by Joni Rodgers
“Mel, please,” Kit chided. She could tell Marnie wasn’t amused.
“Oh, pardon us, Miss Kitty,” Butch said. “I guess we’re not fit for polite company, little brother.”
“Sorry, babe.” Mel leaned down and kissed her in an annoying, dismissive, Me-big-heterosexual-guy-you-Jane kind of way. “We just came in to get another beer.”
“So go get us a couple o’ beers, woman!” Butch hollered.
Kit wanted to smack him.
Mel laughed heartily, and Kit wanted to smack him, too, even though he clapped Butch on the shoulder and said, “I’ll get ‘em.”
“Why don’t I?” Marnie offered, grateful for any reason to get out of there.
“You boys better cut yourselves off,” Neeva warned, and she wasn’t joking. “I won’t have drunks out on my front porch.”
“Relax, Ma,” Butch said. “Nobody’s getting drunk on a coupla beers.”
“That behavior might be fine for the marines, but I won’t have it out on my front porch.”
“Don’t start on the marines, Ma,” Butch darkened. He did sound drunk.
“Hey,” Mel cut in, “you know what we should do? We should dig up a deck of cards.”
“When did I start on the marines?” Neeva pressed her hand to her chest in innocence. “I have nothing to say about the marines.”
“We should dig up a deck of cards and play some cribbage.”
“God bless the marines!” Neeva declared, “Semper feeeee.”
“I mean it, Ma,” Butch warned. “Mel and I did our duty, same as—”
“Fee fi fo fum.”
“Hey, Butchie, huh? What about a game of crib?”
“Maybe, they’d have taught him to be a man in the marines,” Butch postured, “instead of some pansy-ass—”
“C’mon, Butchy, huh? Remember, Ma?” Mel was begging like a puppy, “Remember how we all used to sit out on the porch and play crib?”
“They teach a man to be a gentleman in the air force,” Neeva said. “They teach a man to live with some dignity.”
“Did they teach him to die with dignity, too, Ma?”
“Butch,” Mel implored.
“Did they teach him that in the precious fuckin’ air force?”
“You watch your mouth, young man,” her voice quavered.
“But he’s a saint, and we’re shit because we came home and—”
“Butch!” Mel stepped between them. “Enough. Ma, he didn’t mean it, okay? Butchy, c’mon. Let’s just go outside, man, all right? Let’s go on out and have a beer.”
He shoved his older brother through the screen door, farting loudly just as it clapped shut behind them.
“Hmm,” Neeva pursed her lips in disgust. “Another small country heard from.”
“Well,” Marnie hedged, “I think we should probably get going.”
“You. Just. Got. Here.” Neeva gestured with her cigarette as if she were underlining each word on a chalkboard.
“Well, I—I know, but—umm, I’ve been really tired lately and ... and my obstetrician said I should keep my feet elevated.”
“Here.” Neeva pushed an ottoman across the floor with her foot. “Elevation. Sixteen inches above sea level. Probably the highest point in Southeast Texas.”
“Thanks.”
Marnie shrank back into her chair and gingerly propped her feet up.
They sat, picking at their cake and skiffing noncommittal chitchat back and forth across the coffee table until ten-thirty when Marnie manufactured some reason to be out in the kitchen, and Neeva excused herself to the “little girls’ room.” Otto was sleeping in the recliner, his top teeth slipping down, forming the off-kilter grin of a skeleton in his slack mouth. Outside the screen door, Butch and Mel were swinging on the glider, Mitzi and Trudy asleep on their laps. They were definitely drunk now, making up limericks and laughing. Being too loud. Kit shifted uncomfortably in the doorway, not wanting to embarrass Mel, but worried that all that base and debasing humor, not to mention the smell of all that beer, might be entering into Mitzi’s alpha state.
“ ... he thought he could ride it,
but fell down inside it,
and that’s the last dat was seen of da minah!”
Butch cracked up at his own punch line, and Mel fairly howled, but then hushed, “Shh ... keep it down, man. Kit’s gonna kill me.”
Butch said something she couldn’t hear, and they laughed even harder at that.
“Oh, geez,” Mel gasped. “Ah... geez.”
