise jars filled with lightning bugs, but as soon as it was really dark, as soon as the lights in the houses all around us started to go out, I’d panic and we’d run inside.”
“If we set up a tent, would they spot us outside?”
“Oh no,” she says. “They never look out.”
“Friday?” I suggest.
“I’ll think about it,” she says.
“It’s a plan,” I say. I hang up, excited.
I dig out the tent, the AeroBed and battery pump, some sleeping bags, new batteries for the flashlights. I fill a giant canvas tote bag with bug spray, pillows, an old black-and-white video baby monitor, so we can keep an eye on her parents.
We have dinner with her parents. I slip upstairs and set up the old baby monitor and then bid them good night and leave. I think I’m so clever and crafty, going out the front door and then slipping around back.
I wave to Amanda as she’s in the kitchen; I have a melancholy split-second flash—her yellow gloves reminding me of Jane, of that Thanksgiving.
Amanda does the dishes and gets her parents settled for the night while I’m around back, decorating with a string of Christmas lights I found in George’s basement. It’s like being a kid again. I’m decorating and thinking about Amanda: Will I ever really know her? It’s like she’s one person inside the house and entirely another outside—an indoor/outdoor personality.
She comes out at about nine-thirty, offering herself to me. She stands before me in the lantern light, taking her clothes off, and then, in a panic, thinking she hears something that we can’t see on the monitor, she puts them all back on and goes in to check on her parents.
In a reversal of the children being checked on by the parents, Amanda keeps thinking something is wrong, something is happening, and goes back inside every ten or fifteen minutes, worried they will fall and break their hips, there will be carbon-monoxide buildup, a gas leak that will cause the house to explode, they will wake up frightened of the dark, they will want a glass of water, a sip of Scotch, a little nightcap.
Despite my idea that it would be exciting, it’s a lot less erotic than I’d hoped. The AeroBed is squishy, the ground beneath it cold and hard. At around eleven-thirty, when we’ve been going at it on and off with limited success on both sides, we see her father on the grainy black-and-white monitor, leaving his room. Seconds later, we watch him enter the mother’s room, pull down the sleeping woman’s blanket, push up her nightie, and mount her.
“It looks like he’s hurting her,” Amanda says, shocked.
“Hard to tell,” I say.
On the small monitor, it looks like her mother is trying to fight him off in her sleep. She swats at him as though he is an oversized nuisance, an enormous fly, and he is holding her down, forcing himself on her.
Amanda stares at the small screen; you can see his equipment jutting out of his pajama bottom. “Is my father raping my mother?”
“Maybe,” I say. “Let’s see how they are in the morning.”
“I can’t believe how blasé you’re being,” she says
“I don’t feel blasé, I just don’t know what we should do about it. Go into the house and create a distraction? Do you want to confront them in the act? Maybe this is how they do it, the way they’ve always done it. Remember, you’re spying on them; they may be senior citizens, but they have rights, and at least one of them still has feelings of a certain sort.”
She is mad at me.
“If you feel so constantly worried and overburdened, why don’t you put them in a retirement home?” I ask.
“Why don’t you go to hell,” she says sharply, turning off the monitor, then rolls away from me and feigns sleep.
I am in the office three days a week. I have my own ID card to get in and out of the building, the office, and the men’s room. I have been given a small office with a narrow window—Ching Lan sits in a cubicle outside. Often I ask her to come into my office and read the stories out loud; she is practicing her English. It’s interesting to hear Nixon’s words with a strong Chinese accent.
Nine of the stories are in close to finished form. I review them, tease out the narrative thread, trim the digressive dross. For a man who didn’t like a lot of small talk, Nixon was almost verbose in his fiction.
“What’s the best way for m
e to contact Mrs. Eisenhower?” I ask Wanda. “There’s a story I’d like her to consider sending to some magazines.”
“I’ll let her know,” Wanda says. “Which magazines?”
“The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vanity Fair. What the hell, we could even try The Paris Review.”
