Funeral Platter

by Greg Ames

  Cathy smiled at me. I smiled back. We burst out laughing.

  At that moment, we were as close as we had been since Mom left for Florida.

  It didn’t last.

  “Hey Cath,” I said, regaining my breath. “I know how we can use Marilyn for something really great.”

  “How?” she said uncertainly. A vertical crease appeared between her eyes.

  “Well, what Dad needs, I think, is a little physical discipline.” I nodded my head at this inevitable conclusion. “He’s being very bad, isn’t he? So maybe you could bake a chocolate cake and we’ll crush the stupid log inside it. He’ll eat the cake and then he’ll flop around on the kitchen floor, choking, and we can cram his nostrils full of peanuts while he cries.”

  “What?” Cathy blinked at me. “I’m not gonna feed Marilyn to Dad. What are you, a maniac? It would kill him.”

  “Well, maybe we should tie him to the tree out back and pour honey and Kool-Aid all over him, and then break an ant farm on his head.” I laughed and reached for Marilyn.

  Cathy jumped up. “What are you talking about, Emmett? He’s our father. Are you joking, or what?”

  “Just forget it.” I glared at the double rainbow poster on her wall. “I was only kidding.”

  Regrettably, in that instant, I saw that nothing had changed between us. Oh, Cathy could dabble in darkness, but when foolish, spontaneous, and possibly fatal decisions were required, my sister invariably turned her back and went skipping toward the light. She would eventually go to high school and become involved with music clubs, Track and Field, and animal rights organizations. She’d earn high grades and head off to a university in Boston. Her days as an innovative ventriloquist would be long forgotten.

  In my eyes she was a lost cause. A training bra dangled over the back of her desk chair. She couldn’t pass a mirror without checking her teeth and hair and inspecting her profile. Something secret and horrible was going on in her bedroom at night, something that didn’t include me.

  That night I left her bedroom with hardly a backward glance. I trotted down the carpeted stairs, kicked open the back door and hopped down the slushy cement steps. Snow crunched underneath my sneakers in the driveway.

  Bones was galloping around the backyard, his ears flapping. I noticed that he’d knocked over his water dish and had chewed up one of Dad’s winter gloves. “Up to a little mischief again, are you, boy?” I shook my finger at him. His wet brown eyes flashed at the sight of me. “Maybe you need somebody to teach you some manners.” Bones started panting and hopping around as I neared him. “Follow orders! Pay attention!” I said. “Get in the coat closet! Listen to Father Timothy!” I grabbed Bones’ collar and yanked him closer to me. “What you need, I think, is a little physical discipline. Then you’ll know how to behave.”

  But Bones, he didn’t understand. He was just a puppy.

  MEN’S ROOM

  We are dancing to Shostakovich in a Taco Bell men’s room in Utica, New York.

  Grabowski says, “I got a cache full of fire words and scads of time, rooster.” The acoustics of the men’s room are top notch, and our man Shosty has never sounded more robust, but there’s room for only two men in here at any given time. Tonight we are four and feeling the pinch. No one disagrees with Grabowski but Leach is laughing hard, too hard, in my opinion, and he’s making everyone feel unsafe.

  Leach’s bio: love-avoidant GED recipient, always picks Ratt’s “Round and Round” on Karaoke Nite, uses the term “comeuppance” with alarming frequency. I feel his hot breath on my earlobe. I can’t escape the reach of his breath. We are too constricted here and he knows this, Leach does, and he uses it to his filthy advantage. “Grabowski ain’t got the gumption to glimmer newfangle,” he says in my ear. “You gonna need fibrocon consolation jacks to fortify that foundation, posthaste.”

  Cleaver’s been taking an origami night class at the community center. I’m watching him transform a wad of toilet paper into an African elephant. His hands are a blur, his tongue-tip clenched between his teeth. When he finishes, he grins and says, “Voilà.”

  Door opens behind me, bangs into my back. A smirker in a bloodred Che T forces his way into our sanctuary. He wedges his body between Grabowski and Cleaver to get at the urinal. Now we are five and completely immobilized. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any warmer in here, another man—bearded, insolent, with sharp elbows—fights his way to the mirror, where he inspects the contours of his bristly face. He spits on his fingertip and runs his finger along the length of each eyebrow. Evidently they are ’brows that require not a little saliva to hold in place. Then he works a wooden toothpick between his lower teeth. I cannot look away.

