by Ann Pancake
“This dinner would be perfect with a tomato. A nice, fresh, red tomato.” Uncle Bobby demolished his food as he talked without choking on a word, his astounding skill at talking with his mouth full without anyone hearing the food, years of practice under her grandmother’s vigilant ear and eye. “I know where there’s a homegrown tomato, you know that, Nathan? You know that?”
Nathan tore off half a piece of garlic bread and thrust it into his mouth. Janie could see clear back to his molars before he started chewing. Don’t talk to him, Uncle Bobby, she whispered in her head, leave him be.
“There’s a nice ripe tomato on one of your dad’s plants out back by the alley. I saw it when I was putting out the trash.”
Uncle Bobby, and this time she just about said it out loud.
“I’d sure like to have a tomato now, that would be nice.” Uncle Bobby looked at each of them in turn. “You know, if neither one of you all are gonna get it for me, I believe I’ll just go out there and pick that tomato myself.”
In a single motion, Nathan rammed his chair away from the table and hurled his knife, the blade glancing off an antique bureau and dropping, mute, on the Oriental rug. “You can’t have that fucking tomato!”
Uncle Bobby looked down and away. Nathan bolted onto his feet, wheeled, and slammed an open hand against the arch between the kitchen and dining room.
“Goddammit!” he shouted. “Just get the fuck out of here!”
Janie stood up. Uncle Bobby stayed down.
“Not you! Him!”
Uncle Bobby gazed shut-mouthed and blank-faced off to the side. A dog who didn’t do it. Upon Nathan’s command, Janie had started to sit back down, but she stopped halfway, her hands on the chair arms, her knees slightly bent, paralyzed by emotion. Frustration with Uncle Bobby for never knowing when to stop, and embarrassment for him, too, and shame. But more impassioned than those, the instinct to defend Uncle Bobby against Nathan and the line he had crossed. Nathan was not family, only family was allowed to raise their voices at Uncle Bobby, and when they did, they never screamed, they did not cuss, there were rules for reacting to Uncle Bobby annoyance. But in that moment, overriding even her outrage at the injustice committed against Uncle Bobby, Janie felt most primally the urgency to calm Nathan down.
By now, of course, he’d blown himself up big, and this time he bellowed instead of screamed: “I said, get the fuck out of here!”
Uncle Bobby scooted away from the table. As he walked out, his napkin dropped from his lap to the floor.
Nathan flung himself into a living room chair, his heels on the seat, his knees pulled up to his face. Janie eased herself back down into her own chair. She looked at the torn food on her and Nathan’s plates. At Uncle Bobby’s almost empty one. After a few minutes, she started to clear the table.
Nathan entered the kitchen behind her, placed his soft hand on her arm right above her elbow, and pulled her, not roughly, outside. The clouds strained towards storm, dusk greenish with it, and he led her, him still barefoot, to his Scout on the street.
They’d just turned off Kentworth Drive and were passing the Coin Castle when the storm finally broke, instant and violent. Just like a movie, Janie thought. Just like one of these old movies. That too explained why everything felt at such a distance from her. Around them, cars pulled off to the sides of the streets to wait out the first blinding force of the rain, but Nathan forged head-on into it, and Janie had no room in her to be afraid. They were driving up the Ohio River on the West Virginia side this time, the rain exploding on the windshield like comic book firecrackers, and Nathan had not spoken a word. Soon the thunder and lightning started to divide so she couldn’t tell which clap went with which flash, and the rain fell with less ferocity, and Nathan was pulling them into a field across the river from an Ohio country club. They’d been in the field before. They had rapid sex in the backseat while the rain continued to slack on the roof. Then Nathan passed out.
Janie disentangled herself. She pulled up her shorts, snapped them. She pushed her hair away from her face. She crawled into the front seat. She could see even in the dark how clumps of weeds in the field had been beaten into swaths laid low across the ground, and from a side window, she watched the lightning recede across the rest of West Virginia. The lightning cutting the sky to the east. Uncle Bobby would not turn on the TV until the thunder died completely away. He was terrified of the set blowing up, not to mention “ghosts” appearing on the screen, which he claimed he’d seen before during a storm, but Janie’d never understood if he meant actual spirits or some technical term he’d turned into a malaprop. In the morning, he would not mention the dinner. She also knew that no matter what else he felt about the evening, he’d still have some regret about missing dessert.
