by Chris Lynch
As hoped.
As dreamed.
Ma waved us on out of her yard and saw us to the gate. I looked back at her, and she was very very clearly happy and proud for me. And a little bit, she was something else.
I know, because I felt it for a second myself, whatever it was. But just for a second.
Leafing Through
I COMPETED WITH TAG through the whole walk to Barbara’s house. The dog would get tangled up in her feet, making Barbara scold it playfully. So I would cross over in front of her, steering her off the curb into the gutter.
“What’s the matter with you? Cut that out,” she said to me, not as nicely as she’d spoken to Tag.
We got to the intersection where traffic was moderate for an early fall evening, just as the sun was finally gone and we could hear the streetlights humming to life above us. She scooped up Tag and nuzzled her, explaining to the dog, in a kind of modified baby talk, how dangerous traffic was and how no, no, no, she was never to run in the street.
I scootched up close, my upper arm touching hers, as we waited for the light to change.
I was looking straight ahead, steely and determined as if the only thing in the world that mattered to me was the changing of that traffic light and the safe passage of my little family. When all that really mattered to me was the contact I was making with Barbara’s arm.
But I could see out of the corner of my eye as she looked at me. At my arm, then up at my grinning, overheating mug. Tag took the opportunity to lick madly at Barbara’s jaw, as if she had on beef gravy perfume. Hey dog, that was going to be my move.
“You sure got a houseload of very friendly dogs,” she said to me.
I finally faced her head-on. “Oh, and we’re just getting started,” I said, “wait’ll you see.”
I cringed as soon as I said it, before Barbara even shoved off the curb toward the opposite sidewalk, leaving me staring into her vacated spot in my universe.
“Oh, I get it,” I said as I caught up to her. “You mean, like, I’m a friendly dog too, like, one of those mental, way too friendly dogs? I get it. Well you don’t have to worry about that. See... I’m not that kind of dog... I mean I’m not one of those...”
That was the outside conversation. The inside conversation was going on at an even faster pace, and it sounded more like this:
Shut up, Elvin, shut up, for the love of god shut up. Don’t say anything more. Lick her face or her shoes or chase a stick or root through a garbage can but please find something else to do with your mouth other than talking anymore. No good, no good. Danger. Turn around. Run home. No explanation, no forwarding address, just get out while you can...
Barbara held her little dog up in front of her face, keeping it between herself and me like a shield. “Down boy,” she said. To me, not to Tag.
See, we did think alike. I knew it.
“See, we do think alike,” I said. “I was just kind of thinking of myself as a dog, and there you were thinking the same thing. Do you get that, that we both think kind of the same?”
Barbara put Tag down, and let her flop along ahead of us. My pulse immediately slowed, and I stopped talking. No, wait, it raced. Then I resumed talking.
“Shush,” Barbara said, in a friendly cautionary way.
I shushed.
The wind was picking up, making it feel and taste more like fall. Leaves were popping themselves off the trees and laying themselves down ahead of us as we turned the corner onto Barbara’s tree-busy street, and Tag was occupied enough chasing the small tornadoes of leaves that blew around from the swirling breezes that we didn’t have to control her very much. She really was a good dog after all, wasn’t she.
“This is my house,” Barbara said, picking Tag up and hugging her. She was, in fact, speaking to Tag more than to me. Fair enough, since this was the dog’s new address and not mine.
A light snapped on in the driveway as soon as Barbara pushed on her trellised wooden gate.
“Motion-sensor lights,” I said like one of those do-it-yourself doofuses, who love to show you they know every boring home improvement detail.
“Nope,” Barbara said. “Girl-Protector lights. Connected on the other end to my dad.”
I took a step back from the fence, started looking the house up and down the way you do when you hear a voice but you don’t know where it came from.
“That was one of the nicest nights of my life, Elvin,” Barbara said, from what seemed like a half mile away. It was probably more like six feet.
“Ya?” I said, then realized I should probably try to not sound surprised. “Uh, ya. My ma can cook, for sure. And it was pretty great to unload all those dogs. I thought we were going to have to...” I made the hanging-from-a-noose, tongue-dangling gesture.
Barbara was not impressed. She hummmphed at me before going on. “Your mom is the best. Tell her I said so.”
“I tell her all the time,” I said, and for once, Barbara and I really were saying the same thing at the same time.
As she backed away, toward the house, Barbara made a head gesture up toward wherever her father was hovering behind a curtain. “You understand,” she said.
I nodded, even though I didn’t entirely understand and didn’t much care to. I just watched her go. Sigh.
So disoriented I almost forgot.
The party. Hell. I was not home free yet. I had not done the dangerous part, the asking. The risking.
Quit, I said to myself, and really really meant it. You can’t go up from here, Elvin Bishop. You can only trash all the good you’ve had. Quit, while you’re ahead. Quit, while you’re crazy happy. Quit, while you can still walk. Just quit, and thereby win, for a change. Quit.
“Quit what?” Barbara asked, tilting her head in puzzlement.
Beautiful puzzlement. Sweet, playful puzzlement, letting her mouth hang a small bit open, hinting that one of us was kind of nuts. One of us was, and when he was unable to answer her, she waved and turned to go again.