“What about McSweeney’s? or One Story?” Wanda asks. “They take risks.”
“All right, let’s go wide, send it everywhere,” I say, not wanting her to know that I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“I minored in creative writing,” Wanda says, exiting deftly. “Mrs. E. is on the line,” she says an hour later, when she rings the phone in my office, which never rang before. “Press the blinking light to take your call.”
“Much thanks.” After a minute of small talk, I make my proposal: “Ultimately, it will be easier to place the collection if a few have been published first. There is one which is ready to go out, but I’m wondering, under what name?”
“What do you mean?” she says rather aggressively, like she thinks I mean perhaps under my name.
“Richard Nixon? R. M. Nixon? R. Nixon? It depends on how ‘out there’ you want to be, how obvious or not.”
“Interesting,” she says. “Let me discuss that with my family and let you know. Can you send me the story?”
“Of course; do you want just the clean copy or all the revisions?”
“Both, if you don’t mind,” she says.
“I’ve read the story,” Mrs. Eisenhower says in a measured tone the following Monday. “The original version was eleven hundred seventy words, and yours is less than eight hundred.”
“Yes,” I say. “I worked on that one pretty hard, took it down to a short-short, what folks call flash fiction.”
“You cut a lot,” she says.
“It shouldn’t be so much about word count but about impact. This particular story had a limited vocabulary, and I wasn’t sure how long readers would stick with it until they got to the punch line.”
“‘Cocksucker,’” she says.
“Yes, that’s the punch line.”
She pauses. “My father wasn’t given to spontaneous humor, but when he’d let himself go, it was quite something. He liked to bang out songs on the piano and it would drive my mother crazy. We would go to pieces, laughing. I still have the letters he wrote me as a kid—very formal, full of good counsel. He wanted things to go well, but often felt so isolated. Whatever it was he was after, he had to find his own path to it. A life like that takes its toll, more on my mother than on him,” she says, ruminating aloud. And then, abruptly, she stops. “All right, then,” she says, “send it out, let’s go with Richard M. Nixon.”
“Thank you,” I say, and hang up.
I draft a cover letter:
Dear Ms. Treisman,
Enclosed, please find a short piece of fiction of great historical significance. In recent months I have had the pleasure and responsibility of bringing into the light the collected fiction of the notable R. M. Nixon. And while Nixon was long known to have made copious notes about all manner of things, it was only during a recent transfer of materials that a particular series of boxes was fully explored. You are the first to be reading this story, because I can’t imagine a better place for it than in the pages of The New Yorker. I will hold my breath awaiting your response.
Thanks in advance,
Harold Silver
My phone rings again. “I’m not ready to go public,” she says. “I want you to continue with your work, and we’ll talk again when the collection is complete.”
“Of course,” I say; my balloon’s been popped.
Ricardo comes for a week. I drive him to school; the bus brings him home. The house rules: no television during the week, no video games, no sugar.
“And what am I supposed to like about this?” he asks.
“That I care about you.”
In the late afternoons we play, do homework, and walk the dog. I check his spelling, his math, make sure he bathes, takes his medication. I make his lunch and pack a snack for the bus trip home. By the end of the week, I would swear that Ricardo is doing better. I’m not sure if it’s true, or if I’ve gotten used to him.
I call the Department of Social Services to see where we are regarding the foster-parent approval. “Your paperwork is in the system; that’s all we can say,” the woman tells me. “Have you got your references, your clearances, your letter from the bank, and the psychiatric evaluation?”
“I was waiting to hear from you about the next step.”
“Never wait for us, just keep moving, and eventually we’ll catch up.”
“All right, then; is there a psychiatrist you recommend? Someone ‘in the system’?”
“No idea. I’m new—I usually work in the Motor Vehicle Administration. Hold on, let me ask.”
I am on hold for what seems like forever.
“I couldn’t find anyone who knew, so I looked in some files of approved families; here are some names of who they used.”
I write them down, Google each, and call the one whose office is closest.
