by Walter Kirn
Blood dripped onto the orange plastic tarp spread out under the doe. It pooled and ran.
“They’re sort of cute together in that camper. And Dad, what a saint. The man just gives and gives.”
I looked at the ground. Mike was hard to listen to sometimes.
“Maybe you think hunting pleases me,” he said. “It doesn’t. Each season I think: ‘That’s it. Enough already.’ I look at my deer and all I feel is sadness. Those big brown eyes, those elegant long legs. Let someone else be the bad guy for a change.”
The spider crawled up the doe’s neck onto its tongue and started down its throat.
“But then, the next fall, another thought comes over me. I can’t control it. It pops into my skull. The next thing I know I’m out there with my bow again.”
“What thought?” I said.
“It’s stupid. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell me,” I said. “I want to understand.”
Mike touched the doe’s forehead.
“Another year of meat.”
Mike let the deer age for a couple of days, then butchered it himself. He tossed the slabs of flesh into a bucket while I stood by with his knives. I couldn’t watch him. In my shirt pocket was a postcard from Grandma describing her trip and ending with a P.S.: “Don’t let him make you eat anything you don’t want to. That’s how allergies develop, swallowing things you hate.” My chance to heed her advice came right away. When Mike finished hacking and scraping he held a steak out and asked if I’d like to taste it raw. I didn’t. He bit off a chunk and grimaced as he chewed, as if he were forcing down a dose of medicine. To each his own, I thought. Everyone in our family had his medicine, and the bug it was meant to drive off was one another.
3
Knox gelatin drink for stronger, healthier nails held an essay contest that winter on the subject of “My Most Attractive Feature.” Audrey decided to enter—as a joke, she said. First prize was a “Miami dream date” with the actor Don Johnson, “America’s swingingest vice cop.” The package included round-trip airfare, deluxe accommodations, a Palm Beach shopping spree, and dinner and drinks at a South Beach nightclub. Audrey said Mike would go crazy if she won.
The whole idea spooked me. I wanted her to lose.
One afternoon while Mike was at work demonstrating a new wide-bodied tennis racket that he’d won the exclusive regional rights to, Audrey sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad and a violet Flair pen. Instead of starting her essay, she doodled circles and swirls and diamond shapes and gazed at Johnson’s picture on the Knox box. He had dimples. His hair was a sweaty, devilish mess. He reminded me of photos I’d seen of Mike during his playing days at Michigan, except that Johnson’s eyes were narrower. The man looked untrustworthy, dangerous. A threat.
When Audrey’s coffee cooled, she poured a fresh cup, and then let that cup cool. Her doodles grew hard and spiky, angry-looking.
“Help your stupid mother,” she said. “You’ve always had a knack for things like this.”
I stood over the sink and poured myself another ruby spoonful of codeine cough syrup. I was home from school with a case of made-up flu, but the hacking cough I’d been faking since waking up had given me a genuine sore throat. The air around me boiled with filmy clouds, an effect of the syrup. My arms felt long and apelike.
“I’m sick,” I said. “I can’t think.”
“Oh, be a sport.”
Audrey was right: I was good at things like this. Once, the St. Paul Pioneer Press had published a letter I’d written to the editor arguing that habitual drug offenders ought to be put to work in mental hospitals. The idea was Mike’s, from a comment I’d heard him make after his store was robbed by an employee high on angel dust; I thought he’d be pleased to see his views in print. When the letter was published, though, Mike was in Sioux City at a fishing tackle trade show, and I was too shy to show it to him later. My gym teacher read it, however, and seemed impressed, so I began to write letters on other issues, from welfare mothers to nuclear disarmament. Having no opinions of my own, I took random positions, pro and con.
Audrey flipped to a fresh sheet of paper. “I have to find something distinctive about myself. And not some cliché like my eyes or sense of humor.”
I pictured Johnson in his trademark shades helping Audrey out of a black limo. Red neon splashed his face and her bare shoulders. Around them milled a crowd of nightclub-goers in tippy high heels and loose Italian jackets.
“Your smile,” I said.
