“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“It is! And while I’m complaining, Cathy slices English muffins with a butter knife, and then barely toasts them at all so they’re still pale and floppy.”
“Oh no, the horror!” Laura said, gently mocking him. Slowly, so as not to challenge Ottoline, she reached over and put her hand on Duncan’s forehead, which was still damp with sweat. He was flushed and he seemed congested. Maybe he was coming down with a cold.
“It matters to me,” Duncan continued. “And yesterday Darlene sliced my muffin with a knife so unevenly that the thin side was burned black while the fat side was underdone. Then she scraped the burnt one and thought I wouldn’t notice. Even though Mounika tried to do better, she refused to use her thumbs, and insisted on splitting the muffin with a fork, so it still came out too smooth and flat.”
“Not enough nooks and crannies,” Laura said, trying to keep a respectful tone. “I promise a deeply scabrous, cragged, toasted muffin for you. I do understand.” She herself had an atavistic appreciation for the smell of burnt toast and the sound of scraping. Her mother had been a chronic toast burner. Laura grew up believing that thoroughly scraping blackened toast over the sink, leaving a shower of charcoal dust, was the recipe for toast.
“I know you do,” said Duncan wearily. “But I can’t depend on you for everything. I even tried to teach Ottoline how to split a muffin with her little opposable thumbs, but she just kept taking bites and then she crumbled up the whole thing. I feel deprived and I get upset, and then I feel guilty, as if I’m being peevish and fussy with the PCAs about every little thing, and meanwhile, even when I am fussy, they can’t get everything right. I give up asking. I don’t care. It doesn’t really matter.”
“But Dunc, you do care! Nobody in the world cares more about how exactly he wants his eggs and his toasted English muffin! We haven’t even begun to discuss your jam closet! You should have things the way you want them. You have a right.”
“I loved all my little details of daily life. When I was in charge of them. Now I’m supposed to be the patient patient, just accepting whatever comes my way without opinions or preferences about these things any more, but I still do care. Having a spinal cord injury doesn’t mean you no longer care how your muffin is toasted or if your scrambled eggs are overcooked. This is just all too hard,” Duncan rasped, his voice giving out. He was thinking about how earlier in the week Cathy had poured buttermilk into his coffee, mistaking it for Half & Half. After the first sip he had nearly burst into tears. Cathy started her mornings with a Diet Coke and had offered him one instead. “Everything is just too much for me. I can’t do it. I give up.”
“I know,” Laura said soothingly. “It’s hard, and you’re handling everything so well. You really are. And not everything is too much, Dunc. Is our little monkeypants too much for you?”
Duncan shifted to touch his jaw against the soft fur of Ottoline’s haunch. “What do you think, Ottoline?” he asked. “What’s your position on the English muffin question? Life’s just a bowl of blueberries for you.”
“Tell us, Ottoline,” Laura said. “Tell us.”
Ottoline chirped at the sound of her name, and gazed at Laura. Duncan made a clicking sound inside his mouth, and she chirruped back at him. She had her people.
“Is that thunder again?” Duncan asked. “In January? In the dark? It really was an evening all afternoon-ish day. If that’s more rain you know it’s going to soak into the snow on the roof and freeze and make the ice damming worse. I hope you moved the rest of the books from that shelf upstairs. All the rest of the M’s and some of the N’s, right?”
She would tell him about the Explicated Four-Square House and the Cavendishes in a week or two, when it was all arranged and he couldn’t possibly object. She hoped he would be pleased. She wanted to be able to present it to him as a fait accompli when she presented him with the framed drawings of the house.
There was another rumble of thunder, followed a moment later by the clatter of rain against the windows. Ottoline cocked her head, listening, listening, curious, curious, everything in the world a question.
THIRTEEN
Ottoline yanked the plastic bag
OTTOLINE YANKED THE PLASTIC BAG DOWN OVER the musk melon, which wobbled on the table. “Good girl!” praised Duncan, “That was faster. Again. Pull it all the way in one fast move! Go! Good. Again. Down! Down! That’s it! Good girl!” He held out a blueberry in his cupped hand, and she snatched it and stuffed it in her mouth, devouring it greedily while searching his hand for another treat. “You’ll get another treat when you’ve earned it.”