Cousin Jason phones to say he’s gotten an e-mail from George. “Does that seem weird? I thought he was in jail?”
I don’t say that I got him an iPad for his birthday.
“He ‘friended’ me on Facebook and sent a message: ‘I always knew you were gay, sorry if I embarrassed you at the family dinner.’ I wondered if maybe he was in a twelve-step program and making amends. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously, but he was so specific. I said thank you. Yesterday he wrote to say all my Facebook friends were so masculine and good-looking and he bet I was getting ‘it’ a lot. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t answer. Today I got another one, asking if I knew anyone in the ‘holy land’ with a bank account.”
“What was the e-mail address?”
“[email protected],” Jason says.
I write it down.
“I wonder if maybe he’s involved in a cult or some weird activity, or maybe his e-mail was hijacked. I had that happen, and all my friends got an e-mail saying I’d been robbed in London and they should wire me money—cost my buddies a couple of thousand bucks.”
“I’ll look into it,” I say. “And you, are you doing well?”
“I’m fine.”
“And your mother?”
“As well as can be expected.”
“Jason, would you want to have dinner sometime?”
“In the city?”
“Yes,” I say, “that would be nice.”
“It doesn’t have to be, like, a big long thing,” he says.
“Of course not,” I say.
“A quick bite somewhere,” he says.
“A quick bite,” I echo.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but is it something specific?” Jason asks. “I mean, is there an agenda or some specific something that you want to talk about?”
“No, really nothing at all,” I say.
“Fine,” he says, “we could do that sometime; not right now, but sometime.”
“Okay,” I say, “let me know what works.”
I hang up, wondering, do I e-mail George, do I somehow contact AOL and find out if this is really George’s account? I’m not sure I want to be “in touch,” so easily reachable. I continue to draw circles around the address until it looks like a Spirograph project. I pin it to the wall by the fridge just in case.…
Sara Singer, the head of Ashley’s school, calls again. “I won’t beat around the bush,” she says. “It is my feeling that it is no longer in Ashley’s best interests to remain here.”
“You’re kicking her out?”
“We are protecting her.”
“From what, your staff?”
“And the other students. It’s getting ugly. Ashley deserves a more accepting environment.”
“Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Are you pathologizing a child struggling with the death of her mother, the collapse
of her family, who was preyed upon by a teacher—a figure of authority, who should have been a comfort, a moral compass?”
“She’s been taken over by the gays and the bois.”
“I didn’t realize that there were gangs at the school.”
“Not gangs—but preferences. She’s been taken in by the gay students and the gender-confused. Frankly, I don’t think it’s the place for her. And it’s become a bit of a stir—sort of ‘who can feel sorrier for her,’ like that experiment where kids carry around an egg for a week and have to take care of it like they would a baby…. In this case, the various factions are warring over who should take care of Ashley, and as you can imagine, the faculty has had to adopt a hands-off policy.”
“No pun intended,” I mutter.
“It’s time to think about looking at different options. It would be nice if she left sooner rather than later—gave the other students a chance to begin to heal.”
“When would you want her to leave school?”
“The sooner the better,” she says. “I realize there’s not much left to the school year but the lid is about to blow. I am prepared to offer you a full refund of the tuition along with the deposit for next year, that’s a total of seventy-five thousand dollars, and we will give her a strong letter of recommendation and suggest an internship for the last part of the term. She can continue to explore her interest in soap opera. I’ve got someone who can set it up. Ashley mentioned wanting to work at ABC in New York, but my old college roommate runs a puppet theater in Scarsdale, called Higgledy Piggledy Pop: A Puppet Place. It’s a local community theater, and I think it would be a good placement. Ashley can write a final paper about her experience, combining her interest in theater, puppetry, and the narrative of the soap operas.”
“Sounds ambitious for an eleven-year-old,” I say. “What does Ashley think?”
“She’s in her room packing. The bois are helping her with the heavy stuff.”
“Well, I don’t think seventy-five thousand is going to do it,” I say.
“What do you mean, ‘do it’?”