“That’s worse than sense of humor. This contest’s nationwide—we need a gimmick. Something to set me apart from all the other gals.”
It struck me that Audrey knew what she was doing and might end up meeting Don Johnson, after all.
“It’s five,” I said. “Mike could come home at any minute.”
“Shush. I’m thinking.” Audrey started writing. Her letters were steeply slanted, almost flat, and she held her chin just inches above the page. The cane in her chair seat creaked as she bore down, but once she’d filled half a page she lost momentum.
“Aren’t you making dinner tonight?” I said.
Audrey scratched a sentence out. “I’m having Mike grab a pizza at Giorgio’s. I told him I’m weak from giving blood. Don’t snitch.”
I broke into a codeine-muffled panic. Only once had Mike let us eat pizza for dinner—a brittle, tasteless store-bought pie bought because Audrey was groggy after having her wisdom teeth removed. A rich, sticky restaurant pizza might spoil us and upset the budget Mike was trying to keep us on. Joel, who seemed to be eating for both of us now that I could barely manage a bite, would probably want one every night, and Audrey might lose interest in her kitchen duties. Even her language, grabbing a pizza, had taken on an alarming breeziness.
“Listen,” said Audrey, “and tell me what you think.” She flattened out the page so she could read it. “A woman’s beauty isn’t just external. Faces and figures fade. What counts is inside.”
“It’s good. It’s on the mark.” I felt relieved. Such corniness, I was convinced, would never win.
“Nevertheless,” Audrey continued, “the outside often reflects the inside, lending a shape to invisible qualities. The body is a mirror of the spirit. So it is with my scars. It’s true: my scars. I consider my scars my most attractive feature, for each one tells a tale about my life.”
My neck prickled and my earlobes heated up. This scar idea was ingenious. A winner, maybe.
“My plan,” Audrey said, “is to tell where each scar came from. For example, the time when Joel fell through the ice and I cut my legs up wading in to rescue him. Or the scar from when I was changing an IV and the patient woke up delirious and bit me.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s pretty strange. Maybe you should just write about your hair.”
“What do you mean? My hair is limp. It’s ordinary.”
“Do you have to send photos?”
“No photos.”
“So exaggerate.”
Audrey pushed out her lower lip and made a grumpy, dimpled chin. The ease with which I’d discouraged her surprised me. She set down her Flair on the pad and gazed again at Johnson’s lethal grin. “I know this seems stupid to you, but it’s important. I want to see the expression on Mike’s face. Maybe if you’re still sick tomorrow,” she said, “you could help me take another stab at it? We could drive to St. Paul, have lunch, go shopping. Brainstorm.”
I glanced at the level inside the codeine bottle: there wasn’t enough to last another sick day. Still, I felt I couldn’t run the risk of letting Audrey write the essay herself.
“If I go, can we stop at the pharmacy?” I said.
Sometimes, after a late-night ambulance call, if the call had been especially sad or bloody or if someone young had been involved, Audrey would come to my room when she got home and sit on the edge of my bed with a drink and talk about her life, her memories. It was always worth staying awake for, what she said, and if I felt my eyes cl
osing I’d pinch myself; there was no other way to learn about her past. She hadn’t kept pictures, both her parents were dead, and her only sibling, a sister, lived in Florida and didn’t keep in touch. Her father, who’d been the team physician for the Michigan football program, hadn’t been kind to his daughters, I’d gathered, and going their separate ways when they grew up was their way of forgetting their time with him. As for their mother, they’d never really known her; she’d died of breast cancer when they were small.
The story Audrey told most often was the story of how she’d met my father. They’d come together at a Rose Bowl party when Michigan beat USC in Pasadena. Mike was a linebacker nicknamed “the Hatchet” for his low and devastating tackles. Audrey was a nursing student. Her father had brought her along to see the game, wangling her a seat on the team plane, where Mike first caught her eye. Sitting next to Woody Wolff himself and obviously a leader and a star, he wore a buzzcut, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and was actually exercising in his seat; curling a pair of dumbbells with his eyes shut. She’d never seen such concentration, she told me, or such a lean and tightly made male body. “He interested me as a specimen,” she said. “I know that sounds cold, but I was cold back then.” She asked her father about him before the party and learned that Mike had the slowest pulse and largest lung capacity he’d ever come across.
