Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “Here,” Randall said, handing her a lemonade in a Dixie cup.

  “Thank you,” she said, leaning forward into him again. His skin had a kind of slippery silkiness, an odd texture for the exterior of a middle-aged man. Her first husband, the dreaded Matthew, whose nickname had been Squirrel—winsome womanizer, alcoholic, self-centered bum, gate crasher, liar, charmer, deadbeat, and cheat—had felt like hair and sandpaper. Sex with him had always been burningly raw and fecund. Children came from it, three of them. Where was Squirrel Van Dusen now? Pittsburgh? Or was it Tucson he had recently called from, yes, somewhere in the Southwest, that sunny haven for bums, asking for a tide-over loan for his newest harebrained scheme? It was hard to keep track of him: Randall had taken the most recent call and kept her from whatever Squirrel had asked for. She still had a soft spot for the guy. The flame could not quite be extinguished. Human wreckage had always attracted her. “The Bad Samaritan,” Randall had called her once, in that not-quite-teasing way of his.

  “It’s a stage he’s going through,” Randall said, sitting down at the dinette. “Frederick’s going through a stage. All boys go through a stage. They have to practice at being bad before they become men.”

  “You were never bad.”

  “Well, okay. I guess I never was,” Randall said thoughtfully, nodding his head once and turning away from her. “Not like that.”

  “You always got up at five o’clock. To pray. With the birds. Like Saint Francis. You were a boy scout,” she said, knowing she was being petty. “You still are.”

  “That’s unkind. And I never prayed, not like that. I prayed to someday meet someone like you. Actually, Estelle,” he said, fixing her with a look, “what are we talking about? This isn’t about me, is it? Or Frederick?”

  “No, I don’t suppose so.”

  “Well, my dear, what is it about?”

  She looked at him. Behind her, she could hear the leaves of the ash tree stirring in the dry summer wind. She could even hear the electric clock in the stove, which gave off a dull but thoughtful hum, as if it were planning something.

  “It’s about the usual,” she said. Of course he knew what it was about. He always knew.

  They’d run off together as teenagers forty-five years ago, Estelle and Squirrel, and when their kids were still toddlers, they’d crisscrossed the country in the Haunted Buick. What fun it was, being young, rootless, those hours of driving when music would start up for no apparent reason underneath the car’s dashboard and then stop a few minutes later. There was a short in the radio, but Squirrel liked to say that the Buick was haunted. An announcer would begin speaking in midsentence from that same place under the dashboard, and Squirrel would say, “Where did he come from?” You couldn’t switch the radio off: the dial didn’t work. The Buick was beyond all that.

  In those days, Estelle and Squirrel never stopped anywhere for longer than a few months. They would cross the border into yet another state they hadn’t yet ravaged looking for opportunities, surefire moneymaking projects to put them on the map, as Squirrel liked to say. That was the expression he used after dark in bed with Estelle in one motel or another, whispering to her about what and where they would be, someday. They’d be settled; and happy; and rich. They’d be on the map. The children, the two boys and Isabel, the youngest, whom they called Izzy, slept in the other bedroom, a clutch of little snorers and bed wetters.

  All the trouble had been manageable at first. In Maine, there had been midnight phone calls from a girlfriend Squirrel had acquired somewhere, and a day later they were treated to her sudden arrival on the doorstep of their rented duplex. She’d been coarsely attractive, this girlfriend, furiously chewing bubble gum, and her waitress name tag was still pinned to her blouse over (Estelle could not help noticing) her plump right breast. Cheryl. She was pregnant, this waitress, this Cheryl, said. She wanted satisfaction. Satisfaction! What a word. Or else. Or else what? She would be back, she said, with a court order. Estelle and Squirrel packed the car that night and were gone the next morning, the kids still asleep in the backseat by the time the sun came up. Estelle didn’t speak to Squirrel, except about necessities, for a month after that.

