by Maria Flook
“I should have had some mint when I had my appendix out,” Tracy said as he pulled his jeans off and moved behind Margaret.
“Oh God, he’s going to try something,” Margaret told Tina. She didn’t like her sister seeing this.
Tina said, “Some people just invite rape. It’s a fait accompli.”
Margaret looked at her. “You believe that? You’re crazy.”
Tina was working the pump handle until the bucket was refilled; then she went back to scooping the water and sifting it over them. “The Egyptians used mint in their embalming, mint and anise,” her sister said. “Comfrey, fennel, costmary, lavender, coriander—” Tina stopped naming herbs when Tracy took Margaret’s soapy wrist, pulling her hand to him.
“Shit, Tracy!” Margaret said.
“Give me a hippie hand-job,” he whispered.
“Out of the question,” she told him.
He was smiling. A smile in the dark looks strange, disembodied; you can’t be sure what it means because the eyes aren’t lighted. Tracy knelt down and scooped his hand over the bronze floor of mud then slapped the clay against her belly, smoothing it down. Margaret started to walk away, but he held on to her. She stood there. He pushed a handful of mud against her cunt, rubbing it into the slit. Margaret felt the velvety grains of earth, gritty but pleasing as he touched her, sculpting notches around her labia. The clay began to tighten over her belly and along the inside of her thighs. Tracy kept dabbing it on until she felt weighted, heavy with pulses. She dipped at the knees when it rocked over her and she saw her sister’s teeth, luminous flashes. Tracy patted the mud against Margaret’s thighs and over her buttocks, then he stood up. He fitted himself behind her, tugged her hand until she took him. His brief, omniscient shuddering was sudden and afterward he leaned into her. He rested his forehead against the shallow plane between her shoulder blades; she felt his eyelashes swipe her vertebrae.
Margaret pushed herself away from Tracy. The clay coated her legs and belly, glimmered with a metallic swirl and she thought of the starlet in Goldfinger. Wasn’t that girl painted head to foot until she suffocated? Hollywood made it look glamorous. She grabbed the sponge from the bucket and she began washing the whorls of mud from her belly and thighs; her muscles rippled, her breasts bounced in tight shivers under her vigorous scrubbing. Her sun poisoning looked raw, pink as cigarette burns above her knees. She had to jerk the handle on the pump to wash herself better, and she straddled the stream, the clay rinsed white in the flow. Her cunt was stinging from the mud’s abrasion or it was the icy water, knifing her until a new wave ascended, but she turned away from it. She threw the sponge down and picked up her clothes. “You go too far sometimes, Tracy,” she told him.
“They charge a lot of money for this mud treatment in Vichy and those other spas,” he said. He was telling Tina they might have a new angle if the Christmas trees were blighted. Margaret couldn’t bring herself to walk away into the darkness and she waited for him as he washed himself. When he was finished, he grabbed her elbow and led her away from the muddy circle. Margaret could hear the pump screeching as her sister worked the handle, the water slicing a bevel in the mud.
III
The next day, Margaret played with the day camp children. She braided the girls’ hair and tied yarn at the ends. The children were pleased to have someone new. They showed Margaret small bottles of insects, spiders and dragonflies asphyxiated by wads of cotton soaked in alcohol. She tried to identify different leaves and scabs of bark displayed in a windowcase.
After lunch they took the nylon parachute out to the field and invented new games. They stretched the parachute like a satin sheet for one of those round honeymoon mattresses. They ran into the middle and the weightless fabric billowed with air, then they ran backward, pulling it taut until everyone’s arms were tired of tugging it between them. She jerked the chute, looping her fingers through its big grommets, which sliced into the tender insides of her knuckles. She avoided Tracy most of the day, letting him brood about his actions the night before. Then Tracy confessed to her.
“I was losing control. I thought you could help me. You know, I used you as a safety net,” Tracy said.
“I don’t buy that,” she said. Then, if she thought of Cam, a cold feather brushed down her spine. Cam, too, was suddenly unreliable. Cam had turned her over, touched his lips to hers. His kiss didn’t give to her or take from her. Anything. She didn’t know its meaning. He had run off and left them.
