by Brock Clarke
But anyway, Champ was a great guy. At first, I was worried, because he looked classy, classier than we were (it was the penny loafers that made me think this), and when I first pulled up to the house, I was seeing it as he was seeing it: with its dirty aluminum siding and its unmowed front lawn (Jugular had left his mark) and our faded green plastic porch furniture. I thought Champ would say something snide about the house or make a sour face and I’d have to punch him, unexpectedly, in the back of the neck, the way Dad had taught me to with people who were bigger than me. But Champ didn’t; he said, “What a nice home,” like he meant it. So I brought him inside. Luckily, by now, my mother had cleaned up Jugular’s mess; there were even new slipcovers on the couch, and my mother had cleaned herself up, too, somewhat, but she still looked tired, beaten down, and older than she was. I felt ashamed, for her, for me, and wished I were with the dog, somewhere in the backyard where no one could get to me; for the first time, I understood completely the saying “Lucky dog.” My mother must have felt ashamed, too, because she said, “I’m sorry I’m such a mess. My dog just died.”
“That’s terrible,” Champ said. He had a way of saying nice things like he meant them, and when he said, “That’s terrible,” about the dog dying, you knew he meant it, whereas if my father had said, “That’s terrible,” you knew he wouldn’t have meant it at all. Although he probably wouldn’t have even said, “That’s terrible”; he probably would have said, “That’s what dogs do,” or, “Get over it.” But not Champ; he said, “That’s terrible,” and then, “I’m so sorry,” and then, “My name is Champ.”
Oh, you should have seen my mother’s face when Champ told her his name! You could see time divide in two for her: in the past, there was a man named Dick, and in the present, there was a man named Champ. In the past, there was a man who wouldn’t take her anywhere (except to the emergency room that one time when she fell off the roof while replacing the shingles Dad refused to replace himself, because he had put them up in the first place and had done his part already), and in the present, there was a man who would take her dancing at the club (Champ really did belong to one) every Saturday. In the past, there was a man who, when Mom and Dad were in public, walked a step ahead or behind her, because she was either walking too damn fast or too fucking slow; in the present, she had a man who would let her put her arm through his, who would stroll with her, who wasn’t at all ashamed to be with her in public, who would make her happy, who would finally treat her right.
Treat her right, that is, until he died. It was my fault, mostly my fault; I’ll admit it this time. Because—and unlike the Korean lilac and Jugular—old Champ didn’t even make it two weeks; he didn’t even make it through the night. But he did make it through dinner, and I blame part of it on that: the dinner. Because it was heavy, beef something or other, with a sauce that tasted like mushrooms frozen and then melted in whipped cream—and even though Champ said it was delicious, said he’d never had a better beef something or other in his life, in truth it was heavy: you could sort of feel your heart drop anchor after eating it. Yes, it was my mother’s beef something or other that did old Champ in, and not the roughhousing.
Because that’s what I wanted to do after dinner: roughhouse. I’d always wanted to roughhouse on the floor with a father, or father figure, but my real dad had never wanted to do it, because he said it would hurt his knees to get down on the floor and it was degrading and undignified. Plus, the one time he had started to do it, when I was five, he had spilled his beer all over the somewhat new Berber carpet and then he let loose with a string of “motherfucker” this and “cocksucker” that. All this was directed downward, to the floor, where I was, next to the beer stain, and it wasn’t clear to me whether my father was swearing at me or the stain until he said, “Jesus, Bryan, go get a motherfucking paper towel and clean that cocksucking mess up, will you?” and then I knew. That was the end of roughhousing on the floor for me and Dad. Or Dick.
But here was Champ. It was after dinner, and he was sitting next to my mother, on the couch. He was my mother’s Champ, but he was also mine, was he not? Had I not found him? Did I not have a legitimate claim to him, to his attention? Did I not have a right to ask him, after dinner, after my mom’s murderous, heart-choking dinner, “Champ, will you roughhouse with me?”
“Roughhouse?” Champ asked.
“On the floor?” I asked.
Champ looked confused at first, but then I got down on the floor in a wrestling position (freestyle, which they’d taught us in gym class) and he understood and said, in his great, sincere way, “I’d be honored.”
