Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  Everybody. Sure, I’ll twiddle. You go to Chico.

  I sip my tea and know I’ll be awake half the night deciphering Bo’s words. He’s putting me off. When did this begin? I’ve been so busy barricading myself from him, I can’t tell when the switch occurred. Because, no doubt about it, he is now barricading himself from me. All these months I’ve let him see exactly who I am; I’ve held back nothing. And I’ve scared him off.

  Bo gets up and checks the sink again. After a moment, I follow. Nothing there moves one bit. Kind of like my love life. Still, reading between Bo’s lines, I suspect my best bet is to lighten up. We both just stare at the murky water.

  I’m a naturally positive person; the upside of Bo’s words abruptly cuts through the blockage that has descended to my chest. I think he is saying, I’m coming, I’m coming.

  We stare at the water in the sink. I say, “I’m amazed water swirls down a drain in the same direction all over the world.” I sound reverent at the idea of such universal unity.

  “Except below the equator,” he reminds me.

  “Oh, right.”

  We know plunging isn’t going to work with this much garbage.

  “Need a bucket. Get the big black iron pot,” Bo says.

  “Eew. I don’t want that garbage in my pot.”

  “Most of this garbage is the same stuff going through your own body’s trap pipe.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “We’ll boil disinfectant or something in it afterward.”

  I have some old habits yet to break. I notice that while my mind is objecting, my body is lifting the pot out of the cupboard. This was how I ran my whole life with Erik. Arguing with him with my mouth, abetting him with my hands. I swear, I never knew I was leaving Erik until the process reversed and my mind watched my body pack a bag and climb into the car.

  “Now,” Bo instructs, “you do the job. I’ll just show you, so you can handle it if I’m not here.”

  “Where are you going?” I sound stupidly bereft.

  “Nowhere. You said once you wanted to know how to take care of everything around your place here.”

  I think Eew, again. But he’s right. Living way out here, I have to expect times when even Bo can’t get through a blizzard to bail me out—so to speak.

  “Come on down here,” he says from under the sink.

  I stoop down and stick my head in there with him. “It’s dark.” Since my sink sits out from the wall several inches, these lower cupboards are deeper than in newer houses.

  “I got a flashlight.” He flicks it on. “Now take this wrench and unscrew that plug.”

  “Which way do I turn? Left or right?”

  “Zann,” Bo says, “to unscrew you turn left. To screw you turn right.”

  “You don’t have to be such a grump.” The damn thing won’t budge. “I haven’t taken a pipe plug off before, you know.”

  “It’s universal: left loose, right tight.”

  I take a breather. “Everywhere? All over the world you loosen left?”

  I have trouble believing the planet is that organized. Bo has trouble believing I’m that uninformed. He shines the flashlight on my face. “Everywhere on this side of the equator,” he says, “below the equator it’s the opposite.”

  I laugh hard. I don’t know. I feel giddy. It’s nice down here together. We could buy furniture and move in.

  Bo has that melted look in his eyes as he watches me laugh. His eyes shift down to my mouth. I stop smiling. My eyes drop to Bo’s mouth. The upper halves of our bodies are tucked deep into this silly space. Old linoleum remnants from the mudroom cover the floor, beneath our elbows. The black-bottomed sink with speckles of old white paint, looking like a starry night, looms above us. Bo reaches a hand around the U-shaped pipe swooping down between us to hold my cheek.

  But his hand halts midair as we both hear a car door close with an expensive cushioned slam.

  I whisper, “Caro?”

  “Sounds like.”

  She comes in the back door after a “Knock, knock” called into the kitchen. The silence feels deep and throbbing to me. Outside the cupboard my legs and Bo’s legs, hips to toes, point toward each other.

  I deliberately tap the wrench three times against the U pipe. Our alibi.

  I apply the wrench to the plug again.

  Bo corrects, “Unscrew, Zann.” He raises his voice. “Hi, Caro.”

  “That’s right,” Caro sings out. “I’m here, Suzannah, time to unscrew.”

  She thinks she’s funny. Five minutes later she might have been saying that from my bedroom doorway.

