“Sharp as broken glass. I wore a thick linen skirt, cream colored, with a few blotches on it, and a denim shirt, beat-up cowboy boots, and stood in that pasture you liked when you were little, with the bushy soft tall grass. The light was sinking, I could feel my breath inside my skin, traveling and flowing into every corner of me, and my mind so alive, fully aware of any little fly that sat on my wrist or breeze that passed by my head, and I looked out and said, Someday, when you’re almost dead, remember this feeling, cold as water drunk with your head thrown back, remember it, that you were here in your boots in the grasses with the birds in the far trees, you were alive and young, so much was still coming, tragedies, history, presidents, lovers, cakes, even cakes were coming, the old-fashioned vanilla rich cakes that used to sink in the middle but what a delicious texture they had, real crumbs, hardly needed icing with a cake like that. We could go back in the house and try to make one. You want to?”
Annie stood up a little taller. A breeze brushed both of them.
Spitzy stared at her. Annie smiled. “That sounds good.”
Tomorrow, Summer
“We were stooges. We were freshmen.” Manny wished he had not brought it up. Especially today, when they were excited about graduating—he’d thrown a shadow into the room.
Mirage said, “Please tell me it is not true. I can’t stand it.”
Four years ago, they’d been loitering outside the cafeteria when, for whatever reason (she and Manny liked to linger and flirt), she’d impersonated their horrible biology teacher. Mirage rarely mocked people—even the girls painstakingly repairing their black nail polish in the bathroom. But the biology teacher had made fun of her name—“Do some people call you Illusion?”—and he was the dullest person on earth.
Mirage had mastered his low, crackly drawl. “Stoooooo-dents, re-mooooove all your exCESS beLONGings from the TOPS of your desks. No cell phones, all SYStems OFF. Prepare for classsssssssss. To-DAY! We will analyze the compoNENTS of . . . DUMB DUMB DUMB AND BORING THINGS!” Then she gargled and coughed, raising her right hand to half-cover her mouth, as he always did, to the consternation of people sitting in the front row. Why did he emphasize certain syllables so strangely? Was he translating from nematode language even as he spoke?
There was almost no way to escape having Mr. Ray, unless you had an allergy to frogs. Tall and bald, with one of those protruding stomachs on an otherwise beanpole frame, he had, by the fourth day of class, succeeded in hypnotizing even the most avid academics into a biological stupor. Mirage said his first name was Ambien. Ambien Ray. Sounded like a fish.
Manny had laughed and said, “I think he has acid reflux. That hacking dry cough thing. Do you think he goes onto automatic pilot the minute the bell rings?”
Mirage had once, in class, answered Mr. Ray in his own cadence unconsciously. He asked, “Do I detect an insult?” which made everyone titter.
Amal, the Pakistani girl, helped her out that day. She interjected, “Mr. Ray, we were discussing the possibility of a visit to the botanical gardens, since they have that new frog pond and we could perhaps get a group tour . . . would you like me to check on it?” Mirage and Amal chatted more often after that. At the botanical gardens, they watched a Venus flytrap eat a fly together.
But Amal was nowhere nearby the day Mirage impersonated Mr. Ray and he came around the corner and stopped right in front of her and Manny. He stared into her eyes. He said, “Am I that bad?”
She froze. A sadness shaded his gaze. He said, “I know, I’m not the most animated guy on earth.” He looked down, and up again. “Sorry about that,” he said. Then he walked away. Manny said, “Ouch.” Mirage covered her face with her hands.
The year rolled on. Mirage wrote an apology note to Mr. Ray and left it on his desk, but he never mentioned it. She worked hard on biology but felt awkward answering questions in class or even meeting his eyes. At the end of the year, her grade was a B. The next year when she and Manny were sophomores, Mr. Ray retired at Christmas, surprising the new crop of hypnotized biologists.
Then Manny had run into him at a grocery store a few months later. He was looking thinner and paler than usual.
“Mr. Ray!” Manny said. “How are you doing?” and Mr. Ray said, “Not so good, actually, I’ve had some challenges.” After a long pause, he added, “They tell me I have about a month or two.”