My mother was saying, “Oh, Champ, you shouldn’t do that. You don’t have to do that,” but Champ did it anyway: he took off his penny loafers, handed my mother his cardigan, and got down on the floor. And we roughhoused.
And then he died, too, right there on the Berber carpet (it was the same carpet my father had spilled beer on eleven years earlier) in my scissors lock, which wasn’t even that tight. It wasn’t even that tight. After all, Champ was old, and his heart and arteries were full of that heavy beef something or other Mom had made, and I’m pretty sure the scissors lock wouldn’t have killed him if he hadn’t just eaten what he’d eaten. But I didn’t want to say this, didn’t want to blame my mother for Champ’s death, which was clearly what my father would have done. I didn’t want to sound like him, didn’t want to use his voice. No, I wanted to use Champ’s voice and then call it my own. But what would Champ have said to my mother about his own death? It was hard to tell, especially since I’d only known the guy for about five hours. I didn’t want to say something Champ wouldn’t have said, didn’t want to use the wrong voice and then be stuck with it as my own. So I sat there awhile, mulling it over, trying to think of what to say to my mother. Luckily, she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to hear anything. After it was clear that Champ had died, my mother had called 911; then she returned to the couch, where she sat next to me, legs crossed, with a calm look on her face as she absently stroked Champ’s cardigan, until I finally thought of just the right thing to say.
“Champ was a great guy,” I said.
“Yes, he was,” she said. “And then you killed him.”
“Hey, hold on,” I said. “What about that beef something or other you made him eat?”
“Shut up, Bryan,” she said. This stunned me a little, since I’d never heard my mother use that phrase, never heard her say anything harsher than a gentle “Hush.” I looked at her, waiting for her to apologize, but she didn’t. “What are you fucking looking at?” she said.
“Wow,” I said. “You sound just like Dad.”
“Good,” she said, and then she said a few more things, too, but I wasn’t really listening to them. Because I was thinking how Mom had stopped sounding like herself and started sounding like Dad, too. What did this mean? Did this mean that she wasn’t using her real voice anymore, or that this was her real voice all along and was just waiting for her to find it? Did this mean that Mrs. Tooley was wrong? Did this mean that there was no such thing as a real voice? Or did this mean that your real voice was the mean voice you wished you didn’t have, and not the good voice you wished you did? Did this mean that there was no cure for meanness? Did this mean that the only problem with meanness was that it made you look for an impossible and unnecessary cure for it in the first place? Was there anything really wrong with taking some pleasure in a little meanness now and then? After all, my mother really seemed to be enjoying herself, now that she had finally stopped trying to be good: she was all smiles as she pointed out how I had killed Jugular and the Korean lilac, asking how could I plausibly pretend I hadn’t, and how I was too stupid to live, or maybe I was too stupid to love; I couldn’t tell because of how fast she was talking, maybe making up for all the time she’d lost not being mean. But she seemed happy, for the first time ever, that’s the point, and who was I to tell her she shouldn’t be happy, just because the happiness was born out of a little meanness? Who was
Mrs. Tooley? Who was anyone?
There was a knock on the door; I assumed it was the police or the paramedics, and so I got up to answer it. But when I unlocked and opened the door, I discovered it wasn’t the police or the paramedics: it was my father, his suitcase in hand. He’d obviously just shaven, and his big blue jaw glowed like neon in the porch light.
“Dad!” I said. “Are you coming back to us?”
“Julie kicked me out,” he said, and then held up his suitcase as evidence. “She said I was too mean to her. She said she didn’t like the way I talked to her.”
“She didn’t like your real voice,” I said.
“Who the Christ knows,” he said. “But yeah, I guess I’m coming back.”
“But why did you knock on the door?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just let yourself in with your key?”
My father leaned over, raised his hand, extended his right index finger. I recognized the gesture, knew that my father was going to tap my forehead, hard, and tell me to “think.” I closed my eyes, waiting to be tapped and told. But before my father did so, he must have glanced over my shoulder, must have seen Champ’s corpse on the Berber carpet.
“What the . . . ?” he started.
But my mother interrupted. “Bryan, who the hell is that?”
I opened my eyes and called out, “I have a surprise for you,” then grabbed my father by his tapping hand and pulled him into the house, into the living room, where my mother sat on the couch, calmly stroking Champ’s sweater as if it were a cat. When she saw my father, my mother smiled; it was a huge, genuine, grateful smile, a smile she’d probably been waiting to smile her entire life.