  Finally, I unscrew. The pipe drains into the bucket and Bo says, “Hand us that clothes hanger, Caro.” He jams it around the pipe to loosen anything stuck there and we are finished. Except it might help if Bo and I are forced to write I will not push garbage down the drain one hundred times on a blackboard. We both keep forgetting I don’t have a garbage disposal.

  We get involved in our talking and mindlessly push peelings, coffee grounds, egg shells right down the sink drain.

  If this is a metaphor for our relationship, I don’t want to hear about it.

  eighteen

  “Sister, don’t you think Bartholomew looks peaked? Bartholomew, you look peaked to sister and me.”

  “I’m not getting enough sex.” Bo tosses this out slouched down in an easy chair, his Sunday-best cowboy boots stretched toward the fireplace.

  We are sitting in Violet’s side of the sisters’ duplex. Maizie’s side, as I have seen during a previous visit, is too crammed full of furniture moved from the ranch house to allow family gatherings, such as this Christmas Day dinner. Maizie continues with her analysis of Bo’s color.

  “That’d do it—wouldn’t it, sister? Violet and I always look peaked. Course that’s attractive in a lady. Men see that and want to help.”

  With our wine, cheese, and crackers, we wait in Violet’s living room for O.C. to arrive. Though still in a brace from his knee surgery and using a cane, he refused offers to pick him up.

  Violet says, “In a man, howsomever, it appears suspicious. A lady has to ask herself: What’s the problem here?” She pauses to study that question a moment. “I think body odor first.”

  “That’s indelicate, Violet. And you know it’s not true. We want to help just the same as men do. That’s why we took in Mr. Pearson.”

  Violet clinks her wineglass down hard on the coffee table. “Maizie.”

  “Bartholomew knows about our boarders.”

  “Suzannah doesn’t.”

  “Suzannah knows what Bartholomew knows. Suzannah, you look peaked yourself.” The boarders the aunts refer to are their live-in male friends, a relationship only Violet is engaged in at the moment. Mr. Pearson is off visiting his daughters in Tucson for the holiday.

  Luckily for me, O.C. opens the door before I have to respond to Maizie’s remark, and Hazer crashes into the living room. She jumps at each person individually in greeting. Luckily again, her paws are mostly snow-free by my turn. Butt wriggling, high prancing, she gets all pigeon-toed with friendliness as she makes her way toward me. I longed to keep her forever when I cared for her, and I begged O.C. for an extra week. Now she collapses tummy up at my feet, and I’m enchanted that she remembers my rubs.

  Violet is peeking down the front of her dress, as she waits for O.C. to remove his coat so she can hang it. He says to her, “They still there, Violet?”

  Violet scrunches around. “Cracker crumbs,” she says.

  “Aw, they’re bigger than that.” O.C. hobbles over to join Bo on the men’s side of the room. We three women are lined up on the sofa.

  We all laugh at O.C. I like to get my giggles in loud and early before the more offensive jokes are paraded out and I get targeted by O.C. for being no fun. Violet complains about the scratchiness of the crumbs inside her clothes and that spurs Bo to recall an occasion of scratchiness outside her clothes. He tells about hugging her goodbye when the bus arrived on school m
ornings and feeling crusty little knobs of dried bird droppings on her bathrobe.

  “Pop got his fingers bitten so often by Aunt Vi’s parrot he used to call it the little rottweiler,” Bo tells me. Violet defends her deceased parrot and suggests that Hazer, who is nosing all the ornaments in reach on the Christmas tree, is less than the perfect pet, especially for a brittled-boned old man.

  “I might could have got me a more lethargic dog,” O.C. allows. “The silly pupper races circles around me. She’ll turn to butter one of these days.”

  We watch the tree boughs sway and anticipate the tinkles turning to plunks. I wish Beckett were here, though I am pleased that Erik has his company for Christmas. Next week Beck is flying out to stay with me until time for him to enroll at the University of Wyoming in Laramie mid-January. He’ll get a good dose of all these characters then.

