More of This World or Maybe Another

by Barb Johnson

  “I don’t know,” Pudge says. “I haven’t really decided. It might be boring.”

  Big Luce pulls her long braid over her shoulder and takes it loose from its rubber band. Pudge watches her hair spring free. “You don’t know,” he says. “It’s a lot of work.”

  Big Luce’s swinging leg goes la-le-la.

  “Where do you go to get suits?” Pudge finally has to ask because he’s not ready to say the titties part, and his ignorance, this particular ignorance, fills him with shame, and his throat stops the lemon ice from going down so that it burns instead of cooling and then it’s pulling at his cheeks.

  “Pudge, honey.” Big Luce leans over and puts her hand on the knee of the stupid, tight pants, and then Pudge is crying because his eyes will cry even when he tells them not to.

  Don’t, he keeps saying to himself, biting down on his own teeth. Don’t. But he cries because he’s a titty baby. “I’ve got titties,” he says. There’s no more time. Aunt Alma will be walking through the gate any minute.

  “What?” Big Luce asks.

  Pudge sits up straight and pokes them out. “Titties,” he repeats.

  “Well, everybody’s got titties, Pudge. The problem here is that you got a too-tight shirt.”

  This much Pudge knows. The question is how to make the titties go away. How to get a shirt that will hide them at least, a suit that’s made for a boy Pudge’s size. When Pudge suggested to his mother that maybe he should try on the clothes at the store to be sure of the fit, she just made that sound she makes when Pudge says something stupid, the pshh-ing sound. “I’m not hauling your fat ass from store to store so everyone can stare at me,” she said. That’s when his mother told him the thing about how small clothes would be an incentive to lose weight. “You got your pants cutting into that table muscle all day,” she said, poking him in his belly, “you might think more about what you’re shoving in your pie hole.”

  Big Luce squeezes Pudge’s knee. “You got a man’s chest and a boy’s legs and arms.” She puts her arm next to Pudge’s. It’s a lot longer. “See?” she says. “You’re still growing. Pretty soon, your legs and arms will grow, and it’ll all even out.”

  It could be true. It might be that he has a man’s chest, Pudge thinks.

  “Look at me,” Big Luce says, standing up to toss their empty cups into the trash. “I used to be teensy till I grew.”

  Big Luce is six feet even. “You were short?” Pudge asks.

  “I surely was. One year I needed a little step stool to hang up my clothes, the next year I didn’t.” Big Luce sits back down next to Pudge, pats his knee again. “Same thing will happen for you.”

  Pudge makes a muscle, even though it’s a little kid thing to do. “Look at this.” A muscle is proof that something good is on the way. Maybe when his arms grow out, he’ll look like that guy, like Arnold Swarzanecken.

  Big Luce gives the muscle a squeeze. “Not bad, Galahad,” she says, like it’s the best muscle in the world. Big Luce just loves everything. Aunt Alma, too. His mama and Aunt Alma are opposites. Pudge wonders if he and his sister will be opposites when they’re grown.

  A buzzer sounds from inside the laundry, and Big Luce goes in the open back door to pull clothes from the big industrial dryer. On her way in, she puts a hand under Pudge’s chin and makes him look at her. “Aunt Alma and I are having a cookout tonight,” she says. “I wish you’d come over for dinner.”

  There’s nothing Pudge loves more than sitting with Big Luce and Aunt Alma and playing I Spy on the bayou outside their trailer. Even though he’s too old for it. Even though his mother has told him not to hang out down there because Big Luce and Aunt Alma are an abomination, going against God’s plan. The devil, she’s said, will work through them to get at Pudge, so he should steer clear.

  Once, Pudge made a mistake and bragged to his father that he and Big Luce had caught twenty-seven fish. He didn’t say the part about how the fish were really hand bones—carpal, metacarpal, phalanges—or that fishing is what they call the game they play to help Aunt Alma study for her nurse’s tests. His father didn’t call Pudge a liar. Instead, the next weekend they had to go fishing so Pudge could enlighten his father about his technique. That’s the word his father used. Enlighten me. And then Pudge had to do the whole thing. The complicated fishing pole, the worm, the hook, pulling the scared fish from the water. And then it had to be hit with the club Pudge’s father made from the end of a baseball bat. You had to hit it to make it stop flopping around, to put it out of its misery, his father said, like smashing it with the club was some sort of kindness. “Don’t be such a titty baby,” his father told Pudge when Pudge looked away from the fish while he smashed its skull with the bat. It was all Pudge’s fault for exaggerating, for making his father think that he’d really gone fishing with Big Luce. It wasn’t ever a good idea to mention her name at home, but sometimes Pudge just forgot.

