Catapult

by Emily Fridlund

  In the evenings, my father climbed the ladder and inspected my work. He walked the ridge of the house, pointing out nails to hammer into place or little curls of shingle stuck in the gutters. He worked as a pole climber for the telephone company so he was excellent with heights. My balance was not so good as his. I scuttled after him on my haunches, crab-daughter with blackened hands. I could see mosquitoes quivering like TV static at the edges of his arms. They probed me as well, and I stopped still, letting them fasten on.

  We didn’t talk much inside the house. I made a dish with cabbage and onions, and my father spooned it on toast. The dog arranged her spine against the door, rolling her skull again and again on the knob. She missed my grandfather. I tried to explain he was gone, talking to the dog the way my mother used to: in complete sentences. Once years ago I caught my mother explaining to the dog the concept of weekends. She said, On certain special days, honey, we sleep late. On those days you get to stay in your crate and dream a little longer. I remember my grandfather walked in and rolled his eyes. For Christ’s sake, she either pees herself or doesn’t. My mother frowned. She said to the dog, Well, doesn’t that clear things up? Pee yourself, honey, go right ahead. I’m sorry to bother you, let me get out of your animal way.

  I know that talking to the dog can be a sneaky way to talk to someone else.

  To Coco at the door, I said, “It’s just us for now. We’re good enough.”

  My father said, “Don’t forget Orson.” Orson was the cat.

  One night the power went out, and Dad stuck some birthday candles in a loaf of bread. They were the only candles in the house, and we hovered over them expectantly. They made rippled skirts of wax on the crust of the bread. Dad rolled a battery from a broken flashlight on his palm. Outside the dark windows, I could feel the beautiful empty houses rise up, nudging the trees with their rooftops. Then the last candle snuffed out, and my father sat silent in the dark. I couldn’t see him until he shifted in his chair, emerging from the general blackness.

  When I met my mother for lunch, she wanted to know what my father said about her. I didn’t want to say nothing at all, so I told her other things that were true: he didn’t eat as well, he slept poorly. My mother, beaming, took these as compliments. We ate lunch at places she couldn’t afford, restaurants near the new golf course where we chose salads from the appetizer list. The salads were composed of complicated, pretty foliage. We shivered in the air conditioning.

  “He doesn’t know who he is,” she insisted. “He doesn’t know he doesn’t know.”

  My mother had gone to work since I’d seen her last. She’d started selling cosmetics at a department store, and she was experimenting with her face. The tape from her eye job was gone, but now the skin across her cheeks was puffy and orange with makeup.

  “Listen,” she said, setting a lacy leaf on her tongue. “He’s got aspirations, doesn’t he? He thinks, this is what I am, a son. Even when his dad leaves, he just goes on being a son, not a husband. Not a father. For some reason, he can’t stop being what he’s been all his life. He’s acting like a child.”

  “Sure,” I said. “He misses Grandpa.”

  “Of course he misses him!” My mother glared at me. “But it’s not as if the old guy’s on a fishing trip or something. Your dad keeps working at that house like he’s going to surprise his daddy when he gets back.”

  I thought of all the windowpanes I’d scraped and painted. The new white door. “I think it’s nice. He’s fixing it up.”

  “For what? For a dead man?”

  I squeezed my cloth napkin. “Grandpa’s not dead.”

  “Not yet. If your father visited Ron more often, he’d know better than to fix up a house for him. I visited him.”

  “Grandpa?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” She sucked from her straw and looked at me. “I sat by his bed and watched him open and close his mouth. Like a fish.”

  The waiter came by with a tray of pie slices and dessert breads. He was charming and effusive, calling me lady but talking only to my mother. He wanted us to order more than salads.

  When he left, my mother whispered hopefully, “Do you think he’d give me a ride someplace?”

  “The waiter?”

  “Your dad.”

  She was forever coming back to him, as if he were our one mutual friend and we had nothing else in common. I splayed my hands out on the white tablecloth. They were stained black with tar from the roof.

