by Chris Lynch
“And if your mother didn’t think we could be helpful, she wouldn’t have invited us, right?”
“I never invited you,” Ma replied from the kitchen.
They could hear us.
Oh god, they could hear us. “Shit.”
“Elvin!” Ma said.
I headed into the kitchen again, to find the two women seated at the beautiful dinner. The table was a little crowded, but it just looked more lavish that way.
“He says that all the time,” Barbara said. “He’s got a little problem there, I think, Mrs. Bishop.”
“It’s his only one, Barbara,” Mrs. Bishop said. “Otherwise he is just about perfect.”
That sounded like a joke, didn’t it? Could the naked baby pictures be far behind? Me and Mr. Potato Head over dessert, you’ll see.
However, there was a bright spot. Barbara was looking at me, so sweetly, so—friendly, is the word—that I stopped worrying that I’d ruined myself by shooting off my mouth.
Stopped worrying about anything, really. Even Mikie and Frankie.
“You did so invite us,” Frankie said to my mother, breaking like a thousand etiquette rules by engaging in an argument with the hostess, homeowner, cook, and best friend’s mother.
“I never did. I merely told you that Barbara was coming for dinner tonight. Pass me the egg noodles, fresh kid.”
The fresh kid passed the egg noodles.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What were you doing talking to him, anyway? What, you guys have this secret life that doesn’t include me?”
Frank, who was seated on my side of the table, to the left, with Mikie between us, leaned over his plate to leer at me. “Practice calling me Dad,” he said.
Ma, who was sitting in the seat directly across from Franko, reached out with the tongs she was about to use on the noodles. Snipped him right on the left earlobe, holding him still to give him a small slap on the right cheek. “Calling you dead is what we’re going to practice if you don’t get yourself under control.”
Franko, who couldn’t seem to tell the difference between being liked by a woman and being struck about the face and head by one, laughed.
“Now go get up and rinse these tongs off,” Ma demanded. As soon he was out of his chair, she chuckled too.
“Anyway,” Mikie said. “Back to the point. I called here yesterday, Elvin. Your mom was supposed to tell you.”
I looked at her. “Mikie called,” she said, shrugging and sending the noodles around the table.
“Well I hope you’re satisfied,” I said to both guys. Now, I realized that the fight over whether they were staying for dinner was pretty well finished, what with them actually sitting in front of quickly scribbled place cards with their names on them, nibbling bread rolls, and tucking cloth napkins into their shirts like bibs. But I wanted to take my last shot anyway. “My poor mother had to stretch and fill and patch together this meal because she wasn’t prepared for—”
“Oh stop, Elvin,” Ma said without looking at me. She was carefully ladling creamy beefy Stroganoff over the bed of noodles in her plate, in effect illustrating what she was about to say. “I made enough for ten people, for goodness’ sake.”
“Ya,” I said, quickly running out of material, looking around at some pretty unsympathetic faces too. “Well, I was planning on eating enough for ten.”
Ma made a subtle tsk tsk noise at me, and I shut up. Which helped move the evening along.
Because then we could eat, which was maybe the one thing everyone here at the table could do equally well. I probably had an edge, with a well-established history of scarfing down my mother’s Stroganoff, her fettuccine Alfredo, her escarole soup, or smoked shoulder with the blackened honey-mustard shell. I knew her art, and could appreciate it without even touching it to my lips. But tonight we were a gang. A happy and hungry bunch of consumers, and I think we did better dealing with each other because of what the food did to us.
Mikie could not stop thanking Ma, and pointing out what aspect of each dish made him excited, asking what she had put into the water to make the baby carrots taste like pumpkin pie. Ma loved it, and told him nothing. Frankie moaned. His other moan, the one polite company can appreciate. There was almost no conversation during dinner that I can recall, and I suppose that sounds disgusting, but you’ll need to just take my word for it that it wasn’t. There were noises, single words like “wonderful” and “unbelievable” slipped in between bites, and there were nods and gestures with silverware toward the salad bowl, the bread basket, the serving bowls. But there wasn’t a discussion about anything, really, and I was so, so grateful for that. No feeling that Barbara being here, in my house, at my table, across from me in the seating arrangement with the stupid funny sweet little place cards, was an issue at all.