  In Montana, Squirrel’s partner-in-business threatened them all—another midnight call!—with a court suit and, if that didn’t work out, personal revenge Western style with a semiautomatic. By the time they had relocated in northern Minnesota, as temporary managers of the Trout Inn on Ninemile Lake, Estelle thought they were finally free of adventures. They’d come to the calm expository part of the movie, the part after the big opening attention-getting mayhem. Squirrel’s mischief-making had been all used up, she thought, just flushed right out of him, and she was relieved.

  And then one night Estelle had awakened to find that Squirrel had entered her while she’d been sleeping and was thrusting into her with a wild look on his face, with his hands around her neck as if he planned to strangle her, and she screamed at him and shook him off. She loaded the still-sleeping kids into the Buick, against Squirrel’s pleading, and took off for Minneapolis. She remembered to take what money there was, and the credit cards, Squirrel pleading with her but not stopping her, and the children crying.

  That was Part One of her life. Now she was in Part Two. There would never be a Part Three. Of that she was sure.

  Midafternoon, Estelle pulled her car into the turning circle for Community day camp. Of course, Freddie was already there out in front, staring up into the sky as if he were waiting for helicopter rescue. He lumbered toward the car, opened the front passenger-side door, and poured himself in. He aimed the air-conditioning vents toward his face.

  “How was it today?” Estelle asked, too brightly.

  Freddie sat silently as if the question were much too complicated to be answered. Finally, he said, “We’re going to put on a play.”

  “Yes, I think you told me that,” Estelle said. “What is it? What’s the play?”

  “We’re all writing it. Or they are. The kids and the counselors.” He gave her his best sour look. “It’s called Wonderful World.”

  “And who do you play?” Estelle asked.

  “Me? I play Mr. Scary.”

  “Mr. Scary? Who’s that? And what do you do?”

  “I stand up at the beginning of the play and I recite my fear monologue and scare everybody.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” Estelle said, trying to put the best face on things. “Do you have it? The monologue? Could you read it to me?”

  “Yeah,” Freddie said. “I got it right here with me.” He heaved himself upward, trying to get his hand into his trouser pocket. After much poking, he pulled out a grimy sheet of paper. Her grandson unfolded the paper and began to read. His delivery sounded like a voice-over in a horror movie. “Fear,” Freddie intoned. “What is fear? You and I live with, interact with, fear. We know fear, but we shun it. But what if one were to embrace fear? Not to live with it, but to be it, to become fear. In our everyday lives we divorce ourselves from fear. We tell ourselves it is distant, it is unreal, it is abstract. But this is not so. Fear is tangible, more tangible than you or I. What if a man became fear? Where would fear live? He would dwell among us, hidden but not unseen. Who would fear be? For what would fear strive? What would be the face of fear? Ha ha ha ha.”

  “Very good, Freddie. But, well, that’s a strange monologue to give to a twelve-year-old,” Estelle said, after recovering herself. “The words are awfully big. What does it have to do with a wonderful world?”

  “It’s like what you have to get out of the way? Before the world is wonderful? And yeah, well, that’s what they gave me,” Freddie said, slumping down in the car. “The counselors wrote it. That’s what Mr. Scary says. I’ve got to memorize it. Also we made T-shirts today. I mean, we wrote words on T-shirts. So they became ours.”

  “What did you write?”

  Freddie held his shirt up. With laundry marker, he had written GOT HERPES? on his. “Well,” Estelle said, “that’s not very ni
ce.”

  “It’s supposed to be a public health warning,” Freddie said. “A wake-up call.”

  “And the other kids, did they throw food at you?” Estelle asked.

  “Not today,” Freddie said. “Today was a good day. They liked how I did the Mr. Scary monologue.”

  “Freddie,” Estelle asked, “do you really have to laugh at the end of that? It’s a little corny.”

  “The ha ha ha ha part? I added that,” her grandson told her. “That’s my contribution.” He took out his phone gadget and began tapping letters.

  “Are you texting someone?”

  “No,” Freddie said. “I’m writing a story.”

  “Oh, good,” Estelle said. “What’s it about?”