Margaret sat on the sagging planks of the front porch as Tina showed her how to fold her first peace crane. Margaret tried to pinch and tuck the tiny squares of paper according to her sister’s instructions, but her attempts always failed. Margaret’s birds never looked like birds. They looked like crinkled napkins. Tina told her it takes a lot of practice. Margaret tried to imagine practicing such a thing for a long enough time. The thought discouraged her. Tina’s fingers were sore from Fraser fir seedlings and still she used them to crease hundreds of these glossy sheets of paper. Couldn’t Tina be doing something more worthwhile? There were premature infants at the hospitals who needed cuddling; they needed stimulation twenty-four hours a day just to keep them breathing and not enough nurses to do it. Those babies were left squalling until a volunteer came in. Couldn’t Tina do that? Tina told Margaret she shouldn’t be so upset just because she watched Tracy fuck her. “Sex is a visual high,” Tina said.
Margaret looked at Tina working deftly, intently, with the papers. She could probably roll a good cigarette, Margaret was thinking. She tried to imagine other uses for Tina’s gift. Sometimes, the apparent insanity in her family alarmed Margaret. She wasn’t related by blood to her sisters or to Cam, but perhaps this malaise was airborne. Perhaps it permeated the environment of her childhood and was absorbed through audile or visual receivers. Despite the fact that not even a drop of her blood matched anyone’s, they all might have shared, enriched one another’s dementia.
Tracy spent the afternoon tinkering with a go-cart motor for the children. It wasn’t coming along. “It’s tight as a ten-year-old,” Tracy complained. What kind of standard was that! Margaret saw a blue cloud of smoke; then she heard a shrill complaint of metal ringing in the air. The smoke billowed upward, the children covered their mouths with the hems of their T-shirts. When the motor died some of the children moved off in clusters to sit in front of the rabbit hutch, and others walked down the rows of Christmas trees, tugging green nuggets off the tops.
In the morning, Tina was cutting leather shoelaces from a length of calfskin. They were sitting on the front porch drinking cups of tea. Tina drew an Exacto knife from one end of the hide to the other, making tiny lines in the floorboards underneath. Cam drove up the driveway; a wake of rosy dirt lifted behind the Duster. Margaret jumped down from the porch and ran up to Cam’s window. Laurence was sitting in the backseat with a new toy, a plastic wheel of recorded barnyard noises. “The coyote says—yawa, yawa, yawa.”
“It’s been driving me crazy,” Cam said. He reached out of the car and grabbed Margaret’s wrist. He kissed her fingertips in apology or hunger, she couldn’t tell which.
She was at a loss and she turned to her nephew. “Laurence,” she said. “Laurence, you’re here!”
The boy pulled the cord on the toy and the recording chirped his reply. His forefinger was red where it was hooked through the plastic ring.
“You didn’t drive straight through, did you?”
“No, we’re fresh. Are you ready to go?”
“In a blink, I can’t wait to get out of here. It’s like Charles Addams meets Arlo Guthrie around here.”
“What?” He wasn’t listening. He looked out the windshield at Tracy walking up from the shed. Tracy waved and Cam’s chin wobbled upward a degree and down again. It was halfhearted, Margaret was thinking.
Margaret said, “This time, let me drive. I haven’t driven yet, I could use the change.”
“Go get lover boy, and we’re gonesville.”
&nbs
p; “What did you say?” she asked him. She wanted to see if he would say that word for her.
“Get Tracy. Hurry up. These tires are cooling down.”
Margaret was driving when Tina said good-bye to them. Tina slapped the Duster with a new shoelace, whipping the passenger door with the bright peel of leather. “Good-bye, my dears. Give Lewis the cranes!”
“I’m not hand-delivering any of those cranes,” Cam told Margaret.
“Why not?”
“What kind of an impression would it make?”
“It’s not so bad, this peace stuff. It’s not going to kill anybody to have these paper cranes,” Margaret said.
“Looks like I arrived just in time. Your brain is a little soaked already.” Cam looped the necklace of paper cranes over the rearview mirror the way someone might hook a pair of foam dice. “I can’t be confused with this. These scraps!”
