Enter Diane. A regal five-foot-two in her old blue bathrobe. As tradition dictates, she glared at me, her firstborn. Whatever the youngest child is guilty of should have been stopped by the elder one.
“What is going on in here?”
“Use your nice voice,” said Max. “Not that one.”
“Are you drying your hair with water on the floor?” asked Diane. “Honey! You’ll be electrocuted.”
“He doesn’t dry his hair, Diane,” I said. “His towel is wadded up somewhere in his room, so he blow-dries his body.”
This gave her pause.
“He is weird,” I explained.
Max shot me a death glare, then covered his genitals with his hands and said quietly, “Mom, this may not be the right time to tell you this.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t. You’ll get mad. It will be too much on your plate.”
“Max, tell me why the bathroom is flooding!”
“It’s not that,” he said as the puddle grew around our feet. “It’s something else.” He took a deep breath. “Aris dropped the F-bomb.”
“Goddammit!” she screamed. “Get off that wet floor and turn the water off, now!”
“I knew you’d get mad,” Max whimpered. Then he tilted his head back and wailed. “It came off in my hand!”
I imagined my end of the banner sagging down at the eleven o’clock service as the acolytes at St. Michael’s carried on without me, again. When Diane told Max to bring her a screwdriver and he showed up with a wrench, I realized that we’d have to call Penn.
OMG! I forgot to introduce Penn! Reader, meet Penn MacGuffin: family friend (currently without benefits), handyman, nanny. He says he prefers the term “PMI” (positive male influence) to “nanny.” Diane says that sounds more affordable. Penn is a possible catch for ole Diane. He’s old too—thirty or forty or something—and bald under his baseball cap, but he has muscles, gray eyes, and seriously cute ears. He says that’s because his grandmother is a full-blooded Cherokee, and all Cherokees have cute ears. He told us that “kanuga” means “briars” in Cherokee, and Chutiksee, the name of our county, comes from the word “dudun’leksun’yi,” which means “where its legs were broken off.”
Obviously, it’s hard to find a date in Where Its Legs Were Broken Off. You have to look long, hard, and far. Since I’ve already picked my husband out, I don’t have to bother with dating, but Diane hops on and off Match.com. When she’s off the site, she stops getting pedicures and tells me about her childhood dream of becoming a nun.
“We used to drive by a convent on Lookout Mountain, on the way to see my grandparents in Kentucky,” she tells me. “I’d look up through the trees at those steep slate roofs and feel like that was my home.” She describes her imaginary self, gliding over the polished stone walkways of porticos, through shadowy passages lit by flickering gas lanterns, and out into sunny, well-tended gardens. She gets to read for most of the day, and she eats loaves of freshly baked French bread with local goat cheese and sips mugs of steaming café au lait. She is married to God.
Grandma and Papa say there has never been a convent on Lookout Mountain.
“Let’s call Penn,” I said when the wrench fell apart in Diane’s hand.
“I’ve got this,” she said. She tried a pair of pliers. By this time, her sleeves were soaked. Water swished around her ankles.
“We should turn the main line off,” said Max, but he whispered it, not wanting to make her mad.
“She doesn’t remember how,” I whispered back.
Diane isn’t stupid. She really isn’t. It’s just that when a woman has a baby, something happens to her brain. When she had me, after sixteen hours of unmedicated labor, a gap opened up between her front teeth, her feet grew from a size eight to an eight and a half, and she shot a few brain circuits. She said you have to make certain concessions to women after childbirth, the way you do to veterans of wars. When she explained all this to me, I doubled the effect to include the damage of Max, and there you have it.
“Call Papa,” said Diane with forced calm. “Tell him that everything is fine”—she paused to wring out her sleeves—“but we’d like him to stop by for a few minutes.”
“They’ve gone to see Elvis,” I reminded her. “But don’t freak,” I said, because Diane was digging frantically in her pockets for a piece of nicotine gum and starting to get that look on her face. “I’ll call Penn.”