  “The underworld,” he told her.

  Sometimes, on certain days when Estelle had found herself sitting on the front stoop of the house, her coffee cup cooling between her palms, and the morning breeze riffling her hair, Freddie still eating his breakfast cereal inside, she would imagine that the way her grandson had turned out, with his sorrow and obesity and malice, had its own logic. But then at other times, particularly when the breeze stopped, time halted as well. And when that happened, Estelle was no longer sitting on the front stoop with her coffee but was back there, in time, in Part One, taking her daughter, Isabel, to a guidance counselor, and then to that killingly expensive, pill-dispensing psychiatrist in the circular building with curved interior walls that made Estelle think of a gigantic brain, and they, all of them, the brilliant professionals and Estelle herself, were trying to talk Izzy out of the sullen and then manic rages—shoplifting, a stolen car, drug-taking, car wrecks, God knows what kinds of sex, and with whom—that had overtaken her and turned her into this oblivious bingeing adolescent force-of-nature who’d actually driven once into a parked fire truck. Well, at those moments nothing had its own logic, or it had the wrong kind of logic, because you couldn’t talk anybody out of anything, could you? No. How many young women had managed to do what her daughter had accomplished? Had smashed a stolen car into a fire truck? An achievement. Her teenage accomplices had fled, but Isabel had stayed there, dazed behind the wheel but boldly confident that such an excellent accident gave her special monster status. Who else, among Estelle’s acquaintances, had also hit, though not very hard, a pedestrian in a parking lot? Her daughter, Isabel, had, and had been unrepentant. He shouldn’t have been there, she had said of her victim, a retired dentist. In her taste for mayhem, Isabel had truly been Squirrel’s child. So there was a logic to her actions, of a sort.

  Estelle thought that her own life had veered between long patches of drudgery, weeks and months filing claims in an insurance office during the day and then racing home to cook dinner for her children and to put them to bed, typical single-mom scheduling, and then, the next job, working in the front office at the veterinarian hospital where she’d met Randall, accompanied by a choral background of barking. Yes, all that domesticity. And classes taken at the community college, including art history, her new passion. Then other stretches of time superimposed themselves on the dull ones, the moments of high drama, first the ones staged by Squirrel and then the ones staged by her daughter. Her two sons, Carl and Robert, seemed frightened by their little sister and had landed jobs after school at grocery and hardware stores; poor souls, solid citizens before their time, they almost didn’t count, those boys.

  But Isabel! Even on medications, she drank anything, she took anything, she went anywhere at night; she seemed to have no home place except the deep nothingness that she sought out. In Squirrel, those traits had been charming, for a while—they looked good on a boy—but with Isabel they were as charmless as her scowling face. There was really something demonic about her, almost bestial. Estelle imagined her as she saw her back then: twisted up with injuries, avoiding eye contact, the blond hair matted and unwashed, her jeans caked with dirt, her fierce young woman’s sexuality attracting the worst of the boys who gleefully hovered around her waiting for her next bold move.

  One night, one of many late nights, Isabel had come home at three in the morning. Estelle had awakened out of a shallow and dream-infected sleep and gone into Isabel’s room, where Isabel had thrown herself on the bed in the dark. She was muttering, and after Estelle switched on the lamp, she noticed that the pillow where her daughter rested her head had turned gray at the indentation. Isabel never showered anymore, and she smelled like a feral child.

  “Where have you been?” Estelle asked her, trying not to yell.

  “I’ve been inside and outside,” Isabel said. “I’ve covered the world.” She giggled. “Like that paint? That covers the world? I’ve done that.”

  “Jesus. What am I going to do with you?” Estelle said to herself, to the walls. “At least get undressed. At least get some sleep. And you’re grounded,” she said, automatically.

  “Undressed?” Isabel asked. Every facial expression she gave her mother indicated that any and all requests were, at that moment, preposterous. “You want me undressed, Mom? Like those nine-to-five people who are undressed? Who go to sleep?”

  “Yes,” Isabel said. “Like those people.”