Which freed me up to mostly just look at her. Her eyes, the color of honeydew melon tonight, were actually smaller than I had originally thought, and in fact they seemed to struggle, like little beings all their own, stretching up to get a peek at the outside world over the pale drumlins of her cheeks when she smiled. And she smiled every time she glanced up from her plate and caught me staring at her.
Like it was okay with her that I stared. Like it was not something that bored or annoyed or scared her. Like it wasn’t something she was so used to that she would want me to stop. This alone made us a good pair, because I felt like I could do it for a long long time.
I’d be staring, crouching low and awkward to try and catch her eye, then she’d look up, do the smile thing, and almost cancel out her eyes altogether, the long fat lashes waving Help me like they were going under for the third time.
But eyes or no, how could I ever not want her to do that?
“I can’t eat another bite,” Barbara said, speaking for everybody and closing down the meal. “But I will anyway” she added, and took one last scoop of the main dish without the noodles, and a snap of bread for mopping the sauce. I was impressed. Here was someone who shared my philosophy that you don’t stop eating just because you’re not hungry anymore. But looking down at my own plate as my mother—and Frankie!—came around and started the clearing, I realized I hadn’t gotten around to eating much of anything. And I still wasn’t hungry.
When Ma came around and saw, I thought for sure it was going to be time for one of those gentle-yet-embarrassing commentaries on what’s-up-with-Elvin, like I’d always heard when I’d eaten too much, or too fast, or eaten six helpings of turkey and no potatoes and none of stuffing, or the other way around, because I had for my entire life worn my emotions on my stomach.
She looked down at my plate, then at me, then at Barbara, then at me again.
She took my plate away with one hand, wordlessly, and gave my neck a squeeze with the other as she continued her rounds.
As Barbara’s plate was swept away by Frankie—who was earning big points for minimal misbehavior with Barbara—she dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin and leaned way out over the table to whisper to me. “This was really nice of your mother,” she said. “And you.”
I shrugged. “I suppose. Ya, thanks.”
“Well I think we should do something for you two in return,” she said.
“What’s going on down there?” Mike asked.
“No, no,” Barbara said, standing up and waving him off. “Sit there and relax. Elvin and I are just going to get the party favors.”
“Favors?” I asked as I blindly followed Barbara to the door. “Favors?” Frankie said, reentering the picture. “I love favors. This is, like the coolest dinner party of my life, and that is saying something.”
“What favors?” Ma asked as she came in with a silver bowl filled with Stella D’oros and Fig Newtons.
We were standing at the back door, about to exit.
“Didn’t you tell them this was a theme party when you invited them to dinner?” Barbara asked.
Ma was awesome.
“Of course I told them,” she hummed, nibbling the fir
st anisette biscuit before she’d even hit the seat. “I told them when I invited them. They know that.”
Ha. Their mouths hung open.
“Hey Ma, looks like you got two baby birds there, need to be fed. Pop a couple cookies in those beaks, and we’ll be right back.” Nice exit line, that. Except, I didn’t go anywhere. I stood there in the doorway, wanting to linger in the moment, watch them. I felt sort of in control, and I had absolutely no idea why.
Barbara, who had already headed out, doubled back and grabbed me by the hand, tugging me along to the garage.
Ah right. That was it. As I stared at the pale dimpled hand holding mine, I realized why I was feeling the way I was feeling. The elevated Elvin. The thing that I didn’t feel very often—or ever. She was doing it here now. You know that thing she did for the dogs, making them better, making them doggier, making them happy? She was doing it for me by plotting with me against my friends, by leaving a room with me...