“Oh, shit.” Butch wiped his eyes. He shifted Trudy over to his other shoulder and rested his cheek on top of her head. “Christ, Mel. Ma’s right. Teddy should be here.”
“Yeah.” Mel put his hand on Butch’s shoulder, and the glider creaked back and forth.
“God, I miss him sometimes.”
“Me too, Butch. And I miss you, too.”
“Well, drag your ass down here once in a while,” Butch complained.
“Why don’t you drag your ass up to Houston?” Mel countered.
“Oh yeah, Miss Kitty would really love that.”
“I’ll handle Kit,” Mel said as if he did it all the time.
“I bet you will,” Butch poked him in the side. “And I bet you’ll like doin’ it, too.”
“Shut up,” Mel snickered and pushed his hand away, but Butch kept digging his finger at Mel’s big stomach.
“Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty—”
“Knock it off, ya sleazeball.”
“Nice pussy, pussy, pussy—”
“I mean it, Butch. Just lay off her.”
“I’d rather lay on her.”
“I said, shut up!” Mel wasn’t playing anymore.
“Geez,” Butch made a puffing sound with his lips, “you don’t have to get bent about it.”
“I’m not, but geez... Don’t say that kind of shit about my wife, okay?”
“Fine. Geez.”
Butch finished off his beer. Mel took one more swallow off his and set the bottles on the floor below the glider.
“Why don’t I give you guys a ride home?” he asked.
“Nah. You’re in worse shape than I am, little brother.”
“Kit wouldn’t mind driving—”
“Christ! No thanks,” Butchy waved off the suggestion, and there was an uncomfortable silence until Butch said, “We’ll let Trudy drive. What d’ya say, Trudes? Wanna drive the old man home?” Butch waved her lifeless hand and made a falsetto voice. “Shame on you, Daddy! You’re shit-faced!” And they cracked up again.
“Seriously though, Butchy,” Mel said.
“I know. I know. It’s okay. I’ll let Marnie drive. Designated preggo.”
“Butch,” Marnie pushed past Kit and opened the screen door, “you know I hate that word. Especially in front of Trudy.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
His bravado seemed to dissipate somewhat when the light from the living room cracked open the still night air around the swing.
“Butch, I need to go home. Now.” Marnie turned wearily to Kit. “Sorry to leave you guys, but I think we’re at the saturation point.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kit said. “You need to take care of yourself.”
“We’ll see you in the morning, okay?” Butch slung Trudy over his shoulder.
“We’re taking off first thing,” Mel said, as if he fully expected to be up and functioning hangover-free before noon.
“Yeah, well. Catch ya in the morning then,” Butch told his brother.
Kit rolled her eyes in the dark. How many times had she heard this exchange? Now, Mel would say, yeah, great, see ya in the morning, and then, without ever having to actually say goodbye, Butch and Marnie would leave. But invariably, the following morning, Kit would sit at the kitchen table listening to the coffee turn to acid in her stomach, struggling to make conversation with Neeva while the front half of the day ticked by, and Mel snored like a rototiller upstairs, and Butch and Marnie were nowhere to be seen.
The following morning, Butch and Marnie were nowhere to be seen, but Mel surprised her, nudging her awake a little after six.
It was still dark in the room he had shared with Teddy once upon a time. Books and balls and Tonka trucks slumbered on the dusty shelves. A bas-relief map of Texas was propped on top of the dresser along with a Popsicle-stick replica of the Alamo and Teddy’s swimming trophies and Mel’s model cars. Mitzi and Coo were still breathing evenly inside their sleeping bags on the floor, and Kit was deep in dreaming something about Ander and the underside of the blue hoosier when she became aware of Mel rubbing himself against the small of her back. She hadn’t heard him creep across the hardwood floor, stepping over the Erector Set and baseball bats to sardine himself in with her on the single bed. An old screen door opened in Kit’s dream when the metal springs skreeked and sagged under their combined weight. As she became conscious, the random creakiness settled into a soft, squeaky pattern. Mel found his way inside her and took up his familiar rhythm. She pushed back to meet him, bracing her hands against the Raquel Welch poster on the wall, and he moaned low in his throat.