The victory party was held outside, under the first real palm trees Audrey had ever seen. She never forgot to mention the trees. Mike couldn’t dance, so she had him to herself, and as they drank and talked he let a secret slip: he’d heard something tear in his knee during the game and was finding it hard to stand up. “That did it,” she told me. “The thought of such a perfect man in pain sent me around the bend somehow. I swooned. Here I’d been muddling along through nursing school as a way to please my dad, and suddenly up pops this god who needs my help.” In fact, Audrey told me, she sensed immediately what Mike would only decide after his surgery—his football career was finished—and it thrilled her. A man who might have cast her off if his future had played out as planned had ended up dependent on her care. They married before Mike’s senior year was out, while he was still on crutches.
I found it hard to look Audrey in the eye during these late-night chats in my bedroom. I couldn’t stand her beauty. It made me fidget. To have such a good-looking woman for a mother didn’t seem fair to me; it raised expectations for my future love life that I feared would never be fulfilled. When Audrey was my age, I felt, she wouldn’t have noticed me; the only way someone like me could hold the gaze of someone like her was to be her child. Her son.
“You’ll always be my baby,” she sometimes said, rising from my bed after our talks, and nothing made me madder. I felt cheated. Unlike Mike and the other young men she’d known, who’d had the chance to make winning first impressions, I’d met her when I was helpless, speechless, tiny.
Wrecking her essay was my chance to get even—with her, with idols like Johnson, with the Hatchet. I wasn’t proud of myself, but there it was.
At breakfast the next morning I played sick again. I coughed into a tissue and pretended I couldn’t eat my bowl of Oat Rings, a cheap bulk cereal Mike made Audrey buy instead of Cheerios. As a retailer himself, Mike knew the cost of building national brand names, and he refused to pay the premium. He forbade us to wear Levi’s or brush with Crest or relieve our headaches with Excedrin.
Mike sipped coffee and scanned the front page as Audrey checked my glands. I couldn’t help comparing his looks to Johnson’s. Mike had the same cleft chin, a straighter nose, and his cheekbones were, if anything, more prominent, but unfortunately he hadn’t learned the trick of skipping shaving to let his stubble grow out. Touches like that were what made Johnson a star.
“They’re inflamed,” Audrey lied. “No school for you today.”
Joel shot me a jealous look and sulked. He hated school as much as I did and only attended because of sports, it seemed. He played them all, with an ease and natural grace that pointed to great achievements down the line, maybe even greater than Mike’s had been.
“I think what Justin needs is air,” Mike said. “He’s been indoors for two days running now.”
Audrey gave Mike a cutting look; this was an old argument between them. According to Mike, fresh air cured everything, while Audrey maintained that rest was the best medicine. All of my parents’ other disagreements, from where to go on vacation to whom to vote for, seemed to me to be versions of this one. Reagan, because he rode horses, had been the outside candidate; Carter, a scientist, the indoor man.
The debate about how to make me better continued as Mike got up from the table and put his coat on. I opened the bottle of codeine, held it high, and poured, but all that came out was a paltry thread of syrup.
“By the way,” Audrey said, “I’ll be busy all day today, so maybe you could get a bucket of chicken.”
Mike bent down to tie his shoes. “I see a pattern here. Have you stopped cooking?”
“Twice is not a pattern,” Audrey said. “Fried chicken or pizza again, it’s up to you.”
Mike snapped on his rubbers and straightened up. “There’s another divorce on the way. The Andersons. Anna’s run off to Chicago with some gigolo.”
“The man is an accomplished sculptor, Mike. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Staying together takes sacrifice. It’s work. Certain people seem to be forgetting that.”
On the drive to St. Paul we discussed the Johnson essay.
“I want to work in the word ‘gamine,’ ” said Audrey. It was snowing and we were driving behind a sand truck whose amber warning light strobed her face and hair and made her look like an actress in a suspense film.