“Barbara,” I said desperately, just as she’d turned the tumblers in the big dead-bolt on her big oak door. Fortunately I think desperation in my voice had become a kind of white noise to her.
She stopped. She waited.
“Okay, there’s a party, see... and usually frosh aren’t invited. In fact Frankie and me are like the first two in history, because we’re kind of—”
“Darth’s party, right?” she asked. “Sorry to cut you off there, Elvin, but the way you take the long way around things... it’ll be dawn before I get in the house and I won’t be going to any parties for a long time. Anyway, I was at the point where I was worried you were going to take some other girl.”
The old nausea of joy rose in my stomach again. Fortunately words failed me once more.
“Now that you know where I live, maybe you could come and pick me up if that’s all right. Unless you want me to meet you...”
Of course that was all right, and of course she knew it was all right.
Now!
What the hell was that?
Now. The moment. Now. Be bold for once. Act. Now.
“Now what?” she asked.
If Barbara was hearing the voice, I had to act quickly or total self-destruction was certainly my next move.
She must have been good and paralyzed by the sight of me marching up her front steps, right there in full view of her father and his floodlights and everything. Because she simply stood there and waited. No comment, no smile, no defensive tae kwon do posture.
I didn’t stop till I got there. And when I got there...
Yes I did. I kissed her, kissed Barbara, this most prettiest of girls I have ever seen. Even as I was doing it I was worrying it, fearing she would snap out of it and scream me away, but it didn’t happen. What happened instead was that she allowed her lips, her pillowy thick lips, to be pressed against mine. And they had, like, muscles to them, under the softness, little twitchy things of movement that I swore were somehow electrified and would shock me to
near death.
And so they did.
When the porch light started flicking madly, I figured it was just me. Brain overfiring and all. So that Barbara was already well inside her doorway, waving, by the time I realized I was solo again.
But I was altered then, the pressure off, the aloneness a different thing from what it ever was before. Not altogether alone. And not feeling I had anywhere to get to. I don’t think I stood there staring at the house for more than ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.
When I was a kid and I felt good, I used to chase the dried leaves in autumn all over, crazily, as the wind whipped them up and down, circular and straight and fast and without a pattern. It was pure stupid happiness. I’d do it all up and down the street and must have looked completely insane to the neighbors in their windows.
And to Barbara’s neighbors as I did it now.
Prep For Surgery
I SPENT THREE HOURS in the bathtub. Stole a fistful of Ma’s colored bath oil balls from The Body Shop, broke them open in a steaming, almost unbearable tub full of water, then sat there until I had soaked all the dork out of me. By the time I stood up, pink and wrinkled as a newborn, the bathwater had turned to a thick oily soup. So I followed it with a shower to de-slick myself.
“Smells awfully nice in there,” Ma called as she passed outside the door at one point. But that was it. Maybe I was giving off something other than carrot and lemongrass oils, because she kept strangely distant and silent with me all afternoon.
Or maybe it was me who was strangely distant and silent. Because for sure I was spending more time sprucing alone than I had spent at any time since my first penance. And that was only because I had to compose some believable sins to replace the only real ones I had, which I was too embarrassed to discuss even if the priest was in a little dark box and couldn’t see me.
No problem with that now, though. Already had the one big whopper sin to contemplate.
Sally. I never fixed what I did. But I was hoping that the whole thing just kind of healed up all by itself. You know the way little kids cover up their eyes and think nobody can see them? That was me. My version of covering up my eyes was having Frankie invite Sally to the party. And when he reported back that she was happy to go and that she seemed to hold no leftover bad feelings... well, that meant nobody could see me, right? Maybe the problem just did fade away, right?
Like my hemorrhoids. And all my fat. A good bit of it, anyway. I stood there looking into my mirror, wearing only my underwear and the long grandfather shirt with the million buttons that Mikie and Frankie practically took me by force to buy. I held the shirt up, so I could get a better look at myself, and my self was only lopping over the waistband of my boxers by about an inch, maybe two, rather than the three inches of a while back. I leaned closer to my mirrored self, examining the shirt closer, and me in it. The powder-blue stripe, barely noticeable between the thin-enough brown stripes, over the cream background, that worked. It gave me the look of, almost, robust health. Made me look flesh-colored and lean, as opposed to Michelin Man bumpy, and Michelin Man white, like I was used to looking in another lifetime.
I reached behind me without looking away from the mirror, for fear that the illusion would shatter, that the image would be replaced by... you know. I pulled my pants off the bed, those same pants I had bought on that same shopping trip before that first dance. The pants my two friends had gotten me to buy and that my mother had then shrunk, forcing me to perform the great Houdini convulsive snake dance to even fit into.
They slid up over me easily now. Just as if they belonged to me.
I tucked the shirt in. No tent maneuver for this boy.
I stared.
I looked good. I really did. How did that happen? Did somewhere along the line the Army Corps of Engineers come in and do an overhaul of the EB infrastructure? No, it was more than that.
It was Barbara, making me sick enough that I couldn’t eat and nervous enough that I ran everyplace I went.
But it was more still.
