Addled

by JoeAnn Hart

  “We’re not eating these.”

  “Don’t remind me of what I’m missing. I can’t believe I have to watch what I eat from now on. Just the other day I had the most spectacular dish at the new pan-Asian place out on Mass. Ave. Short ribs braised in a Khmer broth with ginger, garlic, young coconut juice, mushrooms, tamarind, and chilies. I was just telling Vita.”

  “Mmmm,” said Madeline. And she was not just trying to encourage him to talk about food rather than other less digestible subjects. She was starving now that Phoebe was home. Brown rice, cooked celery. Brown rice, lentils. Brown rice, yams. Phoebe was never such a picky eater as a child. Until she went off to college, she was always so obedient. Wasn’t she? Or had something been hidden there all along, just waiting to get out? “Where on Mass. Ave.?”

  Frank smiled. “Already a war of attrition at the house?”

  “You know Phoebe,” she said, trying to sound light. “It’s hard to eat anything without her looking at us like the condemned.”

  “She’s got that food disorder,” he said, flipping back again and raising his lounge to a sitting position. When he was fully upright, he burped, like someone who could burp the alphabet. “Orthorexia nervosa. People who are so obsessed with health food that they develop phobias about regular food. They think that purer food will make them purer people.”

  Was everyone in her family doomed to one insanity or another? “It’s just a phase,” she said. “All young people go through some crazy thing or other, it seems. Like the lifeguard.” She pointed her chin toward the pool house, where Scott stood stretching in the doorway. “He has a piece of metal stuck in his tongue. What do you think could be the point of that? You can’t even see it.”

  “It’s not how it’s seen,” said Frank. “It’s how it feels that counts.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, that cloistered world of yours, pet. That stud in his mouth, it’s like peacock feathers. The females of the species love it.”

  “What?”

  “The tongue stud is to attract sexual partners.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, laughing. “It’s not a Porsche.”

  “Don’t confuse a sex symbol with sex. Not every male can afford to attract mates with the power of his possessions, so he has to come up with an alternative strategy. Scotty’s tongue stud has to do with enhancing the sexual pleasure of a woman.”

  “You mean, when they kiss?”

  “Yes and no,” said Frank, with a wet smile. “Let me explain. Some people are uncomfortable talking about labial folds and clitoral response, but not me. I’m a medical professional. Now stop me if I get too explicit. . .”

  “Stop.” Madeline looked over at Scott, who was walking back to his chair, staring at her, and when he smiled, she thought she saw the sparkle of metal between his parted lips. She bent her head to hide her face as she gathered her things, dropping and picking up her sunglasses twice in the process. “I’ve got to run, Frank. I’m late for a flower-arranging class down at the Community Center.” Which was true, she’d signed up last week, but she hadn’t planned to go after she’d heard that the instructor was sort of “out there.” But the excuse came in handy now, so she might as well just do it. What else did she have to fill up her time, after all?

  “I need to attract a mate,” said Frank, still smiling to bursting. “If I’m going to give up fat, I’ll need a replacement to keep me warm at night. But I’m afraid a metal tongue stud will throw off the taste of wine.”

  She threw a beach shift over her bathing suit, not even bothering to go inside to change. She gave Frank a lame smile as a good-bye, then left. He threw her a kiss she did not see, then cradled his stomach warmly in his arms, like a baby.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Divots

  HOLD ON, hold on.” Ralph Bellows shushed his three buddies from the Hunt Club, Anthony Paxton, Goody Cooke, and Malloch Smith. They were all drunk, it was almost dawn, and they were uncomfortably squeezed into a single golf cart with gun cases rattling in the back. The gentle curves of the course rose and fell like heavy tides to their inebriated senses.

  “Stop,” said Cooke. “For God’s sake. I’m going to spew.”

  “Almos’ there,” said Bellows. “Quiet. Ssh. There’s houses along here.”

  “Houses?” said Paxton, swaying gently left and right in the backseat with Cooke, excitement and alcohol competing for his posture. “What are the geese doing in houses?”

