by Unknown
Daddy almost said, No, but sometimes we wonder.
But he got a warning look from Mama and didn't say it. And he looked at Mama in a way that said, I told you this was a bad idea. We shouldn't try to have dinners here in the house.
Delia knew her parents very well. Thanks to the Telling Boy, she knew them better than they knew themselves.
Delia went upstairs, supposedly to watch the Disney channel on her TV and go to bed, and the others went into the living room again for coffee and the expensive imported cookies that Mama was using as dessert.
The Telling Boy was waiting there, of course.
The old man dressed like a little boy for bed.
With the book open, waiting for her.
She had a feeling like a snake of excitement biting its own tail off. Its jaws, chewing slowly, were dread.
Today, Delia saw, the book was called Delia and the Dinner Party.
Delia turned out the lights.
The Telling Boy began to read, even though it was dark. A gentle light from the book lit his dry, gray mouth as he read. The lips moved like a puppet's mouth. In a voice that was old but not grandfatherly, he read:
"Delia was a little girl, or maybe not so little. If you think five years old is little, then she was little. But maybe you are not yet five years old—and then she might be a big girl to you.,'
Delia thought: I've been five ever since the first time the Telling Boy came to explain things to me.
"One day Delia's parents had some people over for a dinner party. Delia didn't feel like talking to them, even though her parents wanted her to. Delia was a sad little girl. She didn't have any friends except a boy who lived in the attic.
"After Delia went to bed, she thought and thought to herself. 'Maybe I can make friends with these people after all,' she said. 'I'll ask my friend the Telling Boy.' So she went upstairs and asked her friend the Telling Boy. He was a very wise little boy who wore wonderful magic jammies and could talk to all the little creatures who lived in the attic. 'Delia,' he said, 'I don't know if you can be friends with these people, or your parents either. The only way to be sure is to go see them again and try to decide.' So Delia went along with the Telling Boy into the Looking Tunnel . .
The Telling Boy tucked the little book under his arm, and gestured to say, After you. They walked toward the corner of the room that was nearest to the living room downstairs, and the lines of wall edges that met in the corner seemed to extend themselves into a new depth, a reach that extended beyond the wall and became a dusty road stretching into darkness. They walked into the corner and down the road. In the sky were stars and spiders, both glittering. There were cobwebby rafters up there, and there were clouds. There was a cockroach crawling along the horned moon. The place smelled of dust and mildew.
And then, on the road up ahead, was the living room. It was a box. A room-sized box glowing gently in one of its corners from the light of its table lamp.
They walked up to the nearest wall of the translucent box, and looked through at the dinner party. She could see them; they couldn't see her.
Daddy had broken out the Chivas. They sat sipping their liquor—Lucy taking hers in coffee, becoming much more nervously giggly—and Daddy was drinking his on the rocks.
Delia and the Telling Boy could hear what was being said, though it was a little muffled. "I love that dress," Lucy was saying to Andy. "It's so assertive and…I wish I could wear something like that but I'd look silly. I mean, you look wonderful…."
"They seem very nice," Delia said. "Andy liked that. She's smiling."
"Let's go over here and see what Lucy really said," the Telling Boy suggested.
Delia followed him around the corner, and saw the same scene played again, with the Telling Boy translating the dialogue. He read from his little book: " 'I love that dress,' Lucy said with a well-disguised sarcasm. 'Black people are always ready to overdress, aren't they? I suppose if you were a black man instead you'd have a big gold chain with a clock on it so I should be happy for small blessings. All my senses are assaulted by your skintight red satin dress with the neckline that plunges to your navel. I could never embarrass myself that way.' "
But Delia hardly heard what the Telling Boy was reading; she was watching, wretchedly fascinated, the Telling Boy's visual translation.
In her bedroom she had a book she'd been given when she was three. It was called The Magic Kids, and it was about someone who learns that their neighbor kids are elves in disguise. And it had a special cover on it with a little plastic see-through panel holding a picture of the Magic Kids. When you looked at the illustration straight on they looked like ordinary kids; when you tilted the book and looked at an angle, the picture shifted and revealed the little boy and girl as elves with wings and pointed ears.
