by Greg Ames
Keith leaned over and whispered in Gretchen’s ear. “Remind me to thank Robert for introducing us.”
“Somehow he just knew,” she said. “As if he had inside information.”
Abruptly Keith stopped walking, spun Gretchen around and looked into her eyes. “How did Robert know we would get along so well?”
“What are you implying?”
Keith stared at her.
“Robert is such a dear friend,” she said, “but he is a bit of a sympathizer.”
“He’s an apologist, Gretchen. Which is to say, a traitor.”
“Unlike you.” She kissed Keith on the lips. “You’re all man.”
Keith wrapped his arms around her. “Robert wants to control everything to avoid thinking about death,” he said directly into her mouth, “but he can’t control this, can he?”
“He’s a major problem,” she said. “Maybe we should have a strong word with him. Tonight.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Am I? You tell me.”
“Let’s eat dinner first and then decide.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Gretchen smiled at him. “I’m so hungry I could eat the spritz from a gobblespark’s fadoodle.”
Keith threw his arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek. “I was thinking the exact same thing.”
DISCIPLINE
When she was twelve years old, my older sister Cathy carried a ventriloquist’s dummy with her wherever she went. The dummy’s name was Marilyn, and at first nobody had the heart to tell Cathy that Marilyn was not really a dummy, but was in fact a charred log from our fireplace. But what could we do? Cathy skated freely on the frozen pond of her imagination, and as she wasn’t hurting anybody but herself, we generally ignored her eccentricities. Every night she slept in her narrow bed with this splintered wedge of burnt wood. She cuddled with it on the sofa while watching soap operas and sitcoms, and she left ashy smudges on everything she touched, from the refrigerator door to my previously white gerbils. Cathy’s homeroom teacher was concerned. The school psychologist, Nancy Palermo, asked my father if we had recently lost any family members to a house blaze or a fiery car crash. My father answered in the negative. Ms. Palermo wanted to see Cathy three times a week after school for private consultations.
We lived in a squat, crumbling, yellow brick house surrounded by tiger lilies. All the houses on Hood Lane were the same size. Our street appealed to young couples just starting out, elderly folks in pajamas, recovering addicts trying to get a fresh start in life one day at a time, and struggling small business owners. There were no block parties or street fairs, but every now and then some drunk kid would crash his father’s car into a tree, and we’d all gather around swimming in the headlights.
My mother’s absence from our lives—she said she was “just getting her head straight” in Tampa, Florida—forced my father to become the sole nurturer in our household. He hadn’t touched a vodka tonic in over fourteen months, but when my mother left for Florida, a move that took us all by surprise, he stopped going to his Don’t Drink meetings and stayed home with us.
“The other kids will make fun of you. You don’t want that, do you, honey?” he said to Cathy. He unwrapped a lollipop and paced in front of my sister, who was seated on the family room sofa clutching Marilyn to her breast like some horribly burned infant. I sat cross-legged on the floor at Dad’s feet, paying close attention because I knew that someday I’d need to write all this down, just in case somebody asked me why I behave the way I do. “Ventriloquists are …” He thought for a moment. “Annoying,” he said and winced. “And nobody really likes them.”
Cathy brooded, arms folded, on the sofa. “That’s not true,” she said in a small voice. “A lot of people like them.”
“Well, sure, a few morons in the audience chuckle,” he went on, “but only because they’re embarrassed for the ventriloquist. It’s old hat. Fifties Vegas crap. That kind of humor doesn’t appeal to us anymore.” He hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans. “And I’m only talking about the traditional stuff. What you’re attempting here—well, believe me, Cathy. Nobody will have any patience for some poor confused little kid with a burnt log for a freakin’ dummy.”
“I like them,” Cathy said, her braces glittering. “I do. Ventriloquists make me happy.” She squeezed Marilyn tighter. “And I’m gonna be a world famous ventriloquist someday, whether you like it or not.”
“Honey,” he moaned, “it’s burnt wood.” He chopped the blade of his hand through the air. “Your dummy doesn’t even have a mouth. Am I the only one in this house who sees that?” He turned to me. “Emmett, could you back me up here?”