  Pudge’s father is gone now, maybe for good this time, his mother says. At night, after the drinking starts and she’s finished being mean, Pudge’s mother sits on the sofa with Belinda, crying. It’s better if Pudge comes home late when his mother is asleep on the couch with Belinda tucked in the crook of one arm. His sister knows to wait, to be quiet, and she just stares at whatever’s in front of her until Pudge comes home and puts her to bed.

  By the time Big Luce finishes pulling the clothes from the dryer and comes back outside, the sun has moved past the corner of the Laundromat, and it’s firing into the courtyard. She opens the umbrella over the table, something Pudge could’ve done, if he’d only thought of it. Big Luce reaches over and pretends to steal his nose, which he has always loved. “We can make banana pudding tonight,” she says.

  Then right before Pudge expects it, Aunt Alma comes through the gate, still in her nurse’s uniform, looking like an angel, clean and smart and happy to see him.

  “Pudge!” she says and gives him that smile, all her teeth shining. “You coming to the cookout?”

  Later that night, after the hot dogs and banana pudding, after Aunt Alma shows Pudge how to make a hat out of fishing line and a paper sack, Pudge starts home. When he gets to Palmyra Street, he decides to check on the closed Laundromat. Really, he wants to make a wish. The snack machine in the front of the Laundromat puts a light out on the sidewalk in front. If you make a wish while you walk through that light, the wish will come true. Pudge has proof. The night before tryouts for honors chorus at school, he wished to get picked. Pudge knows it was his walk through the snack machine light that got him a place with the altos.

  For twenty-three days, Pudge has not walked through the snack machine light and wished for his father’s return. It’s what his mother cries for every night, but Pudge just can’t bring himself to wish for what his mother wants. “People don’t necessarily want what’s good for them,” he heard his Aunt Alma say to Big Luce in the kitchen this evening when they thought Pudge couldn’t hear. “If she takes him back, I’m not going to stay out of it anymore.” The refrigerator door slammed shut. “I’ll kidnap her if I have to.”

  Tonight, when Pudge walks through the light, he wishes for things to even out, like Big Luce said. He wishes for his legs and arms to go ahead and grow. He wishes for his titties to turn to muscle.

  When he gets home, the apartment is dark and quiet, but that isn’t the part that worries Pudge. What worries Pudge is that his mother isn’t asleep on the couch. What worries Pudge is the way Aunt Alma said, “If she takes him back again…” In Pudge’s bedroom, the lid of the footlocker is closed with the front hasp flipped up to keep it from sealing shut. When he opens it, Belinda is sound asleep inside. Her little fingers curl and uncurl when Pudge touches them.

  The door to his mother’s bedroom is closed, and this can only mean one thing: Aunt Alma’s going to have to kidnap his mother.

  There’s breakfast in the morning, everyone together, which is how it always is the first morning after his father comes back. Pudge’s mother has somehow gott
en a dozen eggs and a whole pound of bacon. Grits and biscuits. And there’s butter that no one’s watching Pudge take. His father is missing the little group of teeth that snap into the front of his mouth. After he’s been gone awhile, Pudge’s father almost never comes home with his teeth. The blank place makes him look like he’s putting on an act meant to make people laugh.

  “I was thinking I’d go around to American Can today,” his father tells his mother. “See if maybe I can get on in sales.”

  “Oh, you’d be great at sales,” Pudge’s mother says in a cheerful voice, and he wonders how she knows this.

