by Tina Welling
She says, “I’ll have to find a smaller place, one with more people and lights around.”
Just in front of the long, low house, Bessie Creek joins a canal—part of the intercoastal waterway around Stuart—and off the side yard, the creek bleeds into a dark, swampy stretch that separates my parents’ home from the golf course. Not one neighbor’s porch light can be seen through the knotty growth of mangroves.
“Maybe one of those little apartments by the shopping center,” she says. “I could sit on the balcony at night and watch cars go by on Monterey Boulevard.”
About then we notice that Dad has wandered out to the porch. Embarrassed, Mom allows an awkward silence to settle, and Dad says, “You killing me off again, Lizzie?”
When Dad goes back inside and turns on the lamps and TV, Mom says, “Did Daddy tell you what the doctor said?”
Easy, easy, I warn myself and halt an urge to spill what I know about her depression. She lays these traps, remember. I don’t believe in keeping bad news from people about their own health and have been longing to override Dad’s orders and talk to her about it. But I say, “You tell me.”
“Dr. Meagher says I have rheumatism in this thumb.” She wiggles her left one in the dim light coming from the living room window. “I wish…you know, that he hadn’t told me, just told Addie. I hate worrying.”
Without noticing, I’d stopped the glider. I begin pushing with my foot again. She has always been cunning. Always flirted with truth—the way she just did, asking whether Dad told me—but has always scuttled from it before meeting it head-on. Her fears making her live a cat-and-mouse game, even with me.
“Now I know,” I say, “so I’ll do the worrying.” What have I just done? The exact thing I hoped to correct in my relationship with her.
Suddenly, I get it. She has answered my question about whether I should tell her what I know. I glance at her in amazement over how well she has trained me. Telling me she wished she didn’t have to know about her thumb is telling me—as directly as she ever addresses anything—that she does not wish to be responsible for any health issues.
I want out of these games. The trouble is that her diagnosis forbids me loading her down with more problems. I forget between visits how hard she is to be around.
Mom says, “Hear that music?”
A favorite old song of mine, “Stand by Me,” is playing as background to a public service spot on television.
“I wish they wouldn’t talk about that stuff,” Mom says.
I listen a moment. It’s a spot for Alzheimer’s disease. Dad punches off the TV.
Mom says, “You know what we haven’t done for a long time? Play beauty parlor.”
I laugh. I’d forgotten our old game. But she’d remembered. Sometimes, I feel the issue is my memory, not hers. I try to recall if I’d ever gotten any turns as the customer or whether I always played the hair stylist.
“Let’s do it now. Go get your brush and comb,” I say.
“I don’t know where I put them. You look.”
She can act dumb as a doughnut when she wants.
In many ways I am like my mother. With Erik I acted powerless as a way of inviting notice, interacting with him, sharing myself with him—a form of generosity, an offer of friendship. I thought that was what my mother was teaching me: social skills. But I misunderstood; I assumed that to be accessible to others meant I had to invite them to help me in my own thinking processes. So, like Mom has always done, I, too, stood in front of an open refrigerator door and cozily asked, “What am I doing here?” or yelped in alarm, “Oh, no.” My husband should then say, as I have done to my mother all these years, “You want a Coke.” Or rush to see what’s wrong, only to learn there are no olives for lunch.
Somewhere along the way Mom learned that helplessness was friendly and self-sufficiency was threatening and passed that information on to me. For a long time it glued my marriage together, even provided the conversation as I checked with Erik over every small decision.
Until this trip, I hadn’t realized how manipulative Mom was all my life. Funny how I used to accept the most obvious behavior. She’d wonder out loud, “What’s that noise?” when she didn’t want to get up and answer the phone. “It’s the phone,” I’d shout on the run to grab it. Either Mom has lost skill or I have gained some, because I often catch her delivering some other message than the one she is actually putting words to. Dad says Dr. Meagher wants to schedule some tests.
The day after I get home, Bo calls. He’s planned a cookout, invited the Donnells, a few other friends and his family. “Introduce you to everybody,” he said. At last, I’ll meet the aunts. I’ve bought an ankle-length gauzy cotton skirt, striped with buttons down the front, for half price because the waistband broke away from the gathered skirt and needs a few stitches. It’s worn with stretchy white pants beneath it. A scooped-neck tee and my sandals, buttons on the skirt left mostly undone, and I’ll look enough like the hostess/helper Bo asked me to be for this affair.