  “That’s not even sporting,” said Smith. “I’m going to shoot one out of the air, like a man.” He was ordinarily sullen, but to-night he was buoyed up by the adventure and was now almost annoyingly cheerful. He, like Paxton and Cooke, was still dressed in the tailored suit he’d begun the evening in, minus jacket and tie.

  “The geese aren’t in the houses, you idiots,” said Bellows, who, without any self-consciousness, had taken time to put on his sandy tweeds, a Norfolk jacket, and a pith helmet before leaving his apartment, where the men had made their plan. Earlier in the day, their wives had announced preemptive headaches, so it had been stag night from the start, beginning with the Somerset Club. The four men had attended a banquet hosted by an old school chum who was whiling away time until his indictments were handed down. The many-coursed dinner had displayed his power and desirability, no mean trick in the face of certain financial ruin. There was a game fellow, Bellows and his friends agreed, and they made heartfelt toasts to his past business achievements, back in the days when avarice was no crime at all.

  Then the foursome went for nightcaps at Bellows’s place on Louisburg Square, where he lived alone after the recent dissolution of his second marriage. They sipped a venerable liquor bottled the year before the Depression began, because Bellows liked to provide the best to people who knew what they were drinking. They got deliberately drunk, and the closer they got to the bottom of the bottle, the closer they came to being the boys they were at Andover. They munched on the apples of their youth into the wee hours, wandering in the land of golden shadows. Goalposts and the Lower Field. The sound of Coach irritably shouting their names. From the amber spirits, they conjured up the day when they had skipped English composition to shoot squirrels with the BB gun smuggled from Paxton’s home. Bellows suddenly remembered the geese at the Club.

  “Wouldn’t it be a bit of fun, eh?” he’d said, and after one pour la route, they were off. It was four in the morning.

  Before they left, Bellows had brewed a thermos full of strong coffee and filled a flask with brandy for warmth, even though, being late July, you could have fried an egg on the sidewalk. But it was brisk September in their heads, the fresh start of an Andover semester: the smell of rain on fallen leaves, wood smoke twirling in thermals, the stiffness of new clothes. It had been a time of hope. They loaded Bellows’s collection of shotguns into the back of his Lexus SUV and took back roads so as not to draw notice from the police. They had expected to scale the brick wall of the Club but had found the service entrance unlocked.

  “That jackass, Wilton,” Bellows had said. “Can’t even lock the door behind him anymore. No wonder the place is falling apart.”

  “Can’t we scale the wall anyway?” wondered Paxton, and no one answered him.

  After they’d found a golf cart, they spent a good long time traveling in circles in the dark looking for their prey and threatening to be ill. Bellows drove haltingly because he was driving blind as well as drunk, since, for security reasons, he didn’t turn on the headlights. Suddenly he was spitting with excitement. “The geese are down there, by the water, sleepin’. See ’em?” The sky was a sickly grayish color, which made it impossible to see anything with great certainty, but he sped toward them, the electric cart silently gliding like a sled over the turf.

  “?‘By the dawn’s early light. . .’,” Smith, a sentimental drunk, began to sing mournfully.

  “Isn’t that a tree up ahead?” asked Cooke.

  “Possibly,” said Bellows, not slowing
down or redirecting the cart. “It’s crisis, after all, that tests the basic soundness of a man. I wonder if I packed the goose call?”

  “I’ve always welcomed obstacles myself,” said Paxton.

  As the obstacle hove rapidly into view, it announced itself as definitely being a tree, and they all lurched forward when Bellows braked hard. Smith’s fine voice was abruptly cut off at “the land of the free.”

  They decided to set up camp. “Distribute the firearms,” ordered Bellows, and they organized the guns, which had tumbled out of the back of the cart. The men crawled for their weapons in the dim light.

  “Shouldn’t we build some sort of blind?” said Paxton, unlatching the leather gun case.

  “No need,” said Bellows. “It’s too dark for them to see us.”

  “?‘It’s always darkest before the dawn,’” said Cooke, leaning against the tree to steady his stomach.

  “If we can see them. . .,” said Paxton.

  “Wish I had my old hunting dog, Beau,” said Smith, his voice cracking in grief. “He could retrieve an egg without cracking it.”