“Dummies,” I said to nobody in particular. “Dummies, dummies, dummies.”
My father stared at me for a few seconds without speaking.
“Mom would let me do it,” Cathy said to him. “Mom would encourage me.”
My father twirled the lollipop stick in his mouth, ruminating. “I just don’t get the attraction of ventriloquism. Really. I’m at a loss here. There are so many better options in the performing arts. That’s all I’m saying.” He shoved both hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “You know what the cool kids in school do? They sing and dance. It never goes out of style. What will the cool kids be doing a hundred years from now?”
“Singing and maybe dancing?” I said, casting a glance at Cathy, hoping she’d laugh with me.
“That’s right, kiddo. You can’t hold them back. Don’t even try.”
“I won’t,” I said.
Confident now of my accord, he turned his attention back to my sister. “But okay, if you insist on doing this, honey, I’ll buy you a real dummy at the clown shop or whatever and you can—”
“Stop it!” Gawky, crazy-legged, swinging her pointed elbows, Cathy ran out of the family room and stomped up the stairs, trailing a whiff of scorch behind her. We heard her bedroom door slam shut overhead.
“Well, she’s got a flair for the dramatic, I’ll give her that,” he said to me. “But I’m worried about that girl. What’s gotten into her?”
Still seated on the floor, I smiled at my father. Shrugging, I turned up my palms, as if to say, “Pubescent girls: a mystery to us all.” I felt pretty good about how things had turned out in our family. At one time I was the biggest troublemaker around. I was a source of constant concern. My parents’ fear for my future was the mortar that held the bricks of our family together. Now, Mom was staying at Aunt Connie’s house in Florida, trying not to snort cocaine with bikers. Cathy had fetishized a piece of firewood. My father was veering closer to his next alcoholic relapse. I was sitting pretty for once.
Dad stroked his goatee, that gingery eruption of hair on his face, and gazed out the family room window at our snowplowed suburban street. Cathy’s strange behavior had called into question so much that he had taken for granted, including his own hipness. He was forty-one years old, a marketing director for a local theater, a job that allowed him to dress and act like an artist—ponytail, earrings, jeans—yet still collect a businessman’s steady paycheck. He liked avant-garde theater, but he was not cool enough to deal with the grotesque in his own home. He bit into the lollipop. Flakes of green candy clung to the inverted triangle of hair beneath his lower lip. He would have welcomed my mother’s input in a situation like this. He looked down at me and frowned. “And what do you find so damned amusing, mister?”
Simple. Nobody was yelling at me. Cathy was a straight-A student and I was not. She played her clarinet with a dramatic flair that charmed adults and music teachers, and I couldn’t even whistle. She had won awards for academic excellence, and I was often stuck in detention, which in my school was called JUG: Justice Under God. I was forced to write “conduct” and “discipline” repeatedly, in neat columns on lined paper, until my right hand went dead. Father Timothy sat at his desk scowling at us. He didn’t even read a magazine or the newspaper. And if you said a single word to your n
eighbor, Father made you stand in the locked coat closet. You were in big trouble, kid, if he followed you in. So I was actually elated to see Cathy challenged by the same type of patriarchal oppression that I had grown so accustomed to and had been forced to counteract with an elaborate system of snorts, guffaws, and, on occasion, feigned loss of hearing.
Like most children, I spent up to twelve hours a day studying the erratic behavior of adults. Recognizing Dad’s discomfort, I changed tactics. I wasn’t quite sure if he had noted that, for once, we were on the same side. In my sweetest model-son voice, I said: “Cathy is behaving very badly, isn’t she, Father?” I motioned with my crooked forefinger, so that he might bend down closer for a secret boy-to-man chat. “Maybe a little physical discipline might not be out of place. A belt whip across the calves?”
“Stop it, Emmett. That’s terrible. Where do you come up with these things?” He kicked my dog’s chew toy under the dining room table. Then he hitched up his sagging jeans and squatted before me like an aging baseball catcher. “Does she seem a little … ”
“Spanking?” I said. “Good old spanking.”