I think of my mother and her rules while I dress for the party: Never wear white after Labor Day or before Memorial Day. Same for straw purses and sandals. Officially, I’m on the edge of the good-taste plateau on two counts. I look in the cabinet mirror above the bathroom sink and worry whether Bo will think I’m pretty today. I heard my mother say to my father during my visit last week, “She’s got nice…you know…these things.” My mother poked herself gently in the eye, then blinked in surprise.
She seemed fine all day while Dad was gone or busy in his office, but from dinnertime on odd things occurred. Dad and I were involved in one of our impassioned discussions. This time about the absurdity of the golf course next door claiming they were a bird sanctuary. I maintained that the chemical runoff from the heavy use of fertilizers and weed killers poisoned the drainage ponds and made the idea a joke.
In a whisper and tugging Dad’s sleeve, Mom interrupted, “Addie, Addie, who’s that pretty girl?”
I turned to look at my mother, and she smiled formally to me and pretended not to have said a thing. How does she remember her manners and not her child? She made no attempt to join the conversation, yet repeatedly tried to distract Dad from our talk. When I was little, three or four years old, she used to scowl at me if I monopolized Dad’s attention when he came home from work.
Dad brushed off Mom’s question and told a story about a golfer claiming he scored a birdie when he killed a heron on the green with one of his drives. Dad hated golfers and made Mom quit taking lessons when they moved to Florida.
Mom asked who I was once again, and Dad, acting as if she were merely a pesky six-year-old, wrote my name on a piece of cardboard that came from his dry-cleaned shirts. Big letters in blue ink: SUZANNAH. He propped it above the TV. I didn’t follow his reasoning at all. If she couldn’t remember what she’d named her only daughter, how was she supposed to remember to look at the sign?
In fact, this worked against my father. Now my mother had two repetitious questions to ask. “What’s her name?” and “What’s that paper doing there?” Neither was Dad accepting that perhaps Mom couldn’t always read. When I found a way to break the news to him later in the week, he promptly began to teach her. “Ssss. Go, ‘ssss.’ Then, ‘oooo-zannah.’ Watch my mouth. ‘Ssss…’”
When Dad pulled that stunt, Mom slid her eyes over to me and lifted her brows in the old family look of “Should I call for the straitjacket or will you?” Once, we used to make a lot of crazy jokes in my family. Now we pretend there isn’t such a word.
I roll my own eyes and lift my brows at myself in the mirror. I grab my backpack and potluck dish and head for the party. Perfect for Bo’s plans, the day has settled into a dazzling brightness, calm and warm. Earlier this morning, grasses on the butte were flattened into long, shiny streaks by the wind. They caught the flash of sun and shadow when clouds, like whipped mounds of meringue, slid across the sky as if on a cool blue plate. Now the temperature has covered its typical forty-degree span
for late May and is holding at seventy-eight. By counting the number of cars passing my cabin, I time my arrival at Bo’s so I don’t have to meet too many strangers at once.
As soon as I pull up Bo’s drive, two colorfully dressed woman pounce on my car door. One spreads her arms lightly around me in a hug, the other unburdens me of my backpack and potluck dish.
“We’re Bo’s aunts. I’m Maizie, this is Violet and you are Suzannah. We knew it right away, didn’t we, sister?”
Violet agrees. “Bo said you had piles of curly light brown hair and was smiley as the Flying Nun.”
The aunts lead me to the kitchen and present me to Bo as if I am their own special gift to him. Bo is relieved to see me. He’s fallen behind schedule and sets me to work mashing avocados. Two by two, guests enter the kitchen and hand me their potluck dishes and introduce themselves. The last to arrive, Caro and Dickie, pick their way across the weedy side yard to Bo’s grassy patch behind his house. I carry the guacamole outside and see that Caro’s wearing strappy shoes with thin heels about three inches high, the dope. First thing, when she steps onto Bo’s rough-board deck, her heels both sink into a gap between the boards, and when she pulls her shoes out, leaning on Dickie for support, the leather is scraped down to curls that wag off the ends of her heels.
She says, “Fucking shit.” Not too loud, but everybody hears these first words of hers before she even gets introduced.
“What did she say, sister?” Bo’s aunt Maizie asks.