The living room box that the Telling Boy had shown her was something like that. When you stood on one side and looked in, you saw the people in the room as they looked "normally." When you went around the corner and looked, seeing it from another angle, the image shifted and you saw what the box really held.
Mama and Daddy and Buddy and Andy and Lucy and Henry.
Monsters. Skin stripped away, red meat and blue white bone exposed and nastily wet, teeth bared, fingers boneless and ropelike, barbed tentacles; black tongues three feet long that whipped out like the tongues of lizards, tubular tongues with lamprey-mouth tips. Bodies overgrown in some limbs, unnaturally tapered in others.
Her Dad—she knew him by his clothes, they all wore their human clothes—had a second face on the side of his head that was snapping its jaws at Mama like a vicious little dog barely kept leashed. Mama's head was triple faced; the one facing Daddy was angry and frightened, one of its eyes had been gnawed away…. Skinless dwarfish faces oozing pus and blood…
Their genitals were repugnantly exposed, their clothes gone crotchless; Daddy's penis was a two-headed lizard thing that hissed and twitched and then convulsed with sickness, vomited sticky white fluid that fell sizzling to the floor…. Mama's vagina was a big hairy spider on its back with its belly cut open, waving its bristly legs.
Delia looked away, her stomach twitching like a fly in a web….
The Telling Boy had prepared her for this. He had been showing her things for many years now. He had given her glimpses. But never so clearly.
It's just a story in his little book, she told herself. That's really all it is, in the end.
She watched the Lucy thing and the Andy thing; the Lucy thing lashing out with its finger tentacles, slashing at the Andy thing's face, scoring it with bloody grooves. The Andy thing recoiled. I love that dress. It's so assertive…I wish I could wear something like that.
Delia was seeing the hideous underside of the conversation. The truth. Or so the Telling Boy told her.
The Telling Boy said, "Let's go look on the other side again."
They went around the corner. It was both a relief to see them human again, and disturbing. Knowing what was just one flicker behind the facade.
Daddy was saying, "How are things at the agency?"
"Kind of a bore, lately," Buddy said. "Getting to be a routine. You wouldn't think it would be the same-old same-old at an ad agency, since we're constantly having new accounts, doing creative work, but—"
"Hey, I could believe it," Daddy said a little pityingly. "You uh…" He picked up his glass, smiled smugly as he sipped. "You find time to work on that novel you were telling me about?"
"The novel? Sure, bits and pieces." Buddy's smile was false. "It's growing slowly but surely."
Lucy was unusually quiet.
The Telling Boy opened his book and read the translation.
"How are things at the agency? Are you bored out of your head with the same old rip-off manipulations of the public, the same old scams to sell unnecessary junk? Are you writing that novel you used to talk about? I doubt it. You're not, are you? You're not that creative. Not like me. I'm an artist. I make my living as an artist, and not a commercial
artist either. An abstract artist. Artists are better than other people. So stay in your place, you little weasel, I'm the celebrity in this house, I'm the artist, not you, your best hope is to follow me around like a puppy dog, looking up to me….'"
"Was that what Daddy was saying?" Delia mused. "I don't know what he means by some of that stuff. Rip-off manipulations. What does an ad agency do anyway?"
"They make TV and radio commercials," the Telling Boy explained.
"Oh."
"I'm sorry. I don't mean to go over your head. Sometimes it's difficult to put things in terms a five-year-old girl can understand."
Delia was tempted to argue about being a five-year-old. She knew she wasn't really. But the Telling Boy didn't like her to talk about that.
They peered around the corner long enough to see that the Daddy monster was standing over the Buddy monster, its tongue sucking out one of the Buddy monster's eyes; the Buddy monster was on its back, its arms and legs in the air like a dog surrendering a fight. The Daddy monster's penis shot sizzling white fluid onto the Buddy monster's exposed belly, so that he writhed in pain….