“All right, cut it out. You’re not helping matters.”
“Cathy’s in trouble here,” I reminded him, “not me.”
“This is serious. Does she ever talk to you about her school or her friends there? What’s the word on the street?”
Cathy went to Roosevelt Middle School, a four-story moron factory that warehoused close to two thousand kids from our zip code. Roosevelt produced a staggering population of headbangers, gasoline-sniffers, Dungeons and Dragons freaks, sex addicts, arsonists-in-training and other future felons, and Dad thought that I might be prone to temptation there. I needed extra attention. The previous summer he’d found caffeine pills in my sock drawer. It concerned him. Pills at eleven meant LSD and heroin by sixteen. So he sent me to a private school, a Jesuit institution known for its moral rigidity, a place where vigilante priests patrolled the corridors eyeballing every backpack and lunchbox with the native distrust of border guards. One in particular, Father Joe, would back me up against the lockers and ask an inane question just so he could peer into my eyeballs to see if my pupils were dilated. To this day, I don’t know if he recognized in me a future stoner and was trying to prevent this terrible fate, or if all his excited talk about illicit substances and “what they could do to a boy” actually drove me to the bong by the age of fourteen.
“She’s your sister, Emmett,” my father said. “Aren’t you concerned?”
“Don’t yell at me. I hardly ever see her anymore.” It was true. She walked to school with her girlfriends from the neighborhood, and I woke up an hour earlier to catch a bus to another zip code. It was dark as midnight each morning when I mounted the steps of the yellow bus.
My father leaned closer. “Hey,” he said. “I’m not yelling at you. Okay, pal?” He squeezed my collarbone. I smelled the sour apple of his lollipop. “But I want you to stop talking like that. Cathy is your sister. You don’t really want me to hurt her, do you?”
“Physical discipline,” I said, low.
“Christ!” He turned away from me and walked out of the room. In the kitchen a cupboard door banged shut. “God, grant me the serenity,” he recited. A moment later my father returned, his cheek bulging with fresh lollipop. “Let’s have us a little chat, man to man. Now, I know you two kids think of yourselves as a team, but actually we’re all on the same team, right? So give me the inside scoop, champ. Is your sister still super popular in the neighborhood?”
“She has lots of friends,” I said, and then corrected myself. “She used to.”
He nodded. “Minor setback. She’ll win them back. So, in your opinion, who are the most popular kids nowadays? The singers, the dancers? Or the jocks?”
I shrugged.
“The nerds?” He smirked. “Have the nerds finally risen to the top?”
“Every cool kid is different, Dad.”
“Right, right. It’s the age of specialization. She’s taking a big risk with this log thing, but who knows? It might pay off. You think it could?”
I was the wrong person to ask. My inability to keep up with the latest trends always unnerved him. The public and private schools, in his opinion, were a hotbed of ingenuity, a testing ground where a tribe of potential superstars sparred over the future of our culture’s rites and rituals. I was too distracted to worry about any of that. After my mother moved to Florida without warning, I became the unofficial archivist of her debris. I inventoried the baubles on her bedside table. I straightened the photo I’d pinned on the fridge beneath a pineapple magnet. Nights, in my bedroom, I read her left-behind books, especially the photocopied working scripts from the roles she’d played at the theater. I fixated on her tiny pencil-scrawled notes in the margins: “Build.” “Energy, energy, energy.” “Brokenhearted.”
“So what’s your persona at school?” my father asked.
“My what?”
“You know, your identity, your vibe. What sets you apart from the pack?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“That’s loser talk, Emmett. Hey, you got any singers or dancers in that Jesuit school of yours? I bet you could make a big impact in that area.”
He tucked the gummy lollipop stick behind his ear, one of the oddest moves I’d ever seen him make. That hapless white stick balanced over my father’s ear like an unsmoked cigarette, giving him the look of a street tough in an old Hollywood movie, a ne’er-do-well loitering outside the pool hall. He cracked his knuckles and rose unsteadily to his feet. “Let me show you some moves. You’ll be a hit at the next mixer.”
“I’m gonna check on Cathy,” I said, getting up from the floor.