  Belinda’s in her high chair, grits all over her. She doesn’t like to have food on her, and Pudge tenses up when she starts to moan. He puts a piece of bacon in his mouth and concentrates on the salty good taste. Belinda just wants someone to wipe her face. When Pudge stands up to do it, their father cuts him the eyes—tending babies is woman’s work—so Pudge grabs another piece of toast instead and sits down. He crunches on the near-burnt bread to drown out whatever’s coming. But his father surprises him and says a first-day-back kind of thing. “Hey baby,” he says to Belinda, smiling. “Hey.” He reaches for a clean spot on her arm and wags it. “Say, ‘Hi, Daddy! ’ Say, ‘Hi!’” Belinda stops moaning, goes completely still. Pudge imagines that eventually she’ll be able to talk, to say what’s bothering her. So far she hasn’t said one word.

  After school, Pudge walks to the grocery and hangs out reading Muscle World in the magazine aisle. Make a plan, Big Luce always says. Wishing is the first part of a plan. She was right about how Pudge’s titties mean he has a man’s chest; all the men in Muscle World have them. But their titties match the other bulges on their giant arms and legs.

  Later, he goes to the Laundromat. Big Luce is out front talking to Deysi Hernandez’s grandmother, who doesn’t speak much English. Whenever she comes to the Laundromat, though, just like magic, Big Luce starts talking Spanish, too. Pudge can’t imagine how she learned to do that. Maybe she wished for it, and it came to her.

  Deysi Hernandez is the smallest girl in Pudge’s class and the prettiest, Pudge thinks. Maybe the smartest, too. When she and her grandmother go shopping, Deysi does all the talking. Pudge gave her a secret valentine last year. She never said anything about it, so he guesses she hasn’t figured out it was from him. If she’s at the Laundromat today, he’s going to ask her if she got an invitation to Jerry Beatty’s party. Supposedly, everyone got one. It might be a trick on Pudge, or maybe not. Jerry Beatty’s father is a minister, and his mother makes Jerry invite his whole class to things.

  “There’s folding in the back,” Big Luce says, “if you’d like to make some money.”

  Folding means folding clean laundry. That’s part of Big Luce’s Laundromat business. Doing other people’s laundry and bringing it to them all folded up. Pudge goes to the back and pulls warm towels and tablecloths from a big basket. After he folds everything, he wraps it up in brown paper and ties it with a string. He loves the brown paper. It’s what he made Deysi’s secret valentine with. He had hoped the paper would be a hint about who was “Crazy for Deysi!” Probably everyone is, though.

  Pudge puts the brown packages in the insulated wooden box of Big Luce’s delivery cart, which used to be her father’s ice cream cart. Her father made the whole thing himself, the three-wheeled bike and the insulated box. All it took was some good old-fashioned ingenuity, Big Luce said.

  Pudge wants to surprise Big Luce by getting the rack for the hanging clothes that goes on the bike. It’s tall and wide, made from galvanized pipe, shaped like the chin-up bars at school. Pudge’s arms aren’t really long enough to carry it yet, but maybe there’s another way to move it? Maybe drag it? In the courtyard’s shed, he finds the rack leaning against the wall. He grabs one leg of the giant galvanized U and pulls on it, and then it’s like the rack is alive. Yanking on one side throws the thing out of balance, and it swings around the shed with a mind of its own.

  The rack knocks a shelf loose, and a pile of rusty, cast-iron window weights scatters, banging against the cement slab and rolling around so that Pudge almost slips on them. “Fuck!” Pudge says, then “Sorry, sorry,” though no one can hear him out here. He puts the shelf back up and lays the weights on it just like Big Luce had them: eight pounders, then ten pounders, then twelve. A while back Big Luce said she planned to spray-paint them and use them for decoration.

  Pudge does his best to get the shed straightened up, then goes out to sit in the courtyard until Big Luce comes for the rack. When she does, he watches her spread her arms and lift it easily.

  “Big Luce,” Pudge says, following her inside, “could I use a couple of those barbells from the shed?”

  “Barbells?”

  “You know, those weights. The ones from the back windows?”

  “Oh sure. You can have all of them.” Big Luce lifts the rack and fits it into the tubes on either side of the delivery cart. She checks the tags on the hanging clothes and puts them on the rack. “There’s spray paint back there, too, if you want it. Red, I think.”

  Pudge doesn’t want to get too excited in case the window weights are not the answer, but he does his Tarzan yell anyway. The window weights are as big around as the thick plantains in the grocery, only heavier, because they’re made of iron.