  “Dance party?” Grabowski says.

  Me (shrugging): “Why not?”

  Cleaver: “Spank the torque out of my dingus maker. I’m fixing to canoodle with death.”

  Eyebrows: “The fuck?”

  Che: “Patria o Muerte!”

  Leach, as always, colonizes the final word: “Stick dog wears a yellow beak and I’m fat fat fat. Hop to it, boys. The water’s fine.”

  We start moving again and snapping our fingers. Cleaver ejects the Shostakovich cassette and inserts a Sibelius symphony, darker music with haunting modal implications, and Leach shoves the ’brow groomer into Che Guevara who uncorks a spray of fantastic profanity and Grabowski throws a left uppercut, misses, and the boomboombox slips off the sink and smashes on the dirty tile floor and Leach lets fly with a wild right hook that catches me in the mouth and the lights go out and when they come back on I am on the floor and Grabowski is standing on my abdomen. “Grabowski!” I say.

  Cleaver has a tambourine.

  THE LIFE SHE’S BEEN MISSING

  Nine people exit the movie theater: four couples and Addie. She stands under the dripping marquee and shakes open her cheap umbrella, a move that attracts the attention of a man loitering by his Lexus. He plucks the red plastic coffee stirrer from his mouth and tucks it in his breast pocket. A weird gesture, she thinks, a bit gross, but kind of endearing.

  “Your umbrella’s shot,” he calls out.

  Addie nods and looks down at her cell phone. No missed messages. It’s definitely on, but nobody has called.

  Dimitri is probably having sex right now with one of the waitresses at the bar, most likely the blonde from Jersey City with the pretty singing voice and the easy laugh.

  “How’d you like the movie?” the man asks, approaching her.

  This one has a matador’s face, she thinks, insolent and beautiful. “It was okay,” she says. “Kind of shallow and derivative, but I didn’t really expect much going into it.”

  Derivative. That should scare him.

  “Agreed,” he says. “That flick was bullshit.” He arches his neck and lampoons the American actors’ failed British accents—“Blewdy hell, it’s pissin’!”—and in spite of herself, Addie laughs.

  His name is Rob, he says. And hers?

  Four minutes later, he’s strolling back to his Lexus with her number in his cell phone.

  Back at her apartment, Addie keeps checking her phone. No missed messages. To take her mind off Dimitri and the blonde, she flips open her laptop and scrolls through responses to her online-dating profile.

  Suitor 11: “Why you don’t smile in you photos? You think your better than everybody?”

  Suitor 14: “How do you want it???”

  Suitor 19: “Can I ask you a question. Under the heading ‘The most private thing I’m willing to admit,’ I see that you’ve written ‘snitches get stitches.’ Care to elaborate?”

  Suitor 20: “suck wang”

  Suitor 22: “Greetings. My name is Martin Josovich. I am a retired History teacher. I am seventy-three years old, but I’m blessed with more joie de vivre and enthusiasm than men half my age. My dear Sadie, may she rest in peace, could testify to this. Were she watching me, and I believe she is, she’d be saying, ‘Get out there, Marty. Meet someone new.’ Help me make her wishes
come true.”

  Addie sighs and closes her laptop and wonders if she made a mistake by giving Rob her number. He is, after all, a complete stranger. He could be violent or boring. He probably won’t even call. Of course he won’t call.

  Rob calls on the third night. Normally when she’s on the phone, Addie paces around the apartment and thumbs through books while the other person talks; or she scrolls through Netflix for new releases; or she eats raspberries from the carton with the fridge door open. But Rob has a pleasant voice and a great sense of humor that makes her want to do none of these things. A few times she laughs out loud, a good sign.

  That night in the shower Addie replays the entire twelve-minute conversation. Rob wants to pick her up at noon on Saturday. Another good sign. Some guys can wring only an Italian dinner and a Hollywood-movie-plus-drinks out of their repertoires and can’t imagine picking up a woman before dark. This date will be different.