  “You’ll have to ask him about that.”

  “What’s wrong with your hands?”

  I spread my fingers farther out. They looked like something that lived in a swamp. I wanted to be chastised for bringing them to a fine restaurant.

  But my mother was busy wiping a crumb from her lip with her pinkie finger. She was writing out the check. “Did you hear about that burned girl?” she asked. “Awful.”

  I pulled my hands back to my lap. Breezily: “She got fucked up.”

  The burned girl had been one of Julie’s new friends, a year or two younger than the rest, but with a bigger chest than any of them. Before she was burned, I’d seen her linger after the pool closed, helping Julie carry her magazines and clothes. On the street, she was the one boys yelled at when they drove past in their cars. She could blush like no one I’d ever known, her skin a flash of red like something switched on, a buried bulb. After she was burned, her face was slippery and translucent and not really any color at all.

  Her boyfriend said she put her head in a candle. He said, they were sitting in the dark, and she dipped her face down as if taking a drink, just a little sip and her hair was on fire.

  The burned girl wasn’t pitiable like Julie. She unnerved people with her bandaged face, made people uncertain of themselves, as if she’d accused them of something. Three weeks after she was burned, she walked hand in hand with her boyfriend in the park, tiny petals of translucent skin crinkling out from under her bandages. She made people feel guilty for having nice faces. Boys, the ones who used to jeer at her from their cars, followed her around furtively when she went shopping with her mother. They were busboys, they were baggers. If she caught them staring, they grew embarrassed and tried to open doors for her. They rummaged around in bins and found the best fruit: sleek apples, kiwis dripping with ice. They wanted her to touch them with her hand, to forgive them and bless them with her lipless glance. She took their fruit, but would say nothing. She only had one expression.

  When the seniors asked Julie to sign a sympathy card for the burned girl, Julie refused. “It’s insulting,” she said (I heard this from my mother’s friend at the pharmacy). “I’m sorry, but she did it to herself.”

  From my father’s rooftop, I could see down the street and into the golf course pool. That’s where Julie lay, surrounded by her most loyal girls. Their bright towels on the white patio chairs looked like the flags of nations. Annie was there, with her plum-red hair, and Kitty Roster, white and bonier than I remembered. Julie, in the center of them all, fanned herself with a fashion magazine. She made the healthier girls nervous and guilty, the ones splashing in the pool, so they climbed out of the water and didn’t swim as many laps. They set straws between their teeth and sucked juices. They coughed when Julie coughed.

  By that time, I’d nearly finished the roof. I spread tar paper over the smooth boards on the rafters, making a clean, black landscape up there—one I couldn’t touch in the afternoon because it was so hot. It seemed like the surface of another planet, black and baking with underground fires. I liked how foreboding it was. My father planned to hire professionals to put the shingles down, a team of Mexicans from a company in town that did a roof a day. I told my father I could do it, but he looked at me like I’d made that joke before and it wasn’t funny. He wrote me out a check instead. In the space for my name my father wrote Cash.

  The day the Mexicans came, I climbed up in the neighbor’s tree and watched them unload supplies. They had jeans and bare backs; they didn’t speak Spani
sh; they all wore long, scraggly ponytails. On the roof they did not scuttle or crawl. They strode across that black surface as if it were the land where they were born, familiar as their own backyards where they threw out garbage and buried animals. From time to time, they lit cigarettes and lifted their ponytails up, airing their necks.

  By noon, they’d nearly covered my black planet. They sat on the front-yard grass and picnicked, sipping from water bottles and beer cans. They giggled at the dog, who came at them with her hackles up, dribbling urine. I climbed down from my tree.

  “Well, look,” they said. “Such a pretty squirrel.”

  “You shouldn’t drink on the job.”

  “A pretty evangelist. Honey, you got bathroom?”

  “Nope.”

  “No? We roofing a homestead or something? You take a piss with the dog in the grass?”