Manny said, “That’s terrible!” He struggled for something else to say. Then, “Mr. Ray, we—miss you at school. You were—a really good teacher.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “I’ll never forget your little friend—how well she played me. I guess I didn’t have that stand-up gene that would have made me interesting. I just loved my—topic.”
His obituary would say he had a brother in Rockport. That was it. There wasn’t even a memorial mentioned.
And Manny had made the mistake of repeating the whole grocery conversation to Mirage, right now, today, because they were graduating and might not see each other again and he’d never brought it up before.
She looked as if he’d punched her. Her eyes filled with tears and spilled right over. “I hate myself.”
“No, you don’t. We all make mistakes. C’mon, forget about it! Geez, I should never have said anything.”
She said, “He told you that and then he died.”
“Well, trust me, you had nothing to do with his death. Change the subject. Think of summer! I am truly ready for summer, aren’t you? I am looking forward to returning to my old apron and being charming to nasty people again.”
Manny was a waiter at Joe’s Crab Shack. He had the patter down.
Johnnie
Spitzy wasn’t getting out of bed anymore. She stayed in bed as the sunlight filtered into her room and traveled silently up the wall, touching her bent photograph of Otto in a pasture and a faded yellow and green cross-stitch that said, simply, “HOME.” She was leaving the dog food bag wide open so her dog Muscatine could have breakfast when he was ready, sticking his muzzle deep into the chow.
“Dad, it’s bad,” Annie said, after another weekend with her favorite great-aunt. “When you start letting your pet feed himself, that’s a bad sign.”
“Old age is a bad sign in general.” Her dad sighed. “What can I do? She won’t come into town and live with us. She won’t allow anyone to be hired to help her. You have to go to school, so you can’t live out there all the time. Who’s feeding her, did she tell you?”
“Some lady named Rosie from down the street comes by every day with a plate lunch from the church. Then Spitzy parcels it out to become three meals. I think she saves the bun for next day’s breakfast. I made some noodles for her, and some blueberry crumble.”
“And her bathroom business?”
“She gets up sometimes. For that only. But very, very slowly. Then she goes straight back. I tried to give her a little bath in bed. She won’t step over the edge of the tub anymore—she says she won’t be able to get back out.”
Annie paused. She didn’t know whether to tell him or not.
So she blurted it. “And there was a man in bed with her a few days ago, when Rosie went by. Rosie told me.”
“What?”
“A youngish man, not an old one. He was lying on top of the covers next to her with his clothes on. They weren’t doing anything. But Spitzy was asleep and he was awake.”
“This is the worst thing I ever heard.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s really weird, that’s for sure.”
“It’s insane. He could rob her blind.”
“What does she have?”
“What?”
“What could he rob?”
After he’d caught his breath, Annie’s dad asked, “Did Rosie recognize him?”
“No.”
Her dad shook his head. “Spitzy is a tough cookie.”
“She’s proud of it. She doesn’t like pity.”
Her dad sighed again. He always seemed so tired when anything about his family came up.
Annie figured his tiredness had most to do with his long-dead dad, Spitzy’s brother, but they didn’t mention it. Some people you couldn’t make happy, no matter what you did. And you certainly couldn’t make them happy after they were gone.
Annie went to school that day wondering about the man in the bed. Maybe he was just a homeless dude Spitzy took pity on. One of her long-lost handymen. Maybe he was just out of jail, en route to work on a ranch at Big Spring—Spitzy wouldn’t fear such a person. She’d figure he’d been rehabilitated, his good qualities polished by lockup—a hardworking cowboy again. Once she’d taken in two runaway girls from Killeen and talked them into phoning home, then bought them bus tickets back.
Annie called Spitzy after school. She answered on the sixth ring. “Spitzy, who was the guy in bed with you a few days ago when Rosie brought you lunch?”
“My boyfriend.”
When Annie said, “Come on!” Spitzy said, “Do I bug you about yours?” But Annie didn’t even have one.