She dug her fingernails into the fragrant, soft stem end of the melon and scrabbled out a small piece of rind, which she ate, and then she straddled the melon to get a better grip so she could dig into the sweet flesh of the melon with both hands and excavate in earnest, now that she had found a way in.
“You look ridiculous, Ottoline,” Laura said, passing through the kitchen with a basket of laundry. “What is this, a melon rodeo? Dunc, don’t let her mount the fruit! We’re eating that tonight. Let’s at least pretend to be hygienic.”
There was a scuffling sound at the front door, which made Ottoline sit up and cock her head inquisitively, and then a moment later the doorbell sounded.
“I’ll get it,” Laura called up from the laundry room in the cellar. Of course she would get it. There was an automatic opener that allowed him to roll out the back door and down the long straight ramp (made from economical cedar, at Duncan’s insistence) to the open patch of grass in their yard, adjacent to the narrow driveway they shared with Jesse and Frank next door. But Duncan had no way to open the heavy old front door, as he knew well from the times he had been on his own, shouting instructions through the door to the United Parcel or Federal Express driver. Usually Ottoline alerted when her beloved UPS truck pulled up in front of the house, so it was someone or something else on this rainy Saturday afternoon in March.
Laura came into the kitchen with a bemused look on her face. “You have visitors.”
“I don’t want visitors,” Duncan said irritably, annoyed by her constant intrusions on the training session with Ottoline. On the weekends, Laura was home all day and he had much less privacy. “You know that.”
“You want these visitors,” said Laura, unclipping Ottoline’s lead from Duncan’s chair. “They’re in the living room. Let me put Ottoline in her cage for now and then in a while you can introduce them.” She unclipped the lead from Ottoline’s waist collar as she hopped onto the back of a kitchen chair. “Come on, honey, cage! Take a little break from assaulting the melon. Cage! Good girl.” Ottoline leaped cooperatively into her headquarters and pulled the cage door shut behind her as she was supposed to do. Mystified and a little piqued, Duncan backed his chair from the table, turned, and rolled into the living room.
Ingie was sitting in an armchair, her head bent in devotion over her phone. Scout, Bailey, and Jackson McCarthy were sitting side by side on the sofa across from her. Scout’s thumb was jammed in her mouth, while the boys sat with their hands clasped tightly in their laps, trembling with the effort of self-containment. Bailey was encased in swathes of brown paper Stop & Shop bags, held together with a lot of shiny packing tape.
“We came to visit!” he announced with a rustle as Duncan rolled into the room.
“Apparently! It’s about time,” said Duncan.
“The winter, it was so bad,” Ingie said. “They have asked before now.”
“Our mom said it was okay because we were getting on her nerves with school vacation all week and anyway Ingie is with us,” said Jackson.
“And also even though you’re a stranger you couldn’t do anything to us,” added his brown-papered brother, “because we’re faster than you, because you’re a cripple. So we can just run away from you.”
Ingie looked up, startled. “Boys! Be polite to Mr. Wheeler.”
“It’s okay,” Duncan said. “Yo
u guys, call me Duncan. So what’s the story, kid, what are you, a grocery bag? A brown paper package tied up with string?”
“I’m a leaf.”
“He isn’t a leaf, he’s a re-leaf!” said Jackson. “He was a leaf last Halloween! Now he’s a leaf again! So he’s a re-leaf, get it? His costume was all smooshed under the bed. He wanted to wear it just to show you so I taped him in. I went as a goddamned plumber.”
“I would like to have seen that,” Duncan marveled. “What does a goddamned plumber look like?”
“He had his Oshkosh overalls to wear and he carried a toilet plunge,” said Ingie. “We bought a new one so it had hygiene.”
“I was a wightning bug,” said Scout, around her thumb. “I bwinked on and off.”
“I’ll bet you did,” said Duncan.
“I followed them on the street,” said Ingie.
“You gave out Milky Ways and Butterfingers,” Bailey said approvingly. “That was cool.”