  Isabel glanced up at her mother. Picking herself up, she stood next to the bed, then lowered her jeans. “See?” she said. “I can do this.” She swayed and laughed at herself. “Wanna see something?” She laughed again. “I’m a magician. I can do this amazing trick. Just watch. You’ve never seen this before in your life. I can make my panties stick to the ceiling.”

  “What?” Estelle said.

  After stomping her blue jeans to the floor, Isabel lowered her underwear and clumsily stepped free. She bent down and picked up her underpants—pink, Estelle noticed, her heart breaking—and then threw them up at the ceiling. They fluttered back down to the floor.

  Isabel gazed upward and said wonderingly, “I thought it would work. I had such a good time.”

  Estelle was staring, too. Her mind moved slowly. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, poor Mom,” Isabel said. “You’re so sheltered. Can’t you guess?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Isabel said, putting her hand on her mother’s shoulder to keep herself from swaying, “I was with a boy tonight. And we … you know. And, Mommy, did you know that after you do it, I mean when you do it with a boy, it drains out of you? Later? Onto what you’re wearing? And it makes your clothes … sticky. And that’s why I thought my underwear would be up there on the ceiling!” she concluded, triumphantly. “Except it isn’t.”

  Of course Isabel would become pregnant. There was no such thing as safe sex with Isabel. Of course she would have a baby and give it to her mother to raise after naming the baby Frederick (who came out of his mother brown, so his father must have been African-American, or something), and of course she would disappear quickly afterward, leaving no known address.

  Poor crazy Isabel. Poor Freddie, her son. It wasn’t about individuals anymore; it was about the generations, and what they handed down. The courtrooms, the hospitals, the doctor’s offices, the classrooms, the jails where they had put Izzy overnight: sometimes, sitting on the back stoop with her coffee cup, Estelle felt all those places descending over her, as if another person had lived that part of her life and had not yet survived it but now was inhabiting her own body. Clouds would cross the sky, cumulus clouds puffy with their own complacency.

  In the car, with Freddie explaining about his hero, Argo, and his descent into the underworld, Estelle turned toward Lake Calhoun. When she parked near the beach, Freddie sat up and said, “What’re we doing here?”

  “I thought it would be nice to go outside,” Estelle said. “Just a stroll. It’s summer, Freddie. We’ve got a little time before dinner.”

  “Of course it’s summer. I mean, what are we doing here?”

  “Well, look at the swimmers.” Outside the car, she walked ahead of him in the midafternoon glare on a sidewalk that ran parallel to the beach. At some distance from them, yo
ung men and women were playing volleyball. Out on the lake she could see swimmers splashing each other, and, beyond them, hazed in the hot Impressionist light, the sailboats. The air smelled of suntan oil and lake vegetation. People were bicycling past on the bike paths, and everywhere men and women, children and dogs were enjoying themselves. Pop music floated on the air from some radio.

  “I hate it here,” Freddie said, from behind her. Estelle could hear the shuffling of his shoes on the sidewalk. “I need to practice my Mr. Scary monologue.”

  “We should have brought your swimming trunks.”

  “I can’t swim.”

  “You could learn.”

  “Not if I don’t want to, I can’t,” he said. “I’d rather sleep with the fishes.”

  “The fish. Not fishes. Fish. You shouldn’t be so negative,” Estelle told him.

  “You mean I’m supposed to be happy?” He inflected the word with scorn. “Happiness sucks.”

  “Well, you could try,” his grandmother said, feeling a wingfeather of hopelessness. Just to her right, a boy about Freddie’s age, maybe a bit older, bronzed with the sun, a kid who obviously lived outdoors, was tossing a football to a friend. The wingfeather beat against Estelle as she watched him. Happiness came only to those who never asked for it.

  “I’d rather be Mr. Scary,” Freddie said. One of the boys close to them threw his football unsteadily, and it landed near the sidewalk. Freddie stared at it before kicking it out of the way. One of the boys said, “Throw it here!” while Freddie continued on.