I watched myself, something like a movie, but more like the outtakes from a movie, as I started dancing a bit in the mirror, hips shaking. Stopping. Shaking again.
I had to laugh at myself. But I didn’t mind at all, laughing at myself.
Right. They had done me all right, my boys. They’d really taken me by the hand through this social thing. I’d have to finally say something to them, at the party tonight. It would be kind of cool, like, a moment. A real celebration of like, all new stuff happening...
Oh.
No. Wait. That wasn’t going to happen, was it?
I ran to the phone, dialed one of the few numbers I knew by heart.
“Franko.”
“Studley.”
“Cut it out, this is serious. I just realized, Mikie’s not invited to this party.”
“I know that. This kind of thing happens, El. Don’t sweat it. Mikie’s not sweating it.”
“He’s not? Really, you talked to him about it?”
“Of course not. Grow up, El, guys don’t talk about stuff like this. I know Mikie’s not sweating it because Mikie’s not a dink, that’s all. There will be other parties.”
“No.”
“There won’t? Elvin, you know something I don’t?”
“No, I mean, no, can’t we not leave Mike out of it? Can’t we bring him along?”
“Elvin, what did Darth say to you, exactly? He said you could come, and you could bring a date, right?”
“Right.”
“So that is what you can do. That is all you can do. There is no messing with the arrangement, trust me on this.”
“I believe you, Frank. Your friends are a little freakish about their details, don’t you think?”
“Yes. Yes I do think. And I will never mention it to them.”
“Then you get him invited, Frank.”
“Elvin?” Frankie’s voice came out all strange and unrecognizable to me. High, like I hadn’t heard it sound since first grade. “Listen, I don’t want to go places Mikie can’t go. And probably I could figure out a way to get him there. But you know what? Mikie ain’t like you or me. You want to really make him feel bad? Treat him like a lame-o who has to get a charity invite to a party. This he can deal with. That he couldn’t.”
“So, what would happen if I just brought him anyway?”
Frankie sounded so sad, and scared for me when he then said, “Oh, Elvin,” it was almost as if I was already hospitalized, surrounded by flowers and a blurry doctor saying, “Can you feel this then, Elvin? How ’bout here, any feeling here?”
Frankie continued my education. “It isn’t done, okay? Just not at all cool. And in his own way, Mikie is very cool. He knows what’s what. He doesn’t make mistakes.”
Hearing what I already knew about Mike just made me more depressed. I sighed. “Maybe I just won’t go, then.”
“Oh, Elvin,” Same sound again. Same intonation. Same hospital.
“What, Frankie, they’ll beat me up just for not being there?”
“They’re really a lot more sensitive than people give them credit for,” Frankie said. And in his world, that made some sense.
Problem was, that’s the world I was in at the moment. I considered the implications.
“I don’t care what they do to me,” I said, my voice quavering because I most certainly did care, but this was just what a guy said when he was being brave.
“But you do care what Barbara does,” Frank said. “Elvin, listen to me here. Barbara wants to go to this party. You want what Barbara wants. Mikie is your friend, so he wants what you want. Ipso faxo, Mikie wants you to go without him.”
I sat silently on my end of the phone. I didn’t want to agree with him, because I thought I was a better guy than that. I didn’t want to agree with him.
So I just shut up.
“So Mike spends tonight at home or whatever,” Frank said. “There’s always tomorrow. He’ll still be Mikie. I might die if this party went on witho
ut me, but he won’t. I’ll see you at the party.” He hung up quickly then, because neither one of us wanted to talk about it one bit further.
He was right, though, right? This party wasn’t so special. I was making it a bigger thing than it was. It wasn’t like my first penance, it wasn’t anything like my first penance.
Right. Because at my first penance, Mikie was right behind me in line, supplying me the sins I needed to get through it.
I dialed the other number I knew by heart.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said.
Silence.
“Hey,” he said again. “Hold on, somebody wants to talk to you.”
I held on as somebody took his time coming to the phone. Then, there was a sound, like an obscene phone call, only the caller wasn’t having any fun at all. There was the heavy breathing, followed by a lot of desperate gnashing of teeth and chewing of the phone receiver, and weird little coughs like the speaker had swallowed the phone cord and only gagged part of it back up.
“She’s an excellent dog,” Mikie said.
I started laughing. “Is she sick?”
“Nope. Just excited.”
“Excited? How’d you manage that? I could barely detect a pulse. When she was born, I had her all wrapped up in newspaper ready for burial until she squiggled out and started suckling one of my bike tires.”
“I let her watch TV” Mike said. “It stimulates her. She’s my new couch buddy.”
Zing. I was his old couch buddy.
Another pause. I was usually more words and fewer pauses, so I was not firing on all eight here.
“Great dinner,” Mike said finally. “I mailed your mom a thank-you—seeing as she was the one who invited us and all.”
“Great home training.”
“I know it.”
More pause. God I hated that.
“Barbara’s pretty great,” he said. “I’m jealous as hell.”
“Shut up,” I said. To my knowledge, no one had ever been jealous of me in my whole life. Except maybe for the real losers, and Mikie wasn’t one of those.