Why is that so thrilling, I’d like to know? In all my demented fantasies, my loony dreams and frothy schemes, I had done many spectacular and unlikely things with girls who had lots and lots of long hair and no faces. But never something as drab and nowhere as holding a hand and removing myself down the back stairs while a room full of people wondered about it at our backs.
My oh my, oh my oh my what I never knew. How this left every fantasy in the shade.
I stared at Barbara’s hand and listened to her laugh, and it was a very good thing that I knew my stairs and my driveway and my yard as well as I did because my feet could have been anywhere doing anything for all the control I had over them.
She got the garage door partway up, but it was a creaky heavy old thing. “I’m going to need at least two hands for this, Elvin,” she said.
I looked down and noticed I was squeezing. Hanging so tight to her free hand that the fingers were turning pink and puffy.
“Oh. Sorry,” I said, awfully slowly. First I stared at the hands, as if sussing out whether to call for the jaws of life rather than just letting go. Then, I just let go.
Probably it was the comical slowness of all this that made Barbara giggle and look at me strangely. But it was her own unusualness that made her try and help me out.
“You are preoccupied, Elvin Bishop,” Barbara said, and when she said it, everything stopped proceeding normally, the dogs stopped their snuffling on the other side of the door, the chatter stopped filtering out of the open kitchen window above and behind us. Traffic out on the street slowed to the point where cars still went by, but you could hear the suck of their tires on the pavement as much as you could their engines. I lost the ability to blink. Barbara, even her gestures and the movement of her mouth, slowed down just like in slo-mo film, only her voice didn’t sink down into slo-mo deep-devil voice, thank god. Though even that wouldn’t have changed my mind much.
“Con-cen-trate,” she said, leaning close, leaning close.
Okay! I will! I will concentrate!
On what? On what, was I concentrating? Help.
I could not bear another second of this, stupid words and stupid acts coming to mind in a flood now as my self-destruct impulses started pumping extra juice. So I half dove at the garage door, and yanked it skyward so hard that the groaning old croaker shot up all the way, exerted maximum pressure on its springwork, then rebounded hard, zooming back and crashing right back down at our feet. The dogs yelped and squealed and ran away inside.
“Easy there, butch,” Barbara said.
“I’m really strong,” I babbled. What a dink.
Please, Elvin, I pleaded with myself. Shut up and get out of the way, for the love of god, get out of the way...
I gripped the handle of the garage door and raised it, easy this time. Worked out okay.
We went to the puppies, who were cowering as far from the door as possible. When they saw Barbara, they seemed to relax a bit, and Tag led the way to her: “This one is mine,” she said, scooping him up and cuddling him.
I was staring again, and my stomach was jumping. I started feeling like I was going to lose whatever food I had managed to put down at dinner, right here on the dogs. Not that anybody would notice.
“So which ones do we give away?” she asked, perusing the crowd.
“All of them?”
“Listen, I can only help you so much. I’m taking one. Two dinner guests. That’s three puppies, leaving you with four. That’s pretty good.”
“What about the mother?”
“Sorry, that one was your own mistake.”
Grog looked up at me now, head tilted, one eye closed as if he was trying to understand what was being said.
“It was not my mistake. It was an accident. It was a plot. It was my mother, and Mikie...”
And it all came rushing back to me, how Mikie had convinced my mother that I actually wanted this dog instead of the dirty-minded crap-throwing feces rhesus monkey that would have been by now like a new close friend, replacing Frankie, maybe, a lot of the same qualities only less complicated. And not a lot less complicated either...
“Elvin?”
“That one right there,” I said, with new determination. “That’s Mikie’s dog.” I pointed to Tortellini, the dog with the circular orange face fronting the olive head, eyes permanently rolled skyward, who ran into walls time after time, as if to hone his already precious look. “Frankie gets Canelloni,” the tubular one that looked like a dachshund with a sheepdog’s coat. Once we’d scooped them up, and slammed the garage door behind us, I started hurrying. Took three steps at a trot, then stopped short.