  Bo says, “Hazer’s a good mutt.” He calls her over and gets down on the floor to wrestle with her. He tells Hazer she has a serious psychological problem with her need to win all their games. Two small bunches of muscle along each side of Bo’s jaw intrigue me as he talks. Thin blue afternoon light, like skimmed milk, hangs in the window. And just as this kind of light often enhances the ridges and valleys on a mountain face, it also enhances the planes of Bo’s face. I especially notice the slight indentation in his chin. Just a hint of cleft in the center. Makes me remember my attempts at creating a cleft of my own as a thirteen-year-old. I walked around my bedroom for hours with a bobby pin pinching my chin, hoping the impression would become permanent.

  The memory makes me miss my parents as I sit here with Bo’s. I think of my visit home last month and realize I never once sat in such relaxed comfort as I am sitting now, happy with myself. I didn’t personally go to Florida. I sent my secretary of state. To negotiate peace, to promise aid, to fly over the catastrophe and report the findings to myself once I was safely home. I look around at the people in this room. I have to spackle the cracks in each personality just to get the meaning of their remarks, yet I wonder: Who’s to say what is crazy? I close the bathroom door before I use the toilet when alone in the house. I’ve caught myself thinking it’s because the phone might ring—as if the ringing represents the intrusion of another being.

  “Christmas already.” O. C. shakes his head. “I get up in the morning with nothing to do and by nighttime I’m only half done. I wonder some days how I ever had time for work before I retired.”

  “Hmm,” I say, sitting deep into the sofa, an aunt on each side of me. “Every time I smell the turkey, I salivate like…what’s his name’s dog.”

  Bo says, “Does Pavlov ring a bell?”

  I read once that catecholamine is released when a person laughs. The hormone speeds blood flow and healing. I probably have very speedy blood these days; I laugh a lot around Bo.

  Before, I often felt that I was missing life, that life was happening in some other place and I couldn’t get there in time for it. And if by some quirk I was in the right place at the right time, I still felt I was not included. Lately, wherever I find myself feels like the center of the universe.

  The one difference is that I’ve learned how to be on my own, and the more comfortable I am alone, the more comfortable I am with others. Wherever I am—hiking or skiing in the hills, shelving at the bookstore, watching old movies on the sofa with Bo—I am convinced nowhere else is better. Even sitting here in lazy silence watching Bo caress Hazer into a swoon, with this family.

  Scrawny, bow-legged O.C. hunches alertly on his chair as if he were sitting his horse in a hailstorm. He’s got Bo’s smile—all teeth and cheek creases—though not his grandson’s larger build. A word like cayuse pops to mind when I look at O.C. Then there are the aunts. Once I ran into the two of them shopping on the square. We stood on the sidewalk talking and a man stopped to ask where to find the nearest barber. Maizie said, “At Shari’s, for only fifteen dollars, you can get a haircut and a blow job.”

  “Oh?” The gentleman looked surprised…and interested.

  Violet leaned over and said, “She means a blow dry.”

  “Oh,” he said, his voice dropping as the full realization of his loss occurred to him.

  Violet is not so with it herself. I followed the two of them into the drugstore that day to cast my vote for which pair of sunglasses looked better on Violet. She wondered if the glasses were designed for men or women and hollered over to the lady behind the cash register, “These sunglasses are bisexual, aren’t they?”

  In a very short time I’ve come to care about all of them and I’m pleased to be included in their holiday gathering. Caro and Dickie are spending the holidays at another of their homes near Charlotte Amalie in the Virgin Islands. I was invited there, too, but I’ve made the right choice.

  We all talk a while longer as the fire spangles the tree ornaments. Then the aunts rise from the sofa to carry in the food, and I follow to help them; the men wait to be called.

  During dinner I learn new things about Bo. For one, he takes a flashlight when he visits New York City, realizing the only thing he couldn’t handle on his own would be a city wide power outage. That kind of thinking—a Swiss army knife response to life—comes perhaps from being raised in Wyoming, where, self-sufficiency determines survival and happiness. Also, I learn that Bo shovels his backyard free of snow in early spring; he can’t wait throughout the long melt to see the first blades of grass. And as a child Bo sculpted armies of small snowmen in the pasture and played ongoing games of war for days, sometimes weeks.