Suddenly, all the lights went out on their side of the river. The Ohio golf course continued to burn.
THOSE VERY LAST days before she left, she and Uncle Bobby made a final ritual sweep of their places, Uncle Bobby toasting the two of them in each one. To skip the Alexander Henry was unthinkable, but the only movie they hadn’t seen was Reds, two years old and just reaching Remington. Predicting small crowds, Gus assigned it to the shoebox-shaped confines of the converted shoe store.
Despite there being only twelve rows, Uncle Bobby made them sit in the back, the EXIT sign’s red glow almost near enough to touch. Janie used to think it was the color that made him think fire, but now she understood the fire fear was yet another suspicion he’d contracted from “one of these old movies.” As soon as the lights lowered and the previews began, Janie eased the Southern Comfort into the Sprite, nudged Uncle Bobby with her elbow, passed him the drink, and toasted the waxed cup with her knuckles. Uncle Bobby hailed their naughtiness with a constricted cackle.
Almost immediately Janie regretted that they’d come, her unable to focus on the movie, and into the vacuum that inattention created surged the Nathan situation like a vomit. She glanced at her uncle to see how closely he was watching. She doubted Reds would have any scenes he found scary so at least she wouldn’t have to suffer the laugh-shrieking when everyone else was silent. Again, the Nathan situation lifted into her throat. Janie swallowed on it hard. Then she remembered the time back in July when Uncle Bobby had stopped laughing halfway through a movie. She recalled it now even though she hadn’t given it a thought after they walked out of the Alexander Henry that afternoon. That was Mask, the Eric Stoltz and Cher picture about the kid with the horrible degenerative disease they said made him look like a lion but that actually made him look like a lion with a horrible degenerative disease, and Janie hadn’t even noticed when Uncle Bobby’s laughing stopped. She realized it only when she heard instead a peculiar snuffling sound in the dark beside her, and when she did, she pretended not to hear it, picking up the Sprite to pull a few last sips of ice melt and alcohol. The cup was already drained. The second the lights came up, Uncle Bobby began convulsing with laughter again.
“I have to use the restroom,” Uncle Bobby whispered now. He heaved himself up, and the whole row of seats shuddered at the loss of his weight.
The morning after the dinner at Nathan’s, she and Uncle Bobby sat across from each other at the dining room table. She rotated in her fingers a piece of toast, Uncle Bobby behind his lineup of mixing bowl, Cheerios box, and gallon jug of milk. He would eat two mixing bowls of cereal because, he had explained to her several years ago, the holes in the Cheerios cut the serving in half. Uncle Bobby acted as if the night before hadn’t happened, which gave away how profoundly it had, because if it had been a night during which nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, Uncle Bobby would be asking, “What happened after I left, Janie? What’d you all do?”
And as she sat there watching Uncle Bobby shuttle the Cheerios into his mouth with a gusto verging on ecstasy, she understood that forgiving her had not occurred to him because he had not registered any offense. And self-hatred and shame rushed through her in black-red waves so intense she felt vertigo.
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sp; She dropped her toast. Right then she decided, pulling her mind, heart, and groin into a single-steeled purpose. She was finished with Nathan. She was going to, as Uncle Bobby would put it, tell him off.
But how to do it? The phone was out of the question. Because the phone was nothing but voice; even in ideal circumstances with easy people, the phone made her anxious. After loading the dishwasher with the breakfast dishes, she threw herself on her bed where she scrawled a three-page-long letter to Nathan, but after she reread it, she shredded it and flushed it down the toilet, praying it did not clog her grandparents’ pipes. No. She would have to tell him face-to-face. And because she knew he would vanish again, she’d have to march herself to his front door, firm up her voice, and ask his mother if he was in. Janie stood at her window and stared at that door across the street. The only arched door in the neighborhood, with dark woodwork and three small stained-glass panes. In her head, Janie began what became a three-day-long rehearsal of her telling-off-Nathan speech.