Diane met Penn at an AA meeting. I’ve never seen either one of them drunk; in fact, I’ve never seen anyone drink alcohol except at communion, but if Diane drank booze the way she chews nicotine gum, she once had a problem. Her nicotine-gum addiction affects every member of the family, even the dogs. It gets in their hair. Sometimes they go through the trash and rechew the pieces that still have a little squirt of nicotine in them, and then they get all weird. I’m like, Diane, the dogs are high again.
Time and time again, she has promised to quit. Sometimes she tries. She’ll go for maybe two days without her drug, crying and walking around like a zombie. During this special time, Max and I are not allowed to fight or ask for money or express ourselves, lest we send her back to the fires of addiction. Then, suddenly, she’s at it again. She’s driving down the road grinning and smacking the gum hell-for-leather, making a nasty wad of the chewed pieces on the dashboard and risking our lives to tear back into the childproof package for the next piece.
Now, as she bit into the gum, the wrinkle on her forehead smoothed out, and she almost smiled.
“We don’t need to call Penn,” she said. “We aren’t helpless females.”
“I’m not female,” said Max, but we ignored him; the poor kid was four before Diane and I realized that we had taught him how to pee like a girl.
Diane turned the other handle on the sink, and it came off in her hand. “We’ll call a plumber.”
“Plumbers go fishing on Sundays,” I said.
“Hush,” she said. “This is serious. Where’s my phone?”
I started to suggest calling one of Diane’s students but thought better of it. Diane is a popular teacher. Last semester, her favorite students came over on Sunday afternoons to eat chocolate chip pancakes, talk about novels, and jump on the trampoline. One girl even lost her virginity in Diane’s bed when no one was looking. That’s when the dean told Diane to cool it. “If you were a permanent faculty member, this behavior would result in severe consequences,” he wrote in a letter with CONFIDENTIAL stamped across the envelope in red ink. Dr. Dhang has told Diane not to discuss adult matters with us, but Max and I are such good listeners that it’s always a temptation.
“That sucks,” said Max when Diane had read the letter aloud. He scrunched up his face and balled his fist. “I’ll beat that damn’s face in!”
“ ‘Damn’ is an adjective, not a noun,” I said, but he was in boxing mode and didn’t hear. He knocked over a couple of chairs, then stopped, a look of horror spreading over his face.
“Mom! Are you going to get fired?” he asked.
Diane said that adjuncts never get fired. “We’re not worth the paperwork,” she said. All the same, we stopped having students over on Sundays.
Now Diane’s cellphone floated past my ankles. Max let out a whoop and yelled, “I found it!”
I went in my room and called the plumber.
“He ain’t here,” said his wife.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“Well,” she said. “It’s Sunday.”
She let this sink in.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said; then neither one of us spoke for a while. I listened to her light a cigarette and exhale deeply.
“I wanted him to go to church,” she continued, “but he done gone and went fishing on me.”
“Do you think he’ll be back in a couple of hours?”
“There ain’t no telling,” she said firmly.
In the hallway, Diane was freaking out. “Those aren’t rags, Max. Those are towels! Those are my gues
t towels.”
“We don’t have guests,” said Max.
Penn is the closest thing we have to a guest, and he doesn’t use towels. When I explained to Diane that the plumber had gone fishing, she broke down and told me to call Papa on his cellphone.
“Don’t talk to Grandma,” she warned me. “Ask him how to turn off the main line. He told me once, but I forgot.” She smacked her gum thoughtfully. “Tell him we have a small leak.”
“All righty, then,” I said in the cheerful voice I use when everything has gone to hell. I shut the door to my room and moved my bear, Zimmerman, from my bed to a high shelf. I put the mad bomber hat and my laptop up there too. Then I texted Penn:
DISASTER! WE ARE IN A FLOOD. SOS.
I waited. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three … No response. Penn doesn’t keep close tabs on his phone. Either he has misplaced it or some chick is trying to get a scope on him. Diane says he doesn’t like control.
Papa, on the other hand, loves control. He answered his phone immediately, as he always does, but it took me a while to get any information from him because he had to verify that something so ridiculous could happen to people who are related to him.