  Before going to sleep, Addie boils a pot of dandelion tea and works on her manuscript for an hour. When her eyes get too tired, she tosses the pages on the mantel, takes off her glasses, and turns off most of the lights in the apartment. On some nights, like this one, she can’t stop replaying the voice of her college boyfriend. “You’re so romantically immature, Addie.” With their backs to the wall they sat naked, not touching, on his mattress on the floor. “You’re far too pretty and smart to be this insecure. Why can’t you just be cool?” In the kitchen Addie sticks a bundle of fresh lavender in a jar, which she puts on the table beside her bed.

  Why can’t you just be cool?

  On Saturday at precisely noon Rob’s black Lexus pulls up in front of Addie’s building. She notices the vanity plates: I DOCTOR. Does this mean he’s an optometrist? An ophthalmologist? What’s the difference again? She won’t even bring it up, she decides. She’ll compliment his car or his hair instead. She will be very cool.

  Addie slides into the passenger seat and smiles at Rob. “You look great,” he says—this from a man who has made clear vision his vocation—and merges expertly into traffic.

  The city rolls by her window, and she is relieved to find that Rob doesn’t feel a need to talk much. The music is too loud, for one thing, and the stereo speakers are everywhere, above, below, side to side, playing a maniacally cheerful pop song.

  Rob guns the engine on the FDR North and taps his thumbs on the steering wheel.

  “Glad it’s Saturday,” he says at last.

  She smiles at him. “Me, too.”

  He presses a button on the steering wheel, activating a third repeat of the same song. “Totally,” he says, before lapsing again into silence.

  What a pleasant change from Dimitri, who would never stop talking. She met him in the kitchen of a house party in Brooklyn. Addie waited with an empty cup while a guy in a muscle shirt pumped the keg and droned on about a Bolaño novel to a lanky redhead with tattoos on his forearms. Dimitri appeared beside Addie, frowned at the redhead, who was now expertly tilting his cup at a foam-reducing angle, and said, “Greased lightning over here, eh?” She didn’t know why it was funny, but it was. She laughed.

  “This young lady is practically dehydrated, fellas,” Dimitri said to them. “Stop mucking about.”

  When they finished, Dimitri took the keg nozzle and filled her cup first, then his own. She wasn’t looking for old-fashioned manners in a man, but, she told her girlfriends, from that very first night, Dimitri saw her, understood her.

  Rob pulls the car into a mall parking lot. Addie looks out the window and realizes she doesn’t know where they are. Queens? Long Island?

  Rob swings open his door. “Let’s hit it,” he says.

  “The mall?” Still strapped to the seat, she forces a smile. “Really?”

  “This place cracks me up,” he says. “Come on.”

  In the video arcade, Rob slips a five-dollar bill into a change machine, and she watches twenty tokens blast into the brass bowl below. Grinning, he hands Addie eight tokens and swings his arm out as if introducing her to a magical realm. “Play whatever you want. It’s on me.”

  She’s met well-off men before, and they’re invariably different from what you first expect. They do things that nobody would imagine a person of their stature doing. Rob, she notices, doesn’t need to dress in an Armani suit to attract attention to his wealth. He wears a ragged tweed sport coat over a Bruce Lee T-shirt. His dark wash jeans and black Chuck Taylors complete the look he seems to be going for. And this unorthodox beginning to their date doesn’t entirely repel her. On the contrary, it strangely comforts her, because she will not have to put on an act with this guy. She can be herself with Rob. It’s too much pressure these days to date an indie-rock drummer or a coke-snorting sculptor, the guys who want to go to after-hours parties and talk about the great artistic work they’re not doing. They always deem her too conservative, too tame, and end up leaving for a bony woman with bangs and a spider tattoo on her thigh.

  She stands beside Rob at a kung fu video game—her legs and arms goose-fleshed from the air-conditioning—and realizes that she’s even more attracted to him than she had first thought. Tongue tip peeking through clenched lips, dark eyebrows crunched down over his nose—he is undeniably handsome. There really are some good men out there, she decides. Kindhearted, charming sweethearts. She knew it all along. She just needed to look harder. Here’s a fun-loving, generous guy with a positive demeanor, the opposite of Dimitri, that self-destructive moper, whose harrowing descents into despair were numbed only by copious amounts of vodka, ice cream, and kettle corn. Like some kind of computer-animation trick, Dimitri morphed into a fat, alcoholic bartender when she wasn’t looking. One moment he was a beautiful boy at a party, making flirty jokes with her, and the next thing she knew, wham. Old Fat Beard.