But Nathan didn’t vanish. In the seventy-two hours following that dinner, Nathan was more visible than he’d been since before they started going out, Janie saw him from her upstairs post several times a day. Washing his motorcycle in his driveway. Spending half an hour on the curb with his head stuck inside the car window of a belt-thin boy. Striding back and forth between Scout and house, Scout and house, even cutting the grass when Nathan’s father had taken care of that all summer long. And each time she spied him alone, Janie inhaled, braced, silently repeated her first rehearsed sentence, and made to approach. And each time, she exhaled, limpened, and told herself there’d be a better time. Then, just yesterday, she had run head-on into him. Her walking to her Chevette in her popcorn girl clothes for her last shift of the summer, and suddenly there was Nathan, ambling up the street on foot of all things, an absolute anomaly. There was no way to avoid him unless she turned and fled inside, which she considered, but she kept moving, her insides as roily dark as the Ohio, her dragging her practiced speech into her mouth. Then they were across from each other, and Nathan raised his eyes and looked at her as you would an acquaintance you met on the street, and with a chilly smile, part smirk, part faux polite, he remarked, with sarcasm gauged just subtle enough he could deny it later if anyone asked: “Miss Janie Lambert.” And sauntered right on by.
She had slammed herself into the Chevette and gunned it down the street. By the time she reached the end of Kentworth Drive, rage tears were runneling down her cheeks. Rage at Nathan, yes, but rage at herself a hundredfold that, and as she drove, she actually lifted and bunched her fist, and if she hadn’t had to downshift to avoid crashing into a truck, she would have punched herself in her chest. Her cowardice, her stupidity, her muteness, that she’d allowed him to dump her before she could say a word towards dumping him, even though she was certain she was the one who had decided to dump him first.
Now Uncle Bobby plopped back down beside her, and she shot a look along the row to see if the seat reverberations reached the couple on the other end. Uncle Bobby leaned into her ear again, his hygienic odor of Crest and Old Spice, and he whispered loudly, “Remember when Ben forgot his mittens in Black Beauty? If that’d been in this puny place, I’d have found ’em in three seconds.”
The truth was, Janie did remember it. In scraps and from the narrow tilted perspective of someone looking up out of a box, which was how she remembered many of her pre-school experiences in Remington. She remembered at eye-level a glamourous brass door handle twice the length of her head that Uncle Bobby pushed with one hand while the other arm bundled Ben and her against him like packages. She remembered how he blocked them with his body the moment they reached the sidewalk in case they should take a notion to bolt into the street. She remembered the windless cold leaching into them as they stood just beyond the gold and scarlet splendor of the Alexander Henry marquee, its contrast with the monochrome vacancy of Remington’s late afternoon winter light. Uncle Bobby was very tall and very wide, like grown-ups were, but Janie felt also, as charged as a mild shock, Uncle Bobby’s anxiety. All the potential mistakes and mishaps lying in wait for Uncle Bobby entrusted with taking his little niece and nephew to the show. In the burr of that anxiety, Janie felt only half-safe herself, her understanding that Uncle Bobby was only a makeshift adult, but she knew also that he was the closest thing they had at the moment, and she had no option but to surrender to trusting him. And in that moment she trusted him utterly.
He had each of them by the hand then, Uncle Bobby craning his neck up and down Fourth Avenue. “Look for your granddaddy’s car,” he told them. It was then Ben mumbled, “I think I left my mittens in there.”
Janie could remember Uncle Bobby’s face: three seconds of naked shock, disintegrating into blinking confusion, eventually gelling to horror. Now, eighteen years old herself, Janie could translate: the horror of being the most responsible person present. Of having no choice but to take charge in a crisis.
And he had taken charge. All by himself he’d approached an usher—a trauma in itself since Uncle Bobby secretly feared all authority figures, which in Uncle Bobby’s mind an usher was—and the four of them reentered the theater. While she and Ben stood in the aisle, Uncle Bobby and the usher searched under the back-row seats with flashlights. And the mittens were found.
They walked out of Reds two hours into it when Uncle Bobby’s snoring got louder than the soundtrack. They found themselves swept into the exiting Jedi crowd and Janie glad of it, knowing Tommie Sue would ignore her when she passed and that would be less humiliating if she were veiled by a group. She and Uncle Bobby currented along with the others out the brass-handled doors, Janie groping in her purse for her keys, rooting among contraband and tampons, and she halted in the stream under the marquee lights, Uncle Bobby dutifully stopping with her. She finally shot a hand to her jeans pocket outside, and of course, there the keys rode, and at that moment, she heard Uncle Bobby shadow-say something, which struck her as strange because he’d said nothing first to make the echo. She looked at him. His expression was a déjà vu of the lost-mitten afternoon.