“The faucet came off? It just came off? In Max’s hand? How did that happen? What was he doing?”
“Nothing.”
“He had to be doing something.”
You could hear Grandma in the background demanding to know what was going on.
“Y’all must have been clowning around in there,” he said. “Water faucets don’t just come off in your hand.”
“It wasn’t really the faucet. It was the handle-thingy.”
“The what?”
“I don’t know. I was going outside.”
“Outside? What were you doing outside?”
“Nothing.”
“You had to be doing something.”
Eventually, Papa gave up. To regain his territory, he began to explain that in all of his eighty years on this earth, he had never had a sink handle just come off in his hand. In fact, he had never heard of such a thing. Was I sure this is what happened? You have to let these inquiries run their course with Papa. Over his shoulder, Grandma was going, “Nah nah nah nah.”
“Was it the hot or cold water?” he asked.
“Cold.”
“Well, that’s a blessing. If it were hot water, you’d have a real problem on your hands.” He sighed. He told Grandma to be quiet for a minute; he was trying to think. Finally, he began his careful instructions. “Tell your mother to open the cabinet under the sink and reach in there and feel around for the nozzle and turn it to the right. I’ve shown this to her ten times.”
“Okay-doe-kay,” I said. I waded down the hall and relayed this to Diane, who was kneeling in front of the cabinet with the robe bunched around her hips to keep the hem dry.
“If you will wait one minute,” Papa was telling Grandma.
“I’m part of this family too,” she said. “Don’t shut me out. Is the toilet running over?”
I covered the phone with my hand and told Diane that Penn might drop by. Penn is really the best option for Diane, but I don’t mind waiting for them to figure it out. From the few forays she has made into the world of romance, I can tell you that introducing some dating disaster as “my mother’s boyfriend” is extremely awkward. Of course, if the relationship with Penn didn’t work out, we’d be left without a PMI. For example, if the bathroom flooded and Papa and Grandma were headed to Graceland on a bus with other old people from the First Baptist Church, we would have no one to call. We would probably drown.
Papa asked if Diane had found the nozzle yet.
“She’s looking for it,” I said.
“Turn it to the right,” Papa said.
“To the right, Diane,” I said.
“Gotcha,” she said. Neither one of us actually knows left from right. We’re creative like that.
“There’s so much shit in this cabinet, I can’t reach the wall,” she said.
“What?” asked Grandma, who had somehow gotten the phone. “What did Diane say?”
“Fuck,” said Diane.
“She said she’s almost got it, Grandma. Are y’all having fun on the bus?”
Disturbing fact #1: Grandma crushes on dead Elvis.
Disturbing fact #2: The First Baptist Church of Kanuga encourages this.
Grandma said that no, she was not having fun on the bus. I put her on speakerphone while I made some breakfast.
Suddenly, Max charged down the hall, yelling, “Main line, main line! Mayday! We’re going down!” He slipped on the wet floor, crashed, and yelled that the bathroom sink was throwing up.
“I’ll call you back,” I told Grandma.
Don’t ask me how it happened, but another pipe-thing had broken. A geyser erupted and shot off the cabinet door. All this stuff was floating down the hall—junk like shampoo bottles, toothbrushes, and toy boats, along with some of Max’s collectibles, including his Dum Dum wrapper collection and a red ballet shoe he had stolen from me years ago. A tae kwon do medal of participation swirled around my feet.
Max and Diane went to the front yard looking for the main line, while I put my hand in the cabinet to see if I could find the knob and turn it to the right. I tried both directions. The heavier items had not floated out yet. I discovered a jar of old Halloween candy and, wrapped up tight in a plastic bag, a stack of Diane’s journals.
Diane had warned me never to read anyone’s journal. She said that journal reading was like egg sucking with dogs. Once a dog gets a taste of egg sucking, he’ll be in every henhouse in the county. Eventually, she explained, that dog will have to be shot.