“Did people understand your plumber costume?” Duncan had stayed in his room on Halloween with the television cranked up, his excuse being that he needed to keep Ottoline away from the excitement and confusion of children in costumes and the doorbell ringing over and over, not to mention the tempting bowl of candy. Halloween had made him inexplicably sad.
“So, you three were a leaf and a plumber and a lightning bug.” Duncan was fascinated by the apparent existential depths of the McCarthy kids. He and Gordy had always been pirates or devils at Halloween. “Sounds like the beginning of a joke.”
“Tell me the joke, tell me the joke,” begged Bailey, crepitatiously bouncing on the sofa.
“I carried a ringing cell phone that I refused to answer,” said Jackson. “All my calls went straight to voicemail but my mailbox was full.”
“I think we have that plumber,” said Laura, coming into the room from the kitchen, where she had been listening to this exchange. “Except for the hygiene. Would you kids like some hot chocolate and cookies, I mean, if you’re allowed?” She glanced at Ingie, who shrugged.
“Yes, please!” Bailey said, jiggling on the sofa cushion, his brown paper crackling. “Where’s the monkey? Where’s the monkey?”
“Where’s the monkey?” Jackson echoed. “When do we see your monkey?”
“Monkey, monkey,” echoed Scout.
“I’ll introduce you, after cocoa and cookies. But Bailey, you’ll have to take off your leaf, excuse me, your re-leaf costume, because it might scare her. And everyone has to be much calmer and not so bouncy.”
In the kitchen, Laura laid out a double fan of Mint Milano cookies (the only kind in the house—did children like mint?) on a plate and arranged mugs on a tray while the pot of milk (which was on hand only because she had planned to make rice pudding, which was the optimal way to surreptitiously dose Duncan with the Elavil his doctor had agreed to try) heated on the stove. Laura wasn’t accustomed to having children in the house. It was nice. Ottoline, seeing the plate of cookies, bounced up and down and hooted, extending a hairy arm through her bars, holding out her empty hand in a gesture of supplication, give a poor starving monkey a crumb, please, kind woman.
“What makes you feel entitled to a Mint Milano, young lady?” Laura said.
Ottoline gestured impatiently, and then began to whine. “Oh, stop it,” Laura said. “See if you can behave as well as the McCarthy children. You don’t hear them whining.”
Over cookies and cocoa, the boys exchanged information with Duncan, while Laura and Ingie mostly just listened. They were clearly on best behavior, but even so, they sprayed a shower of cookie crumbs in a wide radius. Duncan heard about which girls in second grade had the most cooties. He was thrilled that cooties were still a thing.
“Did you have cooties when you were growing up?” Laura asked Ingie politely, attempting to draw her into the conversation.
Ingie turned red and said, “One very bad winter, in my family we all had the löss. We had to use fotogen, what is it, petrol, no, kerosene. ”
“Lice?” guessed Laura. “Oh god, no, I wasn’t asking about lice! Cooties are imaginary, not real insects, nothing like that.”
“I do not know these cooties,” Ingie said stiffly. “Those, we did not have them.”
“Sorry, my bad,” said Laura (though she detested people who said “my bad”).
“My birthday is next week,” announced Bailey. “We’re having a clown.” He leaned forward with a great rustle to take another cookie and then sat perched at the edge of the sofa, bouncing his sneakered heels against the tweed as he took bites of cookie and slurps of cocoa. Scout was asleep in the corner of the sofa cushions. Every now and then she sighed contentedly and nibbled on her thumb without otherwise moving.
“It’s always good to have a clown,” said Duncan.
“I hate clowns,” said Bailey. “My mom said we have to have a clown or a pony or kids might not show up at the party. And my dad said a pony would shit on the driveway.”
“Bailey, do not say a bad word,” scolded Ingie automatically, without looking up from the cell phone in her lap.
“Everybody hates clowns,” said Duncan. “It’s just something you have to deal with when you’re a kid.”
“Did you have clown birthday parties?” asked Jackson, snatching another cookie.
“No, but I went to lots of them. With those stupid balloon animals, right? My brother hated clowns a lot more than I did. I think he was afraid of them.”
“Is he older or younger?” asked Jackson.