Janie followed his stare. Moving away from them, not twenty feet distant, clearly part of the Jedi crowd, waddled a globe-shaped woman. It was the large-print smock that gave Tessa away. She walked hand in hand with a squatty man in a purple tank top, his shoulders and neck a snarl of dark red hair the length and texture of granddaddy long-legs. Janie gawked, mesmerized by the repulsiveness of that thicket, vivid under the streetlights, and suddenly in the folds of the neck, she thought she glimpsed, although later she could not be sure, the glint of a gold chain.
The couple vanished into the alley shortcut to a parking lot.
For several seconds, she and Uncle Bobby stood silent. They were alone now, the crowd dispersed to cars and bars. And then her uncle threw back his head and exploded into laughter. His most crazed and out-of-control variety, the kind forbidden by her grandmother, the kind that made everyone within earshot turn with a “what on earth?” stare, the kind that had made Janie run away and duck behind the nearest object in mortification when she was a kid.
“WUUHHHHHH wuh wuh wuh, WUUHHHHH wuh wuh wuh.” Uncle Bobby bent in half at his waist, his fist beating his thigh, his face the color of wine. “WUUHHHHH wuh wuh wuh, WUUHHHH wuh wuh wuh.” Until finally, after depleting himself, he gasped for breath, caught it after a few strangled tries, and said, “I think that’s so funny, Janie. I think that’s just so funny.”
ONE ESPECIALLY SLOW weekday afternoon in early August when Gus was gone for a funeral, Ronnie had volunteered to take them behind the screen and below the floors. Tommie Sue, in her single act of magnanimity that summer, said of course she could cover concessions and egged them on. Janie and two of the sorority girls trailed Ronnie and his flashlight down the side aisle of the big central Jedi theater, Hillary and Nicole deliberately bumping into each other with muffled chortling. Janie brought up the rear, breathless with disbelief that this was happening and already buzz
ing with the anticipation of telling Uncle Bobby when she got home.
Ronnie led them up a short set of steps at the corner of the stage and then behind the screen. Janie nearly tripped in astonishment.
And we were standing there with the Star Wars people right alongside us—
—What, Janie? What? I don’t get what you mean.
You could see them on the screen, just we were behind it, Luke and Leia and the Ewoks, they were the same size as us, the characters’ feet and Janie’s feet on the same level so it was like walking among them, and Janie stopped, faced them, and gaped, but Ronnie was hissing, “Hurry! C’mon!” motioning them to the rear of the stage to what turned out to be a longer flight of stairs.
These dropped into a dark warren that under Ronnie’s flashlight revealed itself as an elaborate skeleton-work of broken rooms. It was pitch-black down there, a bunch of rooms with no walls, naked beams, snapped lathes, heaped bricks—Oh, Janie, I didn’t know that—and they were weaving around piles of dismembered tables and chairs and clambering over flattened doors and plaster piles, everything saturated in an odor both moldy and dry—Were you scared, Janie? Were you scared?—and Hillary and Nicole clung to each other for drama and screamed when one stepped on a board that kicked up a couple bricks at its other end, but to her bewilderment, Janie was not scared at all. Because it was too ruined to host ghosts? Because it was too real to? Then Nicole was asking, “Is this the basement that runs under the whole city block?” and Ronnie was saying, “No, there’s a whole ’nother level yet below this one. I’m gonna take you all upstairs first.”
And then we climbed two more flights of stairs—were you scared, Janie?—No, not yet. But by then, I tell you, I was completely turned around, I had no idea if we were on a side of the building, or in back, or even in front—I wouldn’t have been scared, Janie. I would have laughed at it! Halfway up the second flight they were coming back into natural light, and finally they reached a shortish corridor. “The dressing rooms,” Ronnie explained. “There’s three levels of them. The best ones are on the top.” So even higher they climbed, these stairs narrower and steep as loft ladders, the sorority girls quieter now, the light having sobered them. And then we started peeking in the rooms.