Annie asked her father if she could transfer to Kerrville High School so she could live with Spitzy and watch over her, for the spring semester of junior year only. She’d be back in time for senior year. If she were there to take care of her auntie, she’d gain something more precious than another dull semester in the company of her classmates. And by summer, or fall, Spitzy would be better, or worse, and they could reevaluate. The only problem was—the log cabin didn’t have two bedrooms. It was hard to imagine sleeping in the same room with Spitzy—a second bed wouldn’t fit. Maybe Annie could sleep on the piled-high daybed in the living room. She’d clean it off and find forty treasures. And wouldn’t it be somehow exotic to try out another high school for one semester only?
So she was stunned when her dad said, “I don’t want you to go. What if that guy comes back? It’s too loose up there. I don’t think she even has locks. I can’t look after you.”
Annie laughed out loud. “Look after me?” She felt insulted. Half the time she felt she was looking out for him—picking up his socks, making him high-protein smoothies for breakfast.
“Let’s think about this,” her dad said. “There’s still time before Christmas break. Let’s talk about it after we think about it.”
But by Christmas Spitzy had started seeing ghosts in the fireplace and had tried to feed them bread and salt from her church tray.
Annie spent weekends with Spitzy as before but had a hard time understanding things she said—there were so many breaks in stories, jumbled images. Spitzy asked for a bedpan. Something had changed.
Dad said they needed to check her into a rehab facility in Kerrville to get her walking again. Spitzy said she was finished with walking and rejected medical attention. Two of her friends had died from lethal drug combinations prescribed by doctors and she wanted no doctors.
On the Friday before New Year’s, Rosie found her curled up in bed as if she were just sleeping, but she didn’t wake up—it was fish day, too. The church meal she liked best, and now she wouldn’t get to eat it. She’d left a piece of paper on the table, “For Johnnie” with a heart drawn beside the words, nothing for Rosie or Annie or Annie’s father, and no further information.
Freshen Up
The man with a frizzy gray braid unzipped his stained brown jacket and pitched it into the washing machine. Unbuttoned his dusky green checkered shirt, rolled it into a ball, threw it in, too. Pulled off an orange short-sleeved T-shirt and a raggedy sleeveless white undershirt. Threw it all in. An open hand, like the Hand of Fatima, was tattooed on his back. Rainey watched from behind, transfixed. Four layers. You never really knew how many layers people had.
Leo stood next to her, also staring. They’d been folding towels like the married couple they would someday be when the man started stripping.
“Wow,” Leo mouthed.
Then the pants. He unzipped his blue jeans and pulled them off. He wore boxer shorts with yellow cartoon ducks printed on them. Leo shook his head, finger to lips. Rainey imagined him saying, Stop there, stop there. And the man did stop. He bent over in his unexpectedly cheery boxer shorts, pulled wads of dirty laundry from a canvas bag at his feet—a towel, a blue sheet—and pitched it all in. Frenzy of movements, how satisfying to put things where they needed to go.
The man spun around, caught them looking, didn’t acknowledge them, unfolded a black T-shirt from a short pile on the table and pulled it over his head. Tugged on another pair of jeans. No layers this time. Whipped around, slid a handful of quarters into the slot, dumped in some powdered soap from a bag, and pressed the button. The machine started whirling. Then he plucked a bag of Kettle potato chips from the top of the machine, ripped it open, and popped a handful into his mouth. All planned out. Thirty minutes wash, comin’ right up. He walked over to the rack by the door, grabbed the free newspaper, and turned to the Love Wanted classifieds. Rainey poked Leo. “The one part I always skip,” she said.
He nodded, whispering, “You’re a lucky girl.”
Later, in the parking lot, Leo said, “So there’s number one. And we got a surprise, some guy freshening up right in the building.”
Rainey and Leo had a new plan. Every weekend they’d do three things they’d never done before. See what they could see. The clothes dryer was broken at Rainey’s house. Her mom had asked if there was any chance she might haul the basket of wet laundry to a Laundromat. Sure! Rainey said. Number one. She’d never gone to a Laundromat with Leo.