Raquel smiled down on them, dressed in a feral bikini, bronzed and beautiful, rising from the spangled blue surf. Her hand was poised in such a way that she might have only just reached out of the photograph to inscribe the blessing beside her sloping hipbone.
“To Teddy,” it was signed, “Come home safely. All my love, Raquel.”
But the seductive benediction was not enough for Teddy. Despite all his prayers and imaginings, he was about to get laid by the other kind of bombshell.
He put the poster up during his last leave home and, at twenty-one years of age, was shipped off to Cambodia, never to return. He never again laughed with his brothers on the swing, never played another hand of cribbage on the summer porch, never woke before dawn, silent in the single bed, one hand pressed against the exquisite thigh of the goddess, the other orchestrating a squeaky rhythm, as he envisioned himself doing exactly what Mel was doing right now.
“Honeymoon over already?”
Kit almost dropped her coffee cup. She hadn’t seen Neeva sitting at the dark kitchen table, but now she noticed the smell of cigarettes and the wisps of smoke curling up in front of the dawn-lit window.
“I’m sorry,” Kit didn’t know how else to answer. “Did we wake you?”
“No.”
Kit knew they hadn’t. As soon as she turned on the light over the stove, she could tell that, if Neeva had been to bed at all, she hadn’t bothered to undress.
“Sit on down,” Neeva said. “Take a load off, Annie.”
Kit sat.
“God, he’s getting huge.” Neeva drew deeply on her cigarette. “He must crush the life out of you.”
Anything Kit could have said in response would have felt like talking dirty out on the porch swing, so she just sipped her coffee.
“Why don’t you put him on a diet before he drops dead of a stroke?”
“I can’t make up his mind for him,” Kit said. “He’ll do something about it when he’s ready.”
At least, that’s what he kept telling her when they argued about it. Two weeks ago, Kit would have said it was the biggest problem in their marriage, though of course, she wouldn’t have said it to Neeva.
“I don’t know why he listens to Butch about that tranny.” Neeva crushed the cigarette onto her coffee saucer and fished another one out of the pack. “Butch doesn’t know anything about rebuilding a tranny. But does he ask me? Nooooo. I’m just an old lady. What do I know of things mechanical? Just because I spent all of World War II inside the belly of a B-29 and the next thirty years under an eighteen-wheeler—what do I know about rebuilding a tranny? I was only the best damn mechanic Shankow-Turner ever had.” She nodded, and the glow of her lighter cast deep shadows under her eyes. “They got rid of all the other girls after the war. But not me. They knew I was good. They knew I was smart. They kept me on before anybody ever heard of a ‘maternity leave.’ They kept me on, and they knew why. They might not have admitted it, but they knew. The foreman, Frank Dupuis, told me on more than one occasion. They didn’t want me to quit in ‘74 when I had my breasts off, either. They kept saying, ‘She’ll be back.’ But I knew I wouldn’t. I knew I was done.” She shook her head, then shrugged. “That was after Teddy. I didn’t think I’d live through it, because I didn’t want to. But I did,” she sighed. “And here I am. And I’d bet money it’s the linkage to the transaxle. But does he ask me? Noooooo.” She shook her head, bottom lip out. “Nobody asks the old lady anything anymore. But I used to be regarded as a woman of intelligence. A woman of faith. A woman of beauty. I was just like you, Kit.”
Kit shuddered at the very thought.
“Men always marry women just like their mothers. That way, they never have to grow up,” Neeva went on. “On the other hand, look at Marnie. There’s no comparison between me and that mousey little pip-squeak. Butch’s first wife, though—
Arlis? Did you ever get to meet her?”
“No,” Kit said, though she’d answered that question a hundred times before, and she wasn’t sure her attendance was required for the conversation to continue, anyway.
“What—a—bitch,” Neeva pronounced. “She had her pruning shears ready when she saw him coming. It drove him to drink. Drove him to see other women. And that divorce was one for the talk shows. Very nasty. Every bit of their filthy laundry flying out on the clothesline of open court. Neither one of them wanted custody of Blake. They asked me to take him, but I’d have sooner brought Charles Manson home and adopted him.”
Kit kept wishing she’d hear one of the kids come padding down in their footie pj’s, wanting some presweetened, junk-food cereal, dry in a cup, so they could sit on the floor in front of the TV and munch on it while Kit got their things together, and Mel loaded the car, and they could all just get in and go to Matagorda.