“Okay! Now you’re talking,” he called after me. “Good man. Report back to me afterwards and we’ll compare notes.”
I climbed the stairs and knocked on Cathy’s closed bedroom door. “Get lost, Emmett,” she said.
I opened the door and stepped in. The bonfire aroma blended with all the other exotic smells of her bedroom: damp towels and washcloths; nail polish remover; sticky bottles of cheap perfume spot-welded to the dresser; cherry and grape lip gloss. Chest down on her bed, her ankles crossed in the air behind her, Cathy was flicking through the pages of a Seventeen magazine. The charred log, Marilyn, was reclining (prone? supine?) on the once-white pillowcase, just under Cathy’s swaying feet. In the virginal setting of her bedroom, this black log was as conspicuous and disconcerting as an outpatient standing naked in traffic.
I sat down on the smudged pink comforter and placed my hand on her back, the way Dad sometimes did with me when I had a nightmare.
“I have gum in my room,” I said, trying not to brag. “Hubba Bubba and Bubble Yum. I’ll give you a piece. What’s your favorite flavor?”
She ignored me.
“I might have Juicy Fruit, but I’d have to check first.”
“I don’t want any gum. God.”
We sat in silence for half a minute, my sister smothering her tears while I searched for the right words.
“Want me to try to paint your toenails again?” I asked at last. “I can do it better this time.”
“Just leave me alone, Emmett. Can’t I ever have any privacy in this house?”
“I wish. Tell me about it,” I said, employing two of her favorite expressions back-to-back to ingratiate myself with her. And for about three seconds, I gawked at the oily burnt stains on her pillowcases, knowing, even then, that they would never be clean again. “Hey, Cathy, you’re right,” I said. “Ventriloquists are cool.”
She swung her face toward me. “Really? You think so?”
“Definitely.”
“I’ve been practicing every night. I’m getting better, too. I think I’m actually pretty good.”
“Well, that’s what it takes. To get good, I mean.”
“Do you want to see me do a routine?”
I told her I did, and honestly, I did. Even though my sister�
�s sweat smelled foreign to me now and red blotches had surfaced on her chin, I still considered her my best friend. We hadn’t spent much time together since Mom had left the house. Cathy’s bedroom had become off limits. No boys allowed. So I felt honored by her invitation to watch a private performance.
She propped the burnt log on her lap. Ashy fingerprint swirls adorned her pale forehead. Her smudged yellow T-shirt called to mind a demented crossbreed of Charlie Brown and Pigpen. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes.” She took a deep breath and shouted, “It’s a nice day today, isn’t it, Marilyn?” She bounced her left knee once, hard, and ashes fell to the rug.
“Mmm-hmm!” Marilyn said.
Cathy looked down at Marilyn as though she were a newborn baby. “Do you like going to school, Marilyn?” she asked in a loud voice.
“Mmm-hmm!” Marilyn said.
“That’s good.” Cathy laughed. “School is important. But it’s also really tough for a lot of people. Will you be ready for seventh grade, you think?”
Marilyn thought about it for a moment, considered the possibilities before answering definitively: “Mmm-hmm!”
My sister stared at me with raised eyebrows. “So? What do you think?” A loose strand of blond hair fell over her eyes. She pushed her lower lip out and blew the curl back.
“Wow,” I said.
“Mrs. Palermo says I have a ‘unique talent.’ Remember when I told you about Mister Charleston and Woody coming for assembly? They were really great and everybody loved it when Mr. Charleston drank that orange juice and Woody sang ‘Feelings.’ Whoa oh oh feelings.” My sister searched my eyes for an answer. “Isn’t that cool?”
Cathy had been damaged. I understood that I, too, would soon be transformed. The mystical word “puberty” blazed in my head.
“Well, if Mom’s not back soon,” Cathy said, “I’m going to Florida to live with her. She’ll let me do what I want.” Cathy motioned to her oppressor downstairs. “I mean, if I love it, shouldn’t that be what matters? Why can’t he understand that? Why won’t he let me?”
I patted her forearm. “Because all grownups are dickheads?”