  “We’re not going to retrieve the damn things,” said Bellows, looking at the other three for signs of intelligence. “Are we? Those Canada geese are foul.”

  “Ha!” said Cooke. “Foul? F-o-u-l. Fowl? F-o-w-l. See what I mean?”

  “Sssh,” said Bellows. “Everyone sees what you mean, it’s just that everyone sees it as stupid. Get your gun and don’t drop the box of shells. And be quiet. We don’t want to wake them yet.”

  “Who’s going to flush them out?” said Smith, sinking into alcoholic gloom. “We don’t have a dog with us. Beau was a tremendous flusher. God, I miss him.”

  “Please,” said Paxton. “It’s been twenty years. He was just a dog.”

  “What would you know about dogs if you’ve never had anything but pit bulls?”

  “But I’ve never had a pit bull,” said Paxton indignantly. “I’ve only ever had goldens and you know it. Claire wouldn’t have anything else in the house.”

  “Oh, you get my point,” Smith said, wiping his eyes. “Hand me that gun.”

  “Where’s my gun?” asked Cooke, sinking now to the base of the tree in a squat.

  “It’d be a whole lot easier to shoot them in their sleep,” said Paxton, squinting in the crosshairs, pointing his gun up at the sky, then lowering it down to the sleeping geese. “Seems like a lot of trouble to scare them up.”

  “We’re hunters,” said Bellows disagreeably. “We’re going to shoot a quick round, bag as many as we can, then speed away before the neighbors wake up or security swings by. Ready? Prepare for engagement.”

  “Primus, maximus, optimus,” said Smith as he cocked his shotgun. The first, the greatest, the best.

  “Where’s my gun?” Cooke whispered, curled up at the base of the tree, his eyes closed tight.

  Paxton cocked. Smith knelt. “Shoot quickly when they take off,” Bellows said. “And if you can’t see, shoot at the sound.” He threw a small rock near the settlement of sleeping geese, but their heads remained tucked neatly under their wings.

  “The spirit of a lion cannot be roused by the teasing of an insect,” announced Smith, his voice thick with emotion. “Someone said that, and it’s true. Beau was no tease, and neither should we be,” he said, bending to pick up a stick and swaying slightly on becoming upright again.

  “I’ve shot a lion,” said Bellows, leaning on his shotgun. “From a helicopter, but then the hide was confiscated at the border. I paid a fortune in fines. They’re all in on it. It’s a racket, it’s all a racket.”

  Once Smith steadied himself, he threw the stick at the geese as if playing fetch. The startled birds squawked and honked, waking one another up. They stood on their webbed toes and raised their long necks in alarm, but it took another rock from Bellows to encourage a couple of them airborne.

  “Fore!” shouted Paxton, and fired.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Wayward Shot

  HERE, GOOSEY, goosey, gander,” Vita whispered, tiptoeing across the small sandy shoal to where the geese slept in the watery underbrush. It was five thirty in the morning, time for the Early Bird Special. “El ganso, come eat.” She sometimes spoke to them in Spanish because it made her feel closer to what she imagined were her family’s agrarian roots back in Colombia, even though the geese didn’t care whether words or stones fell from her mouth. Their common language was food. Her kind of relationship.

  The thirty or so geese who slept on the island were developing healthy profiles thanks to the bird buffet that Vita had been hostessing morning and night for two weeks. It was worth the extra effort to row to the island geese because it was cheaper than feeding the huge mainland flock. She did not want the common hordes to get in on the cornmeal action. Ever the efficient kitchen statistician, she only wanted to fatten up as many as she could use. She should have just enough for a hundred plates, since she guessed that at most only half of the members would care for goose. But Dr. Nicastro would. He would roll around in the grass with one if he could, and butter himself with foie gras! Hers wouldn’t be the traditional bloated liver of the Toulouse geese either, whose webbed feet were hammered to barn floors so that cornmeal could be funneled down their throats. Her livers would be smaller, but they’d have much better Karma. She wouldn’t have enough to go around, but there was plenty for those who could appreciate its subtleties.