“Younger,” said Duncan, “By eight minutes. I’m a twin. I have an identical twin brother named Gordon. So we always had a shared birthday party and a shared birthday cake. We always blew out our candles at the exact same moment together.”
“Does he have an identical wheelchair just like yours?” Jackson asked.
“No, no, he’s not paralyzed like me. I was in an accident. Not that long ago. I guess you don’t remember seeing me before I was in this wheelchair.”
“So he’s not identical,” persisted Jackson.
“He is too,” said Bailey. “You’re the one who isn’t identical anymore.”
“I guess that’s right,” said Duncan.
While Ingie cut Bailey out of his costume with a pair of kitchen scissors (when Duncan said he was relieved that she would be relieving Bailey of his re-leaf costume, the boys giggled, and then giggled some more at Ingie’s obliviousness to what they found so funny), Duncan showed Jackson the book on their coffee table, a glossy volume of dramatic, contrasty black and white photographs of the houses of William Corrigan. Jackson knelt in front of the table and leafed through the book at Duncan’s direction. Duncan nearly instructed him to Page! the way he would command Ottoline, but instead he told him to keep turning pages, keep turning, again, again, there, stop, go back. The Waxman Dovecote had a page of its own. “See that?” Duncan said. “Now go look out that dining room window at our yard. What do you see?”
Jackson trotted obediently to the window and gazed out at the garden.
“Do you see the little toolshed by the fence?”
“Cool!” Jackson said, breathing against the glass. “It’s the same, but different!”
“What’s different?”
“It’s really little. And it has ivy on it. The one in the picture is next to a big house and there’s a blue watering can.”
“Good observations. The one out there is half the size of the one in the book, but it’s the exact same design. It’s called a dovecote. It’s a kind of building people made a long time ago for pigeons.”
“Wow. Do you have pigeons?”
“No, I made it for my garden tools.”
“That is so cool! Did you make the one in the book, too?” Jackson was amazed.
“Sort of,” said Duncan. What was he doing, trying to impress a seven-year-old? “No, not exactly. I helped.” Ingie, finished with her task, balled up the brown paper and stuffed it into a wastebasket before plopping back down in the armc
hair.
“Okay, you guys,” said Duncan. “Go sit over there, and be really still, and don’t wave your arms, and don’t shout or make any sudden noises, please. Can you be really quiet? Are you ready to meet my monkey?”
“Should I have put the children into their helmets for cycling?” Ingie asked anxiously. “I have responsibility. Do they need a face protection?”
“Oh, god, no,” Duncan reassured her. “Ottoline is a capuchin monkey, a smart little New World monkey, not a chimpanzee who could suddenly rip your face off.”
“Duncan!” Laura warned from the kitchen.
“Face off!” echoed Scout.
“I am unclear,” said Ingie.
“No, really, kids, don’t worry! Ottoline is smaller than a lot of cats, but she doesn’t just sit around and think about herself like a cat. She has little hands that are a lot like yours, so she can do things for me, like pick up stuff I can’t reach, and turn on lights, and turn the pages of a book. In a way she takes care of me. She makes it possible for me to spend more time alone.”
“But if she’s with you picking up stuff, then you’re not alone,” Jackson pointed out.
“True,” Duncan said, “I’ll re-phrase, counselor. She makes it possible for me to do stuff on my own without having to ask another person to help me.”
“Cool!” said Bailey.
“But do not let her on you, children,” said Ingie.
“She’ll be on a leash, don’t worry,” Duncan said. “Okay? I’ll go get her.”
Duncan rolled into the kitchen, where Laura was washing the cocoa mugs and thinking about what to make for dinner. Duncan used to do more than half the cooking, and he often picked up groceries on his way home from work. He had always enjoyed taking charge of dinner most nights. Now, planning every meal was her responsibility, and she had to prepare just about every meal too, though the PCAs gave Duncan breakfast on some mornings. Eating in restaurants was such an elaborate production, and she missed the former ease with which they used to head out for pizza at Pepe’s or a fancy dinner at Union League, without a lot of elaborate advance planning.
Still Life with Monkey Page 21