You find time to work on that novel you were telling me about?
Delia's stomach lurched again, and they looked back at the other side where Lucy was saying, "I guess I'll go outside and have a smoke."
"Oh, you can smoke in here," Daddy said, "if it doesn't bother anyone else…" He looked questioningly at the others.
Andy said, a little stiffly, "No. It's okay. The occasional ambient smoke doesn't bother my asthma much."
The Telling Boy opened his book and read the translation. "And Andy replied, 'You may as well—you've already been offensive to me. Why not torment me some more? You disgust me.' "
Delia knew what she would see if she looked around the corner the Andy monster chewing at some exposed place on the Lucy monster.
"Why don't you have your cigarette in the kitchen," Mama said, "while I'm giving you that sauté recipe you asked for?"
"If it's all right. That'd be nice," Lucy said, smiling icily at Andy. She got up and followed Mama out of the box. Gone from sight.
"I'm glad she left the room to smoke," the Telling Boy said, sadly. 'I sure would like a cigarette." He turned to Delia and said, "If you ever grow up, don't start smoking. You never quite get over it even after you quit."
"Did you die because of smoking?" Delia asked him.
"They said it was lung cancer brought on by cigarettes," the old man in the jammies said. "And that was part of it. But it was also because my wife wanted me to die, so I didn't try to fight it. I was hoping she'd feel guilty, afterwards."
Delia nodded. She understood. She'd learned a lot about people from the Telling Boy.
Buddy was talking over something called stock options with Henry. "They are both pretending they know about stock options," the Telling Boy said. "But they don't know anything about them. They are bragging to one another by pretending to know about the stock market. Do you want me to read the—?" He started to open the book.
"No," Delia said. She was watching her dad. He had gone with Andy to help her pick out a CD.
"Let me give you the benefit of my vast good taste, Andy," Daddy said, jokingly.
The Telling Boy read his interpretation from Delia and the Dinner Party.
'Let's go over here,' Daddy said, 'where I can flirt with you and you can flirt with me without anyone noticing.' "Oh no," Delia said. "He wouldn't do that."
Feeling really sick now, like she was going to cave in. "You saw the monster," the Telling Boy said. "He might do anything. A creature like that."
They were flirting with one another. The woman was pretending to push him out of the way with a sideways shove of a hip so she could get to the rack of CDs, both of them giggling. Daddy picked out James Brown, the woman laughing at him, saying he'll be playing rap records next; she picked out Bartok's string quartets, and whispered teasingly, "James Brown, that's an example of that big, hard organ of good taste of yours?"
"If you want an example of that—" he said, laughing. "I know a motel—"
"Oh, listen to him! Stop!" She laughed.
"Seriously—what I would like to do is show you a painting in my studio-1 just feel like you could relate to it—"
"Oh, it's let me show you my etchings now!"
They both laughed, but she went along with him, downstairs, to his basement studio. Andy just calling casually to her husband that she'd be right back. He waved and nodded, scarcely looking up from his conversation. No wonder he was losing her, Delia thought.
Delia felt cold. She looked around. Darkness, except for the translucent box that contained the living room. She thought she saw a shiny blue black beetle the size of a wheelbarrow crawling along upside down through a hole in the sky. She shivered.
"I wish I'd brought a coat," she said.
"I wish I had a cigarette," the Telling Boy said grumpily. "He's not going to do that thing with her in the studio, is he?" Delia asked.
"Do you want to see?"
She hugged herself. "No."
"It's what happens next in the book."
She looked at her shoes. "All right."
He turned and walked off into the shadows. She followed him. Something scuttled out of their way. And then he was descending, walking down into the dusty and infinite floor, down an invisible staircase. It looked like he was sinking into the ground. Delia was used to this, too. She stepped down into the floor, where it looked solid but wasn't, and found the steps with a probing foot.