Margaret took her turn driving; she chewed her coffee beans and they intensified her reflexes. Her hands started to sweat a little and she drove with Cam’s handkerchief on the steering wheel, switching it back and forth from her left hand to her right. She drove until they were out of Bowling Green and back on Interstate 80. Then it was Tracy driving. Margaret asked Cam about Darcy. It was just like they figured, Darcy didn’t know what was happening. Cam explained how he jimmied the sliding glass door, went into Laurence’s room, and took a drawer from his little bureau with all his clothes in it. He took the drawer outside first, then he came back and took Laurence.
“You took the whole drawer?” Tracy asked. “Now, we can add B & E, Petty Larceny, and Child Abduction to our original and pristine Grand Theft Auto—”
“Tracy’s right, this is going to look bad in court,” Margaret told Cam.
“It’s too late now,” Cam said. “I’m tired of all of it.”
Cam slept in the backseat. Laurence was driving a Matchbox car over Cam, steering it up his thigh and over the plane of his hip, continuing up his arm until he reached his father’s chin, then he went backward. Laurence was purring loudly to show the car’s acceleration over rough terrain where Cam’s knee was bent. Margaret kept shushing him. Next, he was standing up behind the seat, looping his arms around Margaret’s neck, fingering her hair. “Whisper, so you won’t wake your father,” she told him.
Tracy said, “Nothing’s going to bother Cam. If that awful barnyard toy didn’t wake him up, nothing will. He’s seeking refuge in Duster dreams.”
“You should have your seat belt on,” Margaret told the boy.
“But my dad is lying on it.”
“Oh, well, don’t wake him up yet.”
“Where are we going?” Laurence asked her.
“Going steady,” she said, and she pulled him over the front seat and into her lap to tickle him. The boy started to annoy Tracy, and Margaret helped him into the backseat, where, soon, he fell asleep.
Tracy was showing that he was tired or nervous, letting the car sweep left or right, changing lanes too often. They approached one urban area, then another. Margaret tried to talk to him, but he snapped at her. Margaret picked up a big plastic milk jug filled with tap water. The container was heavy and she steadied it in her palm as she tipped it to her lips. When she started to drink, Tracy shoved the bottle, collapsing it against her face. The mouth of the jug cut her lip. The water sloshed down her breast and still Tracy crushed it against her. She shoved his arm away and the bottle rolled off her lap, wetting the seat.
Then Cam was awake while Laurence continued to sleep. Margaret sucked her bottom lip; the cut wasn’t serious, a loose shaving of skin she could smooth with her tongue. She started screaming. She tried to describe the incident to Cam, but he was arguing with Tracy about driving the Duster. Cam said he wanted to get behind the wheel, but Tracy didn’t answer.
“I mean it, I want to drive,” Cam said. “If we stop, you can drive,” Tracy said. “I’m not stopping.”
“Whose car is it?” Cam said.
“It’s Darcy’s car,” Tracy said.
Margaret was laughing. The laughter didn’t start in her lungs, it rolled over her in icy waves. She was helpless. Cam tried to get her to stop, but Margaret kept going.
Then Margaret thought that maybe Laurence missed his mother and her name might stir him up. They shouldn’t mention Darcy’s name. She missed her own daughter.
When they stopped for gasoline, Cam took the keys and waited for Tracy to shift out of his seat. Margaret went to the pay phone to call Celeste. She was forced to call collect, she had to say “from Margaret” when the operator asked who was placing the call. The phone rang several times, but there wasn’t any answer. “Let it ring,” she told the operator. The operator was quiet as the ringing continued a while longer. Margaret watched the cars going past on the freeway, then she looked down at the ground. An ant was dragging a butterfly. She watched the small red ant pull the giant Monarch to a mound of fine dirt, like sifted flower, the entrance of an anthill. The ant backed down the hole and started to tug the larger insect in after him. The wings, of course, were too big to fit. A little orange dust fell from the wings each time the ant jerked it. Was it only a smear of pollen, or was it the substance of the wing itself? “There’s no answer, miss,” the operator told her, and Margaret agreed that there was no one home at that number. She hung up the telephone. She looked down at the anthill once more to see that the butterfly, the ant, were gone.