“‘Fucking shit.’ She said, ‘Fucking shit,’ dear.” Aunt Violet answers in a tone slightly louder than her normal one, as if Maizie were hard of hearing, which she isn’t.
Caro balances each foot to one board of decking and stands with legs not quite wide enough apart to look casual, not quite close enough to appear normal. In fact, she looks the way a horse does from behind while it’s urinating. She says to me before even greeting any of the others, “Who’s the designer of your skirt, Suzannah?” I don’t know, of course. “Well…where did you get it? Was it on sale?” She wants to turn me around and read my label, which she instructs me—as if I don’t know—is always sewn into the back of garments. But I distract her with introductions. I feel the aunts vibrating to get at Caro, so I start with them.
Violet says, “Now tell us all about your clothes, and you, too, Mr. Donnell.”
“I’ll bet they paid full price, sister,” Aunt Maizie says.
Oh God, they’re fun. And now I see they must like me.
Bo’s head darts into view at the kitchen window, and he charges out the back door to intercept the roasting.
“Dickie, you drove.” Bo wipes his hand on a dish towel before extending it to Dickie. “We were looking for you to drop down from the sky.”
“Good to see you, Bo.” Dickie accepts Bo’s handshake. “But that word drop makes us chopper pilots nervous.”
Behind the Donnells, the hiss of tobacco spit as it meets with burning coals introduces the presence of Bo’s grandfather, whom I met earlier. Both Caro and Dickie abruptly spin around at the sound, as if their shirttails were sizzling.
Bo introduces his grandfather. “O. C. Garrett, initials for Owen Charles.”
“A name I don’t never use,” Bo’s grandfather warns. He spits another gob into the flames of the cooker, wipes his right hand across his mouth, then onto the thigh of his Wranglers, before offering it in a handshake with Dickie.
I watch to see if Dickie sneaks a chance to wipe his hand on his own pants afterward; he doesn’t, but he holds the hand stiffly away from the rest of his body.
“Grandma always said O.C. stood for Old Coot,” Bo tells us. “Mr. Donnell,” says Violet, “I believe you’re wearing Luc-chese boots.”
“And I’ll bet he paid just loads for them, sister,” says Maizie.
Dickie stares at his feet undecided about how to react to the aunts. Finally, he just asks them to please call him Dickie and he moves away.
I look to see if Bo’s sorry about this idea of a cookout yet, but he’s fine, enjoying his own party. He appears not to be absorbing his family’s antics as a reflection on himself.
The Garretts’ old family doctor forms a circle with Bo’s vet and both their wives over on the lawn. Mick Farlow, the lawyer who appeared at the bank for the closing of my cabin, joins them along with his date, a woman I’ve seen shopping at the bookstore, Tam Randall. She’s a mental-health therapist, Tessa says. I’ve noticed she reads heavily from the women’s studies section and new fiction, my own favorite areas.
Caro follows Bo into the kitchen to help carry out the pitcher of margaritas and the plates of nachos. I’m going to be hostess in name only, I see. I approach Tam, glad for the chance to get to know her better.
Some time later the aunts come out of the house carrying a large photo album between them. “You must let sister and me show all of you our pictures of little Bartholomew,” Violet announces to the group. She turns to Maizie. “He was a darling child—wasn’t he, sister?” The sisters become caught up in each other. I’ve noticed today that they begin addressing the group, then lose awareness of us. Signals bounce rhythmically between the two sisters as they trigger memories in each other, almost operating as a synaptosome, a nerve ending isolated from surrounding tissue. If they hold to pattern, it will be some time before they will recall the rest of us and again transmit messages to the body of the gathering here on Bo’s deck.
Off to the edge of the mowed yard, another fire burns. This one, in a hole dug in the ground, is set up with a spit for meat. I trail over to join the crowd watching Bo paint a beef roast with red sauce.
“My favorites,” says Maizie in a burst of delight, still holding half the photo album. “Suzannah!” she calls to me. “Come see darling Bartholomew.”
The sisters and I meet halfway across the yard.
Even at four he was all masculinity. Stances of Bo, thumb and forefinger cocked low on each hip challenged the camera. Bo hanging beneath his pony at five, standing in the saddle about to shoot the photographer at seven. Bo with his first elk at eight, driving a pickup at ten. Beside a baler at twelve, tossing that summer’s straw cowboy hat into the final bale. Which, the sisters tell me, is the custom at the end of haying season. Flipping to the front of the album, Violet coos at a photo of Bo as a newborn being bathed in a kitchen sink.