“I prefer ‘petite.’ ”
“Petite’s a commonplace.”
“Miniature?”
“Too technical. Too awkward.”
“Wee?” I said. “Pint-size? Trim?”
“You’re just confusing me.”
Confusing her was the essence of my plan. Last night, I’d let myself picture Audrey’s dream date in greater detail than before, and I was terrified. I could see the blue tropical cocktails on the bar as Johnson led Audrey across the nightclub’s dance floor through a crowd of partying celebrities: Burt Reynolds kissing a teenage fashion model, Joey Heatherton hugging an NFL receiver.
“We’re taking the wrong approach,” she said. “Instead of getting hung up on language, Justin, imagine you’ve never seen me. We’ve never met. You round a corner and there I am, in front of you. And what strikes you first is …?”
The exercise was difficult. I tilted my head to change my perspective and tried to see Audrey anew, as a stranger. Her skin, I noticed, was darker than I realized, as though she had a trace of Indian blood, as well as surprisingly moist and shiny. Pores loomed. Freckles. Blackheads. Oily spots. In school I’d been taught that the skin is an organ—a kind of stretched-out liver or kidney—but only now did this idea make sense to me.
“Talk,” Audrey said. “Describe. Immortalize.”
I was thinking of fancy words for Audrey’s skin tone when I noticed the tendons in her hands, fanned like the wire ribs of an umbrella. Her fingers were beautiful, too. Like the idealized fingers on the Knox box, they curved and tapered perfectly, ending in bladelike crimson nails that I could see my reflection in.
I knew it then: the winning essay would focus on hands and fingers. It was obvious.
“You’ve got it,” Audrey said. “You’ve solved the puzzle.”
“It’s just a thought. It’s stupid.”
“Go ahead.”
“When are we going to find a pharmacy?”
“As soon as you stop stalling me. Let’s hear it.”
Grit from the sand truck rained against the windshield. I pictured Audrey sitting on a hotel bed as Johnson splashed on cologne in his beach house, preparing for their evening out. A towel was tied loosely around his narrow waist and even the tops of his feet were darkly tanned.<
br />
“Fine. No cough syrup,” Audrey said.
I stiffened. Everything inside me reversed itself.
“I think you ought to write about your hands.”
“What about them?” Her voice was low, excited.
“You have to promise me that if you win you won’t forget who helped you.”
“Promise,” she said.
A minute later, I’d told her everything, betraying myself for a mild narcotic. Idiot.
We wrote the essay at lunch in a department store. The cheese in my French onion soup disintegrated as Audrey took my dictation. I was flying. I’d snuck some cough syrup into my Pepsi and suddenly I felt lyrical, fearless, my brain a lubricated spool of words. I described Audrey’s hands folding laundry, forming piecrusts, stroking hospital patients. They turned pages in hymnals and helped deliver newborns.
“Let’s change hymnals to novels,” Audrey said. “We don’t go to church.”
“Write ‘hymnals.’ Take my word for it. A little religion makes a person sound modest.”
The waitress whisked away my untouched soup and set down two Reuben sandwich platters. Audrey laid her pen aside and drew out the frilly toothpick from a sandwich half. Our table was on a balcony overlooking the perfume floor, and I could smell lilies, cinnamon, and vanilla mixed with the salty odor of corned beef.
“It doesn’t sound like me,” said Audrey. “That’s the whole point, the whole dream: that he’d like me.”
“Johnson’s not judging the contest. Knox is.”
“Good point. I forget that. I’ll owe you one for this.”
“No problem,” I said.
“I mean it. This must feel strange, helping your mother refine her image.”
“It does.”
Audrey picked up a sandwich half and nibbled at the overhanging sauerkraut. According to my changed idea of things, helping her with her entry was in my interest, regardless of the outcome. If she lost, as was likely, she’d know I’d stood behind her. And in the event she won, which seemed impossible, she’d know that the credit belonged to me, her son, and not to herself for being smart or special. She’d feel humbled, grateful, in my debt.