I opened the bag and counted seven of them, gray and worn around the edges, some with covers coming apart, only slightly damp. A shiver ran down my spine as I pulled the first one out. It had been patched with Scotch tape and then duct tape. When I opened it, a loose page fell out; I placed it back, carefully, between the other pages.
Suddenly, the spirit of my dad descended upon me and said, “Aris, put that back right now.” Joe does what he can to help Diane with the parenting.
“In a minute,” I said. In the hallway, Lucky and Hiroshima were barking their special Penn is here bark.
The Ghost of Dad said, “I mean it, Aris. Don’t read those.”
“Just a minute,” I said. Then, with a sick, excited feeling in my stomach, I read the first entry, where Diane had made a list of goals.
MY GOALS
1. Lose ten pounds, lower my cholesterol, and increase my muscle tone.
2. Achieve financial clarity and stability by following a monthly action plan.
3. Quit nicotine gum!
4. Organize my teaching materials and follow a schedule of efficient, effective, creative design.
5. Write a novel.
6. Move out west.
7. Follow a meditation routine and attend one AA meeting a week and one church service each month.
8. Orchestrate a stable, peaceful, joyful family life while training my children to be healthy, responsible, and respectful.
On the next page, she wrote a quote from some chick named Evelyn Waugh. “My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults.” Thanks a lot, Evelyn; that makes me feel really magical. Beneath the quote, Diane had made another list.
THINGS THAT RAISED MY BLOOD PRESSURE TODAY
1. The shaggy brown dog the kids brought home. No, we are not keeping it. You don’t walk or feed the two dogs we have unless I nag you. Do you know what our vet bill was last month? They couldn’t care less about the bill. It’s their job to argue and plead until I lose my patience. Then they feel sorry for themselves. Then they go back to feeling sorry for the dog.
2. Dinner. I wrestled with phyllo dough for an hour to feed them a trans-fat-free vegetable potpie. Do they care about the rising incidence of type 2 diabetes in children? They picked at it, lying with pretty smiles so I wouldn’t put a moratorium on candy durin
g the evening movie. The smiles endeared me, pulling me back into that hopeless love even as I faced the dirty kitchen, too tired to say, “Cleaning off the table means taking the glasses off too.” They slipped away. I cleaned the kitchen by myself, then got everyone in the car. I emptied my wallet on Gnomeo & Juliet.
3. Gnomeo & Juliet. Please, God, let it be over, I started praying after the opening scene. It’s a British form of cruelty to make people look at animated ceramic garden gnomes for two hours. The kids got upset when they saw me looking at my watch. In the car they asked when we can see it again.
4. The handsome man in the parking lot who said hello to me.
“What are you doing with my journals?”
Diane was standing in the doorway, still in the bathrobe, looking mad as h-e-double-hockey-sticks.
“She’s not doing anything,” said Max, wading up behind her. “She’s saving your journals from the water, Mom. Aren’t you, Aris? She doesn’t want them to get all wet and ruined.”
Diane and I stared at each other.
“Don’t be mad, Mom,” Max said. “Okay? Everybody, just be happy.” He gave us both this insane smile.
“You are reading my journal,” Diane said coldly, perfectly still as the water gushed all around.
Max wedged himself between us. “We are having a cat’s trophy here,” he announced, “and I think everybody should just stay calm.”
“I don’t read your journals,” said Diane.
“Ommmmmm,” said Max, holding his hands in the shape of an egg the way Diane does when she meditates.
“I don’t put my journals in the bathroom,” I said. Oops. WRONG THING TO SAY. Where did that suicidal impulse come from? The spirit of Dad threw up his hands.
“What?” she said in her ice-queen voice. “What did you say?”
A stillness fell around us, the way it does just before a tornado, when the leaves on the trees stop twisting, the birds disappear, and the sky glows green.
“Give them here!” she shrieked. “All of them! Now! Because there is nowhere else to put them! Because this house is so jam-packed full of junk I can’t breathe. I have zero privacy! I can’t have a life with you two—”
How to Write a Novel Page 3