  Then O.C. teaches me helpful hints about people’s personalities and their body parts. Small ears on a person means they are ungenerous, tend to be selfish. A space between the teeth means they are: “Uh, what would you say…kind of pushy, tend to be sociable, and hard to pin down. That fellow Dickie—he’s got small ears and a space, both. Watch out for him.” I remember Bo warned me about this philosophy of O.C.’s a while back, but to believe it I had to hear it with my own ears—and hope they aren’t too small.

  Meanwhile, the bronzed turkey diminishes to half a carcass and the mountainous bowls of mashed potatoes, dressing and sweet potatoes, scalloped corn and fruit salad are scooped into shallow valleys.

  After dinner, the aunts begin to carry out the used plates and I help them. Bo and his grandfather head for the living room to play gin rummy on the coffee table and listen to CNN. Before leaving the room Bo begins to apologize to me for the segregated routine.

  O.C. interrupts. “It’s Christmas, by God. For two thousand years, it’s been celebrated the same way: Women do their work and men do theirs. And we won’t be changing it this year.”

  “Oh,” I say, thinking I should have known, “you two shot the turkey yourselves.” Of course, wild Teton turkey. I have a big congratulatory smile on my face.

  O.C. looks at Bo. “You bring us a fresh mouth into the family? Your aunts pick her out for you?” He cocks his head hard in my direction and says to Bo, “Tell her how we do it here, son.”

  Bo recites in a monotone, “The women get up early. The men sleep in. The women slave over hot stoves. The men read newspapers. The women—”

  “Ah, hell to you all,” O.C. says. He turns to me. “Guess you noticed who fixed the tacos last night?” I nod, recalling both men steaming up Bo’s kitchen for an hour while the aunts reminisced to me in the sparsely furnished living room (“Remember when we taught Bartholomew how to sprinkle in the toilet, sister?”). “Right,” O.C. says now. “And we cleaned up afterward, too. Tonight it’s your turn. Stop your griping and hurry up in here, because next we play hearts back in the dining room.”

  “Do the women have to lose,” I ask, “and let the men win?” The aunts cheer in the background. “Also, like in the last two thousand years,” I finish.

  “Ah, she’s okay,” O.C. says with a half grin as he directs Bo out to the living room with a hand on his shoulder.

  I glow from O.C.’s benign acceptance of me and my contrary ways.

  Mai
zie washes, I dry, and Violet divides up leftovers and sneaks Hazer, who lies under the table resting her chin on Violet’s shoes, pieces of turkey.

  “We told Bartholomew that this was a circumstance appropriate for putting the cart before the horse.” Maizie sets a rinsed plate in the rack for me to dry. The two have a way of starting in the middle of a conversation, and I always feel I’ve been daydreaming and missed the beginning.

  “We did,” Violet agrees. “We said, ‘There’s your answer for Suzannah.’” Violet digs out every last trace of stuffing from the turkey and heaps it into three plastic bags: one for O.C., one for her and Maizie, and another for Bo and me.

  I wonder what they know about Bo and me and, more particularly, what they are talking about right now. “Answer to what? What did Bo ask you?”

  “You know men. They don’t come out and ask anything,” Violet says. “We just told Bo, ‘You act like it already is, then pretty soon it will be.’ And here you are.” She smiles exultantly at me and directs a greasy fling of her fingers my way as if she were a magician and I were a flock of purple doves she manifested from the turkey cavity.

  “That’s how Bartholomew learns. Begins at the end, works to the beginning.”

  If anybody put the cart before the horse, I guess Bo and I did from the start. I picture Bo’s face surrounded by the folds of my shower curtain last spring as he checked my bare thighs for blood before we hardly knew each other. And if the aunts are offering a metaphor for tearing his ranch apart before readying himself to live as an artist, that works, too.

  “Nowadays,” I say, “they’d call that behavioral dyslexia or something.” Bo’s family is such a mess, I notice terms from psychology 101 just freely leap to my tongue whenever I am discussing one member with another.

  Violet picks up on my theme. “And fund a special school for the directionally disadvantaged.”

  Maizie tosses a handful of silverware into the rack. “We’d get government aid and special parking for the spatially impaired. The invertedly challenged.”