“Anxious to get out of here?” Neeva asked.
“No. No, of course not.”
“You keep looking at the hallway, glancing around—glance glance. He won’t be down for hours. Men release a chemical into their bloodstream, you know. Right after. It makes them sleep. Don’t say God never did womankind any favors.” She gave Kit a confidential sideways look and sucked her cigarette down to the filter. “He’ll be down in a couple hours. Then I’m going to make you kids some breakfast. Pancakes.”
She nodded to seal the announcement and poured a cup from the Mr. Coffee that nobody could say they gave her.
“You know how Melvin loves his pancakes. ‘Your daddy always loved his pancakes.’ That’s what I told Cooper and Millicent.” She held the cup out as if to raise a toast. “Cooper and Millicent. What a couple of bizarre monikers to hang on your offspring. I don’t know what you kids were thinking. I told the girls on the bowling league, ‘I don’t know what those kids were thinking.’ Then I reminded myself that I was talking about a Sugar Land girl named Kitten Amaryllis. I said, ‘Melvin must have married some flower child throw-back to the 1960s.’” She moved her cup off the saucer to make way for the cigarette butt. “Of course, you’re too young to throw back to the ‘60s, aren’t you? I laid eyes on you that first time, I said, ‘My God, he’s robbed the cradle. She’s a baby. May and December. He’s fifteen years older than she is.’”
“No,” Kit said, “just... twelve.”
“Oh, well then! What’s a dozen years, give or take. Combined with the fact that he’s practically begging for a coronary.” She lit another cigarette, then asked the lighter, “Which one will be the merry widow?” She set it down and spun it on the table, and it stopped with the click mechanism pointing toward Kit. “You win.”
“Wow. Look at the time.” Kit got up and set her cup in the sink. “I think I’ll just go up and roust my gang out of bed.”
“It’s only seven-thirty. My God. Good thing you’re not in a hurry.”
“Well, we were thinking about stopping in Matagorda.”
�
��Fine,” Neeva waved her aside. “Get them up. Go.”
“Well, I didn’t mean we have to leave this second—”
“Obviously, you have better things to do than sit around with the old lady.”
“Neeva—”
“Kit-ten! Go on! No one’s begging you to stay.” She closed her eyes and put her cigarette to her narrow lips, cheeks concave with the deep inhalation. “No one’s inviting you to come back, either.”
“Neeva ...” Kit sat down and placed her palms on the table. “Why does this always have to be so hard?”
Neeva expelled her smoky breath as if Kit had punched her in the stomach.
“Ask your husband,” she said, and it sounded like the air was all in the top part of her chest, sewn in by the scars of the mastectomy. “You just ask him ‘why?’ He’s the one who took off for seventeen years. Never let me know if he was alive or dead. He’s the one who came waltzing back with a wife and kid. Hey, I’m home! Drop everything and look at me! I’m part of the family again! But where was he when I had cancer? Where was he the day of his brother’s funeral?”
“Neeva, you know it was too late when he found out, or he would have been there. It kills him that he wasn’t able to be there!”
“But he didn’t have any trouble popping in six months later to pick up Teddy’s Falcon. Teddy’s first—his only car. Into which, I might add, I had just dropped a brand new engine.”
“Oh, Neeva, you know that wasn’t—”
“He didn’t have to go into the marines in the first place! A family sends two boys off to a war—oh, excuse me, a police action—and the third one doesn’t have to go. He wanted to go! He thought the damn jungle was preferable to his own—”
“What’s going on?” Mel wandered into the kitchen, scratching his stomach, so disheveled with early morning that even the clean T-shirt didn’t look clean on him. “Kit?”
“Nothing. I just—I’m sorry, Mel,” she stammered, “I—I said something stupid and upset your mother.”
“Oh, no!” Neeva mocked fluttering her hands on either side of her head. “Oh, my God, Mel! I’m so sorry! I upset the old lady!”
“Ma, c’mon—”
“I was going to make breakfast for you, Melvin! Pancakes! But if you’re in such a damn hurry, then just go. Go on! Get out of my house!”