“Hello, Dick,” she said to my father, who didn’t say anything back. There was a look on his face I’d never seen before: it might have been love, and he might not have expected it—in the plays Mrs. Tooley made us read, love always found people when they least expected it, and whether they wanted it to or not—because he started backing up, toward the front door. But my mother was too fast for him: she sat up, dropped Champ’s cardigan, and grabbed Dad’s hand, pulled him back on the couch next to her, and sat there, stroking his hand the way she’d stroked Champ’s sweater moments earlier. They were both looking at me, as though they were expecting something. Who knew what they were seeing? But as for me, I was seeing a family; finally, finally, I was seeing people who belonged together. I wish Mrs. Tooley had been there to see it: something good could come out of meanness! Who would have thought it possible? And maybe my mother was thinking the same thing, because she said, “Thank you, Bryan. This is the best gift you’ve ever given me.”
“What kind of idiot thing is that to say?” my father wanted to know, but I knew. I knew exactly what my mother was talking about.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“Why don’t you come sit on the couch next to your father,” she said.
“I think I will,” I said, and then sat down next to my father, on the couch where Jugular and Champ had once sat, the place where my mother’s gifts eventually came to rest.
Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife
On Friday, my wife, Catrine, kicked me out of the house, and on the following Thursday, she called me at my room in the Budget Inn and said, “I want you to come with me to the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts.”
I knew this about Lizzie Borden: that long ago she’d made a famous bloody, murderous mess of her parents with an axe and gotten away with it—but before I could ask why Catrine wanted to go to the site of such an awful, violent crime, with me, her estranged husband, she said, “You’re not allowed to ask me why I want to go there with you,” and so instead I asked, “Will we stay the night?”
“Plus, take the official two-hour tour,” she said. Which is how we end up, two days later, sitting in the parlor at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast and waiting for the official two-hour tour to begin. There are five other people also staying the night, etc.: a married couple from Ohio the color and consistency of cookie dough; a chain-smoking white-haired woman from Long Island, who has stepped outside to smoke twice in ten minutes and who has already purchased and donned the official Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast pocket T-shirt with a drawing of the bloodstained axe on the pocket; and two backward-baseball-hat-wearing fraternity boys down from UMass, whose fraternity brothers have told them—as a prank, I’m guessing, as everyone in the room must be guessing, except for the two fraternity boys themselves—that this is the Lezzie Borden House—Lezzie Borden being, it turns out, a lesbian adult film star whose childhood home, I suppose, the frat boys think they’re in. There is some confusion over this, because the chain-smoker has just advanced the theory that the real Lizzie Borden was also a lesbian, and would have been much happier had she lived in another time, in another place, with another stepmother and father who she wouldn’t have had to axe-murder if she’d been allowed to embrace her true sexual self. This business about axe-murdering has thrown the frat boys considerably, and one of them—the thin Laurel to the fatter one’s Hardy—keeps rotating his baseball hat back to front to back in disbelief.
“Lezzie Borden killed her mom and dad?” he asks.
“Lizzie Borden,” says the woman from Long Island, and from the way she says this, through gritted teeth—and from the rainbow cigarette lighter she’s fiddling with—I’m guessing she herself is a lesbian. But the boys take no notice of her, and it’s easy to imagine them in their introductory English classes, using “me” instead of “I,” or “who” instead of “whom,” and being corrected by their professors and not paying attention to them, either.
“Lezzie Borden killed her mom and dad with an axe?” the fat one says. “Because she was a lezzie?”