  One of them opened a hand for the dog to sniff. He ran the other hand down the ridge of fur on her back, so slowly the bristles settled before he touched them. The dog leaned her jaw into his palm.

  I took the dog by the collar and pulled her away. “My dad doesn’t trust you.”

  “What, he’s a racist or something?”

  I paused, thinking of the way my father looked at me when I said I could do the roof myself. He hadn’t even given me a chance. He’d said it would be too hard, too slow, to show me. I told them: “Actually, he’s a narrow, small-minded man.”

  My father doesn’t have any stories about Vietnam, so I made up one for him. It’s not even a real war story. In it, he’s just sitting on a bus in the middle of some city, staring out a dirty window at the bikes and meats and goats. I imagine him sliding around on one of those vinyl seats—the kind on school buses and café booths—and this Vietnamese woman is sitting next to him. She has nothing in her hands, no purse or bag or suitcase. She’s pretty, but maybe she’s been on the bus for a long time, because she’s too tired to hold up her head. It rolls onto my father’s shoulder. He starts to move away, so she murmurs something to him then in her language. I think he likes how her voice sounds. I think her head on his shoulder feels like a thousand pounds, and he wants to let her hold him down so he’ll miss his stop, so he’ll miss the war in the jungle and the flight back to America: the canary-yellow house that’s waiting for him there, the storm windows he’ll have to put in and take out, the hopeless teenage daughter and unhappy wife, the father he will never please enough.

  He reaches out to touch the woman’s hair, but she has only one word for him in English—Yes—so he freezes, pulls back. Waits. When she nods off again, he props her up against the window and changes seats. He gets off two stops early.

  My father is a good man, but what do you do with all the good men in the world? There are too many already. Sometimes you want someone less good.

  The burned girl came to high school orientation. I hadn’t even realized she was in my class. I tried to think back to all the rooms and playgrounds we might have shared: the desks in rows, the tests so quiet you could hear the air conditioner. She sat in the bleachers with everyone else, though the people around her sat too close in order to seem like they weren’t avoiding her. People had started to say she was creepy since she didn’t act damaged. I could see the knuckly lobe of her ear, the patchy sheets of skin on her jaw like new bark. Her hair was growing back, bristly as a military cut, and as severe.

  When her sweatshirt slipped between the bleachers, no one offered to get it for her. I half expected her to hobble, but she picked her way around backpacks and bodies, stepping carefully onto the basketball court. Her breasts bobbled under her T-shirt. I wondered where her boyfriend was, the one who walked with her while bits of her face drifted off in the park. Maybe he was older. Maybe he’d grown resentful of her like all the rest, like the boys she wouldn’t blush for now, like Julie in her lounge chair counting vitamins on her thigh. People said Julie had invited the burned girl to her family’s lake cottage, but the burned girl wouldn’t come. Julie called her a snob: “It’s not nice to snub people’s pity,” she said.

  In the high school auditorium, the cheerleaders taught us the school song—Y-E-L-L-O-W-J-A-C-K-E-T-P-R-I-D-E—and then the Boy Scouts brought out the flag and wedged it between some folds in the theater curtains. The principal wanted to talk about the Pledge of Allegiance. He said, “It’s important, in these controversial times, to remember why we make this oath to our country.” I hadn’t seen him since the summer funeral, and he looked tanned and well fed. “Wouldn’t it be a shame,” he said, “if because of those two words—‘under God’—they called it a prayer and took this away from us too?”

  The burned girl hadn’t returned to the bleachers. People kept glancing down between their shoes, looking for her.

  “You are citizens, and sons and daughters, and students at this school. How you coordinate these duties is your supreme responsibility.” The principal scratched his nose. “It’s going to be an exciting year.”

  A boy tossed a soda bottle through the basketball hoop. Its neck snagged in the ropes. The principal sipped from a milky glass of water. Beneath us all, the burned girl crawled in search of her sweatshirt. The room shook with sophomores standing up.