It’s so green,” Margaret said, looking at the sky.
“It’s unnatural,” Cam said.
Tracy told them, “No, it’s natural, it’s too natural if you ask me.”
The horizon was dark, roiling with odd hues. Once and again, at shorter intervals, serrated lightning ripped a bright fissure through the storm canvas, and the six-lane highway was illuminated with a sheet of blinding flash powder.
“We can’t just drive right into this thing.”
“It’s a tornado,” Margaret said, “I’ve heard that the sky gets really green when there’s a tornado. I knew something like this would happen—”
“Sssh. Don’t wake the kid, there’s no reason,” Tracy said from the backseat with Laurence. Then he was leaning over the front seat, his face level with Margaret’s so he could study the storm. He was interested in seeing how Cam would navigate.
The windshield started to tick with hail. Then the hail came down harder, like pea gravel. The wipers couldn’t brush it off fast enough. Cam was driving in the far left lane when suddenly he couldn’t see out the windshield. The windows were sudsed with the force of the rain, it was as if someone had thrown a bed sheet over the car. The windows went white. It rained milk. Cam pumped his brakes and they heard the traffic, its sudden pulse, screeching in behind them. All the cars were halted in an odd arrangement on the freeway, like monopoly pieces, as the storm rocked over them.
“It’s a cyclone,” Margaret said.
“Just be quiet,” Cam said.
The wind was tugging the Duster until it wobbled on its shocks. Water was leaking in over the rocker panels. Then the rain slowed. The cab was steamed up and Cam rubbed a handkerchief over the windshield. They saw some heavy branches on the road; a section of guy wire was left in loose coils in a middle lane. A license plate flipped across the asphalt like a square wheel rolling away on its corners.
“It really was something,” Cam said, “a big motherfucker.”
Margaret saw the green horizon on the other side of her now, as the storm moved off.
“They go from the Southwest to the Northeast,” Tracy said.
“How do they know what they’re doing?” Margaret said. Then she remembered the science column in the newspaper: “Why do cyclones swirl in one direction across the U.S. and in another direction south of the equator?” The cars were starting to roll again. Margaret looked over at a station wagon. A woman was holding a baby up to the window; the baby’s face was contorted, red. It was wailing.
It was the rush hour when they came into the city. The traff
ic was stopped and it gave them time to look at the skyline, follow the Sears Tower until its point dissolved. Tracy was leafing through an old Holiday Inn directory. Cam said that a Holiday Inn was too expensive.
“I don’t want to go to one of those really cheap motels with paper bath mats. If we have Laurence, it has to be decent,” Margaret told Cam.
“I’ll have to use your card,” Cam told her.
Tracy said, “Does it matter? We’re coming in here so you can go soul-to-soul with the Arrow Collar, not so we can take a sauna.”
“A pool would be nice for Laurence,” Margaret said.
“You want a pool? There’s the whole lake.”
“I don’t see any lake,” she said.
“It’s over that way,” Tracy said.
Margaret looked over the hoods of the cars, trying to find any sign of Lake Michigan. Then she saw a billboard with a familiar face. It was Merv Griffin’s face. “Look at that!” she said.
“Merv Griffin?” Cam asked.
“He’s coming to that dinner theater,” she said. She was smiling.
“We’re not going to hear Merv at any dinner theater,” Cam said.
Tracy said, “God, Merv. I haven’t seen too much of him lately.”
Margaret told him, “He’s a big producer. He makes shows for syndication. They say he has a business sense.”
“He can make millions, but he’s still a three-dollar bill,” Tracy said.
“He’s of that persuasion, that’s sure,” Cam said.
“What do you mean?” Margaret asked.
“He’s like the stamp that has the airplane flying upside down,” Cam said.
Margaret was laughing. “You mean he’s gay? I think he’s probably just like Tracy. You can’t spend years with Arthur Treacher and Viva, people like that, and maintain any kind of innocence.”
“That’s what we’re saying,” Cam said.
“I’m not arguing,” she said. “I knew his marriage was bad when he said his wife wore vanilla extract behind her ears instead of Chanel.”