  After Aunt Alma gets to the Laundromat and Big Luce leaves with the deliveries, he sprays the rusty cylinders red. It makes them look official. He threads clothesline through the hanging loops of the weights, making twenty-pound loads that he carries around the block to his house, one load at a time. He has to rest a lot. In Muscle World it said you have to start small and work your way up. You have to do it every day or you won’t get any results.

  When he goes up the stairwell with the last load, he finds Aunt Alma in the kitchen talking with his mama. Aunt Alma has a quiet, asking voice, and his mama answers her with the pretend calm voice she uses to explain Pudge’s father to other people.

  “You and the kids can stay in our big trailer,” Aunt Alma says. “Luce and I can hang out in the Airstream until you find a place that Clayton won’t drag his ass back to.”

  “Nobody needs to go anywhere, Alma. Clayton is a man’s man, and sometimes he needs to go off and do what men do. I don’t expect you would understand that.”

  Pudge walks right past his mama and Aunt Alma to his bedroom without either of them saying a thing. He cuts the clothesline that’s holding the weights together and lines them up under his bed, eights, then tens, then twelves. The twelves are as long as the bones from his foot to his knee (tibia and fibula), and he can’t lift even one over his head. When he grabs one with both hands and yanks it into the air, he loses his balance and falls backward into the closet door, knocking the door off its track.

  “What are you doing in there?” his mama yells.

  “I’m fixing something,” Pudge yells back. He goes to the hall closet and gets the little toolbox his father gave him for Christmas last year. He imagines having a three-wheel bike like Big Luce’s, except the little chest would be filled with tools, and he could ride around and ask people if they had anything that needed fixing. After he gets the closet door back up, he turns to Belinda’s bed. It shouldn’t have a lid. It shouldn’t. He unscrews the hinges and pulls the lid off and props it behind the footlocker. He might draw Belinda some pictures and tape them on the lid for her to look at. He hides the screws. He’ll tell his father the lid came loose and fell off.

  “I’m trying to save my marriage,” he hears his mother say out in the living room. “You don’t know what marriage is like. It takes work.”

  “Work. Really?”

  “Who’s going to support these kids, Alma?” Pudge hears the calm leak out of his mother’s voice. “And a boy needs his father.”

  Pudge wants to tell his mother that he’d be okay if his father lived somewhere else. Somewhere Pudge could visit and leave. And take Belinda with him. Poor Belinda. She’s got to stay wherever she’s
put because she’s a baby. She can’t deny doing wrong, can’t turn their father’s attention to something else when his anger starts to aim itself at her. She’s stuck. They’re all stuck, but somehow his mother can’t see it.

  In the mirror at the back of the Laundromat, Pudge barely recognizes himself. He buttons the suit coat that Aunt Alma and Big Luce bought him at J.C. Penney’s when he told them that he was for sure going to stay in honors chorus. It’s a great suit. No pinching or poking. His father said for Pudge to tell Aunt Alma that she can keep the fucking monkey suit, that last time he checked, he was still the head of his household, and he didn’t need a couple of bull daggers dressing his son like a fruit. Bull dagger isn’t in the dictionary. Pudge looked. Aunt Alma said he can keep the suit at the Laundromat and wear it anytime he wants. Clothes make the man, the lady at Penney’s said. Pudge is going to wear the suit to Jerry Beatty’s party today to see what kind of man it makes him.

  When he gets to the Beattys’ house, which is right next to Mid-City Methodist Church, a bunch of kids are standing around the dining room table waiting for someone to serve them punch. Deysi Hernandez is right near the front of the line. No adults in sight. Pudge is the only one in a suit, and it makes him feel grown up. He just walks right over to the punch bowl and lifts the silver ladle like he knows what he’s doing.

  “Ladies first,” Pudge says and hands a cup of punch to Deysi with a nod.

  “Thank you,” Deysi says, and she looks at Pudge like he’s something special.

  When he finishes serving punch to the other kids, Pudge walks out to the backyard where several mothers are cooking hot dogs and hamburgers and running back and forth setting everything up. Pudge hopes he can get through the party without messing up his new suit. He should probably take off the jacket at least. Without it, though, he goes back to being round at the bottom and round at the top, the strip of belt like an equator separating his halves.