  She heard her birds shaking themselves awake. She cooed softly, “Here, honey. Eat, eat.” She made kissing noises, and they ran to her, the young and the old, the sleepy and the alert. The male and female? Gender was a mystery, but it didn’t matter. Females were tastier as a rule, but with enough hanging, she was going to tame the vile hormones out of the male. She thought ruefully of the female’s thicker layer of subcutaneous fat and pinched her waist. The geese spread out their wings and thrust their humped necks forward, but Vita calmed them with food. They lowered their heads and vacuumed up the grain, arguing quietly among themselves. She did not want them to honk, or else they’d attract the geese from the mainland, and after them, the opportunistic crows would arrive, dive-bombing her for food and creating a scene, as they do.

  Here, as in the dining room, Vita demanded a calm atmosphere for proper digestion. She knew that much of what tastes like good food was really just a peaceful setting, and that’s why she made the effort to arrive on the island so early, cutting into what little sleep any one chef was allotted in a lifetime. She had also learned, after an unintended drenching, to finish up before the automatic sprinkler system went on. Then there was Gerard. With his canine devotion to the Club, he arrived at the crack of dawn some days, and she did not want to alarm him with her new venture in goose husbandry. She was so early at the Club that she often bumped into the cleaning service, all those Brazilian girls dusting and emptying trash and chattering away in Portuguese. It was strange to meet people who looked Latina like her but who spoke another language. Same people, different conquerors. Vita would have liked to offer them a little pastry, but by the time she got the kitchen up and going, the crew was always long gone.

  While she waited for the geese to clean up the feed, she poked around in the leaf litter for mushrooms. To think she had once completely relied on that swinish Utah for her raw ingredients! No more. How elemental she felt now, so in tune with food and its origins. What a fool she had been to think that a domestic bird could do the job! An animal that had not lived had no tale to tell on the table. If a bird could not fly, could not pluck grass, could not engage in relationships and saunter freely through the world, such a bird was just so much dead meat. A heavyset bullfrog leaped out from behind a rock, and she watched him slip into the water, creating silent circles where he’d disappeared. Most people said they didn’t like frog, but what they didn’t like was frozen frog. She knew that fresh frog, skinned right over the pan, was heavenly. Next time she would bring a net. She wondered how many calories were in a frog.

 
; One of the geese jabbed at her leg with his beak, treating her like a mechanical dispenser of feed, and it worked. She shook out the last of the cornmeal, all the while wishing she had a bird to practice on. She felt so ineffectual next to Luisa’s mother, the talented Mrs. Suarez, able to take a bird as ornery as a Canada goose and hang it by its scaly ankles until its flesh was made not just palatable but divine. It was a process that took more than a week, but it was going to be worth it. The memory of that first bite still lingered on Vita’s tongue.

  A goose rubbed against her leg as it passed, and she inhaled deeply to capture its acrid essence, as elemental as warm mud. She wished she could do the night feedings as well, but she could not be spared from the kitchen. Before dark, Luisa rowed out with their dinner, the only one of her workers who knew what the banquet plans were. She’d had to confide in Barry too, who was horrified, and for a moment Vita was afraid he might even turn her in to Gerard, but it had to be done. She needed a favor: There could be no herbicides or pesticides, no fungicides or fertilizers, nothing whatsoever, applied to the turf until after the butchering. The chemicals would poison the flesh.

  She had picked up fluffy Forbes and kissed him on the head. “That toxic grass isn’t good for this little guy either, you know. It could give him tumors.”

  Barry took his bird back from Vita and hugged it to him. “Tumors?”

  “There are courses you can take to learn other ways, Barry.”

  “I spent four years in college to learn how to superintend greens and you tell me I have to go back?”

  “Sometimes we have to go back before we can go forward,” she said, and stroked the top of Forbes’s feathery head.

  “Tumors, huh?”

  And so the greens went green, cold turkey, and none the wiser. Barry, whose career depended upon the perfection of his fairways, hunted down organic alternatives to chemicals on the Internet and signed up for a course on integrated pest management at the Aggie. He spent his days in his office shed with Forbes, pulverizing insects and hot peppers in a blender, making his own natural pesticides. He praised the earthworm with a lover’s passion.