  When the mascot climbed on stage, his bulging bee head under one arm like an astronaut’s helmet, he put a hand on his belly instead of his heart. I put my hand on my belly, too.

  When I got home from school, my mother was sitting at our kitchen table, four rolls of cotton in her mouth and her chin streaked with drool.

  I said, “Mom?”

  She said something plaintive, but all I understood was holes and mouth. My father, washing dishes at the sink, explained. She’d gotten four teeth extracted and was worried she’d be too woozy to take the bus. In a few weeks, she was getting corrective surgery on her jaw and braces.

  My mother said, more clearly, “He was late.”

  My father turned off the sink and dried his hands on a paper towel.

  “Ry dod en tong.”

  “What?” I didn’t like looking at her. She pinched the bits of cotton from her mouth, slowly, like she was extracting the teeth all over again. Lines of drool thinned and broke, and she set the bloody wads on the table.

  “Everybody went home, all the little girls with their mothers. They closed the place up. I had to sit outside the dentist’s office on a curb and wait for him.” She spat into a tissue.

  My father said, “Watch out with that.”

  “I’m bleeding,” my mother whined. I could see the sparkly blush on her cheeks, saved for occasions like these when people got very close to her face and examined her. She complained to my father, “I can’t feel my mouth!”

  My father didn’t say anything else. He stayed close to the appliances, where there were small and continual tasks to perform with rags. He wiped crumbs and checked the bulb in the stove. When my mother said, “I feel like half my face is gone!” my father remembered a leak that needed fixing in the bathroom. My mother stared after him, crestfallen, as if he were abandoning her in the middle of their date.

  She watched Wheel of Fortune with the dog, and I sat on the front steps and watched our new neighbors move in. They had a long white truck with a gaping door like the mouth of a deep tunnel.

  Later, much later, my father came out of the bathroom and found my mother dozing on the couch. She had a small wad of tissues on her lap, arranged like a bouquet. My father stared at her for a second. Then my mother woke up and said, “Gabe!” blowing a bloody bubble of drool. My father looked horrified and sorry, which is something like love, maybe, so my mother was very pleased.

  When she moved back in at the end of the summer, my mother didn’t bring her miniatures in the tackle box. She brought cosmetics in plastic purses and cleaning equipment for her braces, tiny wire brushes and picks. My father was as wary of her as always, but he showed her the new spackle on the wall and the garbage disposal he installed for my grandfather. He flicked the switch and said, “Careful, careful. Okay?”<
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  In the mornings, my mother likes grinding things up, the gurgle and crunch of half-eaten fruits, the quick disappearance of leftovers. She jumps and shrieks whenever she turns it on, as if it might take her hand down into the blades, as if she always wanted a sink with that sort of power. She says to my father, “Then you’d be stuck with me. Then you’d have to do the dishes while I watched!”

  She holds up her perfect hand, and he steps back.

  She laughs. “Sandra, Sandra, just look at him!”

  I don’t. I’m looking outside the window now, where the neighbors’ lawns are going brown in stripes. Someone drags a sprinkler by a hose, wearily, never looking back. We’ve done this all before. My father is searching for a way out of the room, and I’m thinking, Coward. I’m thinking that riddle about the Indian at the courthouse is easy to solve. He just turned to the person with the hatchet next to him—someone he said he loved, who said he loved him—and held out both his arms.

  But I don’t think that’s an impressive trick, not really. After the hands are gone, someone just puts shackles on your feet and you’re back to where you started, only you can’t eat soup or play cards. There’s no escape in that. If it were me—! If it were me, I’d sit tight and let the bailiff lock the shackles around my wrists. I’d let him lead me into the courthouse and away from the soldiers who caught me in the fields, away from my buddies behind their painted shields, away from my family, who’d only pity me without hands, who’d have to bathe and feed me the rest of my helpless life. I’d let the bailiff lead me down the stairs into the dark cell under the courthouse, beneath the city, and that would be the trick: that I’d go willingly and never come back.