Wait a minute. Now I knew what I was supposed to be concentrating on earlier.
“What?” Barbara asked.
I leaned forward, squashing the three little beasties between us, though they were good and simple enough not to say anything about it. With the face part of me, I kind of lurched toward Barbara’s face.
“What?” she asked again, pulling back just enough, from the neck up. I thought the what part of it should have been pretty obvious. And she seemed willing before. But maybe my approach was sort of less than appetizing.
Barbara shook her head no. I was still close enough that when she did it the curlicues that fell around the sides and the front of her face just lightly swept my face. So that even though it was no, it might as well have been yes, the way it made me feel.
“Sorry,” I said, sorry and satisfied. Doing it all wrong and feelin’ all right.
I headed up the driveway, not toward the back door from where we came, but toward the front.
“What are you doing?” she asked, but followed.
“I know my buddies,” I said. “And they know me.”
“Whatever that means,” Barbara said.
But as soon as we turned the corner from the driveway to the sidewalk that ran past the front of my house, Barbara understood.
The two of them, Mikie and Frankie, were slithering out, whispering thank-yous to my mother and telling her not to bother disturbing me and Barbara.
So we crept along the five-foot chain-link fence that fronted my yard, and intercepted the slinksters just as they were backing out through the gate.
“Thank you,” I said to the first, Frankie, who jumped. “So nice you could come.” I stuck Canelloni in his hands.
“What am I supposed to with this thing?” Frank said, staring at it.
“Feed him seven times a day, and do not let him breed. SPCA made us promise.” I gave him a slap on the back.
Barbara, from her post on the opposite side of the exit, tapped Frank on the shoulder. “It was nice meeting you again,” she said. “Even if you did vote against me.”
Whoa. Frankie blushed. Do I have to point out how hard it is to accomplish that? But at the same time he smiled. He looked at me, jerking a thumb at Barbara. “I suppose there are suckier girls you coulda picked,” he said graciously. I shoved him on his way.
Barbara paused to nuzzle her dog. “My dad’s gonna kill me,” she s
aid. “I gotta practice crying on the way home.”
“Stare at the dog for a while,” I said to be helpful. “They’re like onions.”
Mikie. Mikie walked up to the plate with dignity. Sort of like a condemned man who knows he’s gonna get it anyway, so he’s damned well not going to be seen whining and kicking on his way out. But also like a good sport who know’s he’s been bagged.
He held out his hands and squinted. “Payback’s a bitch.”
“So is this,” I said, and gently placed his new best friend in his hands. “Her name is Tortellini.”
Mikie looked at Tortellini. Tortellini looked at the sky though, god love her, she seemed to be making every effort to look at Mike.
“Got me back good,” he said.
I waved and smiled as if I was on a parade float and he was in the crowd a hundred feet away. “Come again,” I said sweetly.
And before he moved on, something transpired. Big, in its way, but probably a lot of not-much to the untrained eye. Mikie turned to Barbara and just sort of stood there. Stared at her. Smiled. She smiled back. They looked for all the world like two people who had known each other for a long time, and were briefly passing each other by again.
“You’ll take good care of my boy?” Mike said in a goofy old-folks scold.
“Or you’ll scratch my eyes out,” Barbara shot back.
And that was it. Seemed to satisfy both of them. Mike turned to me before leaving. “I always knew you’d wind up dating your mother,” he said.
I was laughing as he walked, then I stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I called. Got no answer.
After we’d killed some time in the front yard, playing with Tag, who seemed now like such a smashingly fine dog, fetching Popsicle sticks and chasing his tail and throwing himself on his back when I growled at him, it was time to go.
Barbara unleashed massive doses of home training on my mother, thanking her sweetly and inviting her to her house sometime and generally leaving Ma as weak and stupid as she’d left me. Then, when I was sure that the other guests had safely cleared the area, I told Ma that I’d be walking Barbara home as planned.