The basement studio was another translucent box, in another shadow gallery. It was shaped rectangularly, and had pipes pierced through it. There was a stack of paintings and a table of paints and a big wooden stand that held a twenty-foot-wide painting. She had seen it before; an abstraction that hinted of iris shapes and orchids and parting folds of red velvet. Daddy was pointing to one side of it, saying something about organic and inorganic shapes, and then he took Andy's hand and led her to the other side of the long painting. And didn't let go of her hand. Turned to her with a you understand, don't you? look.
"it's beautiful," she said.
The Telling Boy said, "Come and see." He led Delia around the corner, where the image shifted.
The monsters were writhing against one another, copulating and rending Daddy's hideous animal penis smashing itself with suicidal fervor into the creature's vagina… a vagina that was a sucking spiral of wet flesh lined with tiny flechettes, oozing coagulated blood: the mouth of an oversized leech. The two skinless creatures making sounds like lard in a garbage disposal, like fluid in a tubercular chest, like a record being played backwards; gnashing at one another with random sets of teeth erupting from their chests; the woman's breasts were the teats of dogs; her butt convulsively spat feces, and his belched masses of clinging, squirming pinworms. They licked at each other's effluvia with their long, black tubular tongues, licking and sucking, feeding, grinding, clawing. Not enjoying this, just doing it because they had to, for some reason.
The painting was changed too. It was revealed as an enormous, grotesquely photo-realistic image of a huge woman's vagina, spread open and nauseatingly displayed.
Gagging, Delia looked at the dusty, infinite floor and yelled, "Daddy stop it stop it stop it get away from her stop it!"
She ran around the other side of the box, the side where her Daddy looked human, where he was simply kissing the Andy lady. And Delia began to bang on the translucent wall, yelling, "Stop it stop being monsters with her!"
Daddy looked up. Not toward Delia but up toward her room.
"What is that girl doing up there?" he muttered. "yelling that kind of shit. The therapist told us to let her act out and not to make a big deal, but, goddamn it, she has to learn sometime–"
He was heading for the stairs. The Andy lady, breathing harshly, turned with embarrassment to pretend to look at the painting.
The Telling Boy said, "We'd better go back to your room. He expects to find you
there."
"Do we have time?"
"I don't know."
They hurried back the way they'd come. Found the stairs, walked up through a ceiling , hurried back along the shadow corridor of the Looking Tunnel toward the entry corner of her room.
She could hear Daddy walking up the stairs to her room. She could see his silhouette, over there, off in the distance. Coming angrily. Losing his temper. Reaching the door.
No. She wanted to get there first, before he found her missing.
She saw her room at the end of the Looking Tunnel, where three lines converged. It was a box, translucent and far away, with another box glowing in it in one corner: the TV. In her room, Daddy was storming around, looking under the bed, slamming open the closet door, looking to see where she was hiding; on TV, Donald Duck was making enraged sore throat noises as he chased a mischievous chipmunk around his cartoon fishing cabin.
Delia stood on the verge of the room, looking at her daddy poking through the closet.
"Go on, while he's not looking," the Telling Boy said.
She stepped through. Her daddy heard the noise and turned. "Where the hell have you been hiding? Damnit, Delia–I'm sick of this bullshit. This kind of acting out. You're too old to play these little games. You're not five, you're eleven, and this is five-year-old stuff–not talking to anyone, staring at everyone like they're insulting you, screaming at us from up in your room and then hiding when I–"
Mama was coming in. "What's going on?"
"Daddy," Delia said, "why were you being monsters with that woman in the basement?"
He blinked at her. "What?"
"Rubbing on her body and kissing and all that. That Andy lady."
Mama turned to stare at him. He worked up a convincing look of outrage. "Goddamn it, Delia, now you've gone too far—making up this bullshit—"
"You were downstairs with her," Mama was saying. "You were."
"We were looking at my new painting—" Daddy yelled. Covering up by making a big noise of it. His skin was fizzing.
Bubbling. Fizzing. Foam coming out on his skin. And then his skin sloughed off him in patches, carried away on the yellow mucky bubbles of the fizzing. Mama was hissing at him, "God, this is humiliating, you and that woman at a dinner party, for God's sake—"