“He had large private parts, didn’t he, sister?” Maizie says.
“Bartholomew was of good size.” They agree with each other that this is of importance to a man and again shut the rest of us out. A few minutes later Violet speaks across the yard to Bo. “Darling, are you still rather well-endowed? Sister and I wondered because your feet also grew fast and then stopped in your adolescence. Your feet are not of unusual size, though adequate.”
“My penis is of unusual size, Aunt Violet. My feet stopped growing. My brain and penis just surged on to astounding dimensions.” Bo paints more sauce on his beef, and his friends laugh.
Caro likes the public talk about Bo’s penis. From her private smile, I decide she is aching to report, but settles for looking knowingly as if she has an opinion she’ll attempt to keep to herself—but makes no promises. Dickie watches her. Poor Dickie. He knows.
Poor me. Now I know, too. But maybe it’s ending.
“Women like the large ones,” Aunt Maizie offers to those of us still listening. “But, oh, one can do nicely with any size.”
By necessity, Bo would have had to move private territory far inward, growing up around these two creatures. I could stand to take a lesson from him, I think, while helping him and Caro carry food to a long table on the deck. He has given his family members back over to themselves. They cannot embarrass him; they do not reflect on him. They are their own zany selves, and Bo figures everyone around has the job of dealing with this on their own. Unlike me, he doesn’t have shoulder pains from the tenseness of making this gathering work for each person. Don’t ask me why I feel responsible. Bo seems to feel his responsibility only inc
ludes offering palatable food and drink—not the weather, not the fact that his girlfriend’s husband is present or that the owner of a New York gallery is joining us soon, or that his crazy aunts insist on monopolizing the talk with penis judgments. Though I could wonder if this would be different were the aunts to go on about the smallness of Bo’s penis. Still, I doubt it would. Yep, Aunt Vi, Bo might say, so dinky I can’t find it in the dark without lighting a match first.
To get everyone started in line, I fill my plate, then find a place to sit where I can further study the guests.
With the pain my imagination projects onto Dickie, I almost miss the quirk of a smile on his lips as he watches Caro smear a cracker with Brie and hand it to Bo.
I’m confused.
Dickie knows now they’re having an affair or are about to—I’m certain of it—yet he appears to be…flattered. It’s pride and pleasure I see on Dickie’s face. You can lust after her, even meet her in motel rooms, but the woman is licensed to me. The smile of a man inviting another man—someone he really aches to impress—to drive his Lamborghini. See? She handles even better than she looks.
Aunt Violet and Aunt Maizie slide onto the bench where I’m speculating about the guests, one aunt to each side of me. We sit with our buffet plates on our laps, our glasses at our feet, juggling extra silverware and napkins.
“Now there’s a man proud of his belongings,” Violet says, tipping a speared melon ball toward Dickie.
“Is that it then?” I say with sudden surprise at having my inner musings confirmed.
“That,” Aunt Maizie says, “and a fascination with Bartholomew that would make our little boy squirm in his sleep if he knew.” Along with her silverware, napkin, glass, and plate, she has the added problem of finding a place to set the salt shaker she’s brought. She solves this by passing it to me.
“What?” I say, accepting the salt.
“That’s my take,” says Maizie.
Violet says, “She’s right.”
The aunts sound more than sane just now—they strike me as extremely perceptive. Their words shock me. To keep myself from staring at Dickie, I scrutinize the aunts. The two have good taste in clothes, if you like expensive Western wear. Outfits straight out of the window of the Wild Turkey Saloon. Swingy skirts, woven vests, cowboy boots. Heavy Navajo jewelry in silver and turquoise parades around their necks and their wrists and dangles from their ears. Violet is pale in coloring, a bit taller than her sister and less effusive. Maizie, I would guess, took the lead in letting her hips and tummy soften and spread. Violet, perhaps once even lanky, has followed suit and settled into a comfort with her middle-aged padding. The aunts must be about sixty-three and sixty-four now. Violet, I know, is the older. They exhibit a certain glamour. They are definitely flirts. Much of that penis talk earlier was directed toward Mick Farlow’s recently widowed father, I believe now. Jem Farlow has been targeted with saucy looks from them both.