  She’s lucky Dimitri dumped her, though it shattered her at the time. He broke up with her: she hadn’t seen that coming. But it wasn’t a breakup so much as an act of liberation. In fact, she should send him a thank-you note.

  Rob shouts, “Press the KICK button for me! Be on my side.”

  She’s ecstatic. She pushes that KICK button for all she’s worth. On the game screen two cartoonishly muscular villains fall and die, thanks to her help.

  Rob breaks free from the game long enough to plant a wet kiss on her cheek. Before Addie can even react, he’s banging away at the PUNCH button with the heel of his hand. “Fuck,” he says and snaps his fingers. “Check it out,” he says, pointing to the screen. “I got killed by that priest guy and his special powers. Wait, I’m getting back up. I’m still alive! Am I? No, I’m not getting back up. Yup. I’m dead.”

  She puts her hand on his back and rubs between his shoulder blades, and helps him through this minor emotional crisis—their first as a couple—and he smiles gratefully at her. “Strange as it sounds,” she imagines telling someone, “we were in an arcade when I just knew.”

  He motions to Sbarro and says, “You hungry? Let’s grab a slice.”

  “Sure, but do you really want to stay here?”

  He looks puzzled by her question, his eyebrows converging. “Why not?”

  “You’re right,” she says, laughing. “Why not?”

  “I’m having fun,” he says.

  “I’m having a blast,” she says, her voice a little too enthusiastic. She reaches out and touches his forearm. “I love pizza. Well, okay, I don’t love it. It’s not my favorite food in the world, but it’s up there. Is it your favorite?”

  “Nope,” he says.

  And that’s it. Nothing more. Guys can do that. Nope. Easy as that.

  Addie and Rob stare into each other’s eyes, and a gulf of silence opens between them. She realizes she hasn’t said anything remotely interesting or smart since he picked her up. Look at that glum face, she thinks. It’s obvious what he’s thinking right now. He’s worried that he’s made a mistake and picked a dim woman.

  “Hey.” He leans closer, his nose scrunched. “I think somebody farted. Do you smell
it? Damn, that’s ripe. Let’s get out of here.”

  Addie leans back in the booth, sated after a slice of mushroom pizza and a quart of orange soda. She realizes that this is the life she’s been missing. Simple, unadorned pleasure. Who needs fine dining with its confusion of utensils, plates, and stemware? Who needs entry into exclusive clubs where only the holiest are permitted to worship? Shared time at the mall, doing nothing, just being together with your man—that’s what’s important. Dimitri, wearing only unwashed gym shorts, spent hours watching the Yankees on his enormous TV or napping on the couch before his nightly shifts at the bar, and she felt ridiculous as she hopped around him on Saturday afternoons, saying, “Want to go to the park? There’s jazz in the park, Dimitri. Want to fly a kite? Go out to lunch? Anything you want, because today’s your day, killer.”

  But Dimitri only smacked his lips and yawned and drifted off to sleep on the couch. That wasn’t shared time. That wasn’t the mall arcade in Queens. (Or Long Island?) Rob isn’t like Dimitri at all. Rob is a doer. And that was probably the biggest problem she had with Old Fat Beard toward the end. She was making all the decisions, and it’s thrilling to be with someone who says, Today I’m making the decisions. I’m taking you out. You don’t have to worry about a thing. You’re in my capable hands.

  Rob licks pizza grease from his fingers and tells her that his “pants are vibrating.” He fishes out his smartphone, an expensive-looking device that can probably make waffles from scratch. He glances at the caller, blushes, and excuses himself. “Sorry. Have to take this. I’ll be white black.”

  Addie laughs—she always laughs when she’s uncomfortable, a tic she dislikes about herself—and wonders whose call is significant enough to get him away from the table. Another woman? Girlfriend? Wife? Why did she ever think that this man was single? Of course he’s married. Or engaged, at least. His tall, classy fiancée is probably some fashion model from Copenhagen who would never set foot in the mall. That’s why Rob brought her here. Cruel and clever. But what does that Danish beauty have that Addie doesn’t, other than two passports and towering height? Maybe Addie can win Rob away from her. No, she shouldn’t break up a potential marriage.