“In real life?” the thin one asks. “Or are we talking about . . . ?” and then begins to describe the plot of some movie, at the beginning of which Lezzie Borden has been imprisoned for some unexplained capital crime and who, with her voluptuous cellmates and prison guards and even a visiting order of reform-minded nuns, is sentenced to spend ninety minutes engaged in some, as the boys put it, in unison, “hot, hot, hot girl-on-girl action.” After they’ve said this, the boys give each other high fives, except that they give the high fives backward, with the backs of their hands instead of their palms, possibly to be consistent with their hats. The chain-smoker stands up and seems on the verge of backhanding the boys and their backward baseball hats across the room, and the boys—who I’m sure have no idea why the chain-smoker hates them but, like your basic mammals, innately recognize antagonism and how to react to it—puff out their chests like fighting cocks, and into the middle of this potential brawl walks the tour guide, a bird-faced middle-aged woman with her plaid skirt pulled up to midsternum, who takes what is obviously her place, in the very center of the room, between the boys and the chain-smoker, and asks if we’ve been getting to know each other. The chain-smoker flicks her lighter and glares at the boys, and now the boys are regarding her warily, as if she might possibly try and set them on fire and they’re not sure if their too-long shorts, their flip-flops, their fraternity T-shirts, and their hats are fully fire-retardant, and the Ohio couple hasn’t said a word yet except to say that they’re from Ohio, and this might be the only thing they’re capable of saying, the only thing worth knowing about them, and just then I notice that Catrine is no longer at my side, is no longer even in the parlor, and the silence in the room is huge and embarrassing, and it seems like someone has to say something. So I say: “We were just discussing Lizzie’s sexual orientation.”
The tour guide smooths out her skirt at this and says, “Concerning Lizzie’s sexual orientation, there is no proof of it, whatever it was, nor that it, whatever it was, had anything to do with horrific axe murders, one of which took place in this very parlor and which Lizzie may or may not have perpetrated. We do know, however, that she spent the last ten years of her life with the New York showgirl Molly Sheehan . . .” As she goes on and describes the s
hows in which Ms. Sheehan appeared and the common assumptions about showgirls in that day and age, the frat boys drift away from the tour guide and over to the pictures of Lizzie on the wall. Catrine and I looked at the pictures when we first walked into the parlor, fifteen minutes earlier, and so I know what the boys are seeing: a severe and not-very-attractive woman in a high lacy Victorian collar, to whom the words “hot, hot, hot girl-on-girl action” could not possibly apply—not now, not a hundred-odd years earlier, when the pictures were actually taken. When the boys turn around, you can see them focus on the house itself for the first time. The house has nothing red or plush or velvet, nothing that screams sex, lesbian or otherwise; I’m seeing it as the boys are seeing it, and it looks not like the home of a porn star but the home their grandmothers might have been raised in, and the people in the same room with them look not like fellow adult film devotees but only garden-variety adults. And the boys are also no doubt remembering the many other times they’ve been duped by their fraternity brothers—who, come to think of it, do not share their passion for Lezzie Borden or lesbian porn—and I would feel sorry for the boys if I weren’t so busy feeling sorry for myself. The pathetic, helpless expressions on their faces ask, Where are we? and How did we get here? and Why? and Why? and I want to walk over and give them a backward high five and tell them I know exactly how they feel, that I have exactly the same questions and a big need to have them answered and a big fear that they won’t be.
A MONTH BEFORE the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, Catrine suddenly couldn’t breathe the way her history of breathing suggested she ought to. Climbing the stairs was like ascending Everest; taking the garbage to the curb was like an aging and out-of-shape Atlas struggling to hoist this boulder we live on. Small acts of exertion—toothbrushing, shoelace-tying, dog-walking—made her face turn blue, the way a face as beautiful as my wife’s should not. Catrine is not an athlete—she swings a tennis racket the way she flails away at bees, and, as a point of comparison, she is terrified of bees, completely, and so the flailing is considerable and spastic—but she isn’t a bit out of shape, either, and often at night I longingly dream of her lovely, vaguely muscled legs as if they were distant, unattainable things, even though those legs are right there in the same bed, sleeping next to me, and if it’s one of the thirty-seven warm, dry days we have per year in Rochester, where Catrine and I live; then you know she’ll be out on her bike, working up a sheen of sweat on her upper lip, using the proper hand signals for the proper turns, drenched in sunscreen and never without her helmet. My wife takes care of herself is the point, and when she woke up one morning gasping like a scuba diver without her tank, we knew something was up. So Catrine took the day off from Mercy High—where for a decade now she’s taught French and English to those ninth- and tenth-grade girls in their knee socks and plaid kilts—and went to the doctor. I work for Kodak, as fewer and fewer of us do these days, and I was in the office, trying to concentrate on how Fuji does it and how we might do it better, when Catrine called.