Number two, the Damaged Discount Food Store in Leo’s neighborhood. He’d passed it forever and never stepped inside. Dented cans. Unpopular brands. Anyone uncertain about the nation’s economy had only to glance at the mobbed parking lot. They were glad they had walked. Women pushed rickety carts piled high with frozen French fries and mysterious frozen lumps of . . . meat? Not everything was damaged and some things seemed much more discounted than others. German foods abounded—why? How had all these wayward packages of spaetzle and plump jars of sauerkraut ended up in the discount bins? They wandered past thank you cards—a dying breed—and French shampoo for oily hair. Leo purchased a can of treacle pudding from England. Rainey selected an attractive jar of pesto sauce and a set of cards that said “Thanks a Million.” When had the word “million” become so popular? It seemed strange to see it in a discount store.
The man who ran the store stepped right into their path with a wooden box of smoked wild salmon in his hands. He said, “This is only six bucks. I can tell you’d like it.” Rainey and Leo stared at each other. Smoked salmon was one of their favorite foods. Both of them. How had he known? And what was it doing here? The box wasn’t battered.
“Gee, thanks, we’ll take it,” said Leo. “And what’s your favorite thing?”
“Smoked salmon,” the man said.
Later, spreading small bits of tasty salmon onto whole-wheat crackers with goat cheese, marveling at food tasting so good, they wondered—how had that guy zeroed in on them in the store? Did he walk up to other people and say, “Here, corn nuts, just what you love.” Was he a psychic grocer? Did they look like exiled Alaskans?
Number three, the serious one. Their outings couldn’t all be easy. Visits to the military hospital would be ongoing, if they could stand it, and the hospital let them continue to come. They weren’t paying homage, either. Trying to understand, was more like it.
Rainey hated killing, and weapons, and war so much, she had negative feelings when she saw soldiers. Maybe meeting some would help. They’d made an appointment.
The volunteer coordinator sent Leo into a ward to sort mail and newspapers.
Rainey was handed a stack of magazines and entered the room of a freckled soldier with one arm and one leg gone, and a black eye patch. She paused, then said shyly, “Hi, Nick.”
He squinted. “Hey you. Little gal. Are you the reader?”
She laughed. “How do you feel about someone reading to you?”
“Great,” he said. “Especially if she’s cute. What about National Geographic, maybe? Somet
hing about the sea?”
As she fanned pages awkwardly, he blurted, “It was the worst mistake of my life to go to war.” Then he started crying. Just like that.
Would she get kicked out? He talked for fifteen minutes. She cried, too.
“Thank you for being so honest,” she said. “I’m very sorry about what happened to you.”
“So read about fish,” he said. “The big fish that eat littler ones like it’s normal.”
Will You Hold My Bullet, Please?
In those days there were many things we did not want.
Our father drove us to Mexico because the dentist was cheaper.
We never said the word “poor.” How much did the gas cost, Dad? Gas was cheap then.
There were no interesting towns between San Antonio and Nuevo Laredo, only scrub brush and cactus, then the irritating wait at the border.
So I was happy on our second visit when the Mexican dentist tripped on a mat, stabbing me in the knee with a metal pick.
The wound bled generously. Our father would never take us there again.
He found an affordable dentist in a San Antonio building called Collins Garden. Yesterday I saw it being smashed by a wrecking ball—dusty mountain of concrete, smoked glass simmering in heat. Good-bye, Monopoly delusions. . . .
Lyman, the new dentist, appeared to have little interest in dentistry.
While “cleaning our teeth” with bleaching potion (no brushing, flossing, or scraping), he spoke of Mexican music, land deals in south Texas, the pleasures of rural living. Later we visited Lyman at his home, a rundown stucco hacienda in a field of scrub brush and cactus. We waited five hours for a fish to be grilled in a pit. Our father began calling him “My friend!” and went to lunch with him. Lyman wanted us all to call him by his first name, which made me wonder if he was really a dentist.
There Is No Long Distance Now Page 12