Lit Riffs

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Lit Riffs Page 21

by Matthew Miele


  Out of left field, Mo asks, “If we get a dog”—his arm disappearing into the sauce pot—“would I have to still babysit?” That thirteen-year-old troublemaker smiles the way that only a kid who hasn’t seen the real world can. “Billy Doric said Irish setters are like smart enough to do it for you.”

  This is probably because my husband was such a cock that I had to turn to something that wasn’t him, but when I first became a mom, the thrill I felt for Morrison was under my skin and stayed that way—until Dylan was born. It was like a poison oak rash for six years.

  And now I’m sighing at Morrison: “Who said anything about a goddamn dog?” Because the thought of a puppy heartburns me—who does Mo think would end up walking the fucking thing?

  “That’s shitting bullcrap, Nanette.”

  He’s picked up language from school; he’ll curse even when it doesn’t make sense to. More than the words themselves, I hate that he doesn’t use them right.

  Anyway, he’s chewing his lips, creasing his forehead—his best hard-guy face. But thanks to that squeaky clean skin of his, I always imagine Mo a sheep on a cultivator feedlot, blinking, a cream puff with no defense from the ax.

  I slap his hand with all I can muster—whap! “What’d I tell you about language in this house?”

  “Ow, Mom.”

  Like the point of a boat, his nose splits the steam that rides around his head. He’s got Dave the Rave’s baby blues, bluer now that they’re getting all teary. “Jesus H. Crap, Nanette,” he mutters.

  I can’t even remember my life without him; it’s always a shock seeing he’s not in any of my picture albums from, say, high school. Meanwhile, here I am, imitating his whine: “Ow, a woman hit my hand.”

  He’s pouting about his wrist, which is blotched red where I slapped it.

  “Mom?” he says, his voice tiny and tight.

  “Dylan’11 probably go against the idea of a puppy,” I say, nice as I’m able now. I hadn’t planned on hitting him so hard. “You know how your brother can be a stubborn little shit.” We laugh on that.

  (The truth of the thing is, motherhood came down-to-earth when little Dylan got born. Even Morrison started to get on my nerves. Overnight he turned from this cute superkid to a clumsy thing I had to protect the baby from. And I never really got that poison oak feeling with my youngest.)

  Now little Dylan himself walks in, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, his hair a wild black heave—a seven-year-old bundle of pee wearing nothing but a Black Crowes T-shirt that’s not long enough to hide his goods. I should yell about this, but me and Morrison just laugh some more. The point is, I forget to look at the mail and don’t notice the letter from the Department of Social Services.

  Next day I went to work, it was hell as always. Every time she saw me, Mrs. Crailt, chief librarian, puckered her face as if she’d heard an insult. Too tall even in flats, that woman showed more chins than I should mention here. “You sure you’ve cataloged everything, and stacked the what’s lefts, Nanette?”

  Why are women so hard on other women? Her hair was the stringy that pasta in a can often is.

  After work I open my front door expecting the usual zoo, but here’s Morrison and Dylan, both close to tears in front of the TV, their heads down. Mo’s clenching his free fist while some gangly man in a cardigan holds them by their hands.

  “Who the hell are you?”—I’m trying to sound like more than the five foot three I am. My hands are trembling. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

  “You don’t need to be alarmed, please. I’m looking for Mrs. McQuaid—their mother?” Cardigan has a breathy good-fairy voice and a wide smile. “Ma’am, is Mrs. McQuaid your daughter?” The guy’s got a tight grip on my boys; his fingernails are like Sno-Kones: red, followed by a white that’s bloodless.

  “I’m the mother, thank you,” I say.

  “Jim Plates,” the guy singsongs. “Department of Social Services.”

  He doesn’t let go of my boys.

  I’d been thirty-seven and two years married when The Rave and I did “blotter” acid in 1986. I sat alone in the kitchen and it hit. I got so cut off, Bono from U2 appeared. Bono wrapped me tight in freakishly huge hands, and he swept me from my housework, from my thinking about myself. He spun me, his massive thumbs flicking my apron off, and before I knew it Bono had me close, his chest solid against the mess of who I was. Bono held me in a way that he never could—he was miles from me, in the green TV chair, waiting on a beer—and I was snug in Irish arms in the kitchen. Together we sang the “name” songs: “In the Name of Love” and “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

  Later, I squinted under emergency room lights at a beaver-toothed med student. If he’d asked me, Do you think you’d end up a good mother one day?—or a mother at all?—I would’ve said, Shut up and play yer guitar some more. But I cleaned up. Had the boys. And got rid of Dave the Rave (though not by choice).

  After all that, here I found myself in 2004 with gray-eyed Jim Plates, Department of Social Services, a stranger across from me at my unset dinner table. His breath was a beesting in my nostrils. I’d sent the kids outside.

  This Plates guy says to me, “Mrs. McQuaid.” He grins while he talks, which is a feat. ‘Tour son, uh, Dylan, tells me—”

  “Mr. Plates, how’d you get into my house?” The breath smell’s not as bad if I breathe in through my mouth. I can take control of the situation. “Not to be rude, but—”

  “—Dylan told me that you’d fed them ‘Orange Crush and peanut butter and jelly’ for dinner one night this week.” He has a voice that rises at the end of every sentence—apologetic-sounding even when you’re the one on the ropes.

  “Mr. Plates, that’s not unusual for a mom.” I’m going with my cheerful voice. “Usually, I just get whatever seems best to me when I’m at the store. It ain’t a stretch to say the boys love that meal.” I don’t want to reach for a cig in front of Plates, but I need one. “Isn’t a stretch.”

  Now the guy, looking up from his file, peers at the chest I haven’t got much of. And he keeps peering. His eyes are cement.

  “I’m not like the type to auction my kids, really, if that’s what this is about,” I say brilliantly. My ceiling seems really low to me. “I mean, who is—right? Ha ha ha.” I bend toward him a little, now that we’re such pals. “So is that what this is about?”

  He stoops to write again. The part in his hair makes a scalp trail, white and straight as a string. “Tes,” he says.

  I check my watch: 6:15. I cough—even that doesn’t make him look up at me. My own house, now municipal-feeling as a DMV. Even the air seems what Mrs. Crailt calls “poor-ventilated.” And what are the kids up to outside that it’s so quiet?

  Plates raises his head all of a sudden, as if I’m the one who’s disturbed him. “Don’t worry, Mrs. McQuaid.” He works his easy-on-the-ear half-whisper. “I’ll never let them take”—checking his notes—“Dylan and Morrison from you.”

  That does the opposite of soothe me. I hadn’t even considered that possibility. I manage to use my librarian voice: “May I ask you to leave?” More than anything in my life I want to be happy, I think. Could be that’s the difference between me and the really good mothers of the world.

  “Uh, sure, you can ask me to leave,” Plates says, squinting. “No probleme.” He’s extrabreathy now, speaking almost to himself, his face aimed at his notepad. “We’re just talking. It was my understanding that we were just talking, Mrs. McQuaid.”

  After that the only sound is the musical-shakerish cha-cha-cha of Plates writing. His hands are fat, pink hands.

  Pritchardville, where I live, was said to be birthplace to the hokeypokey, not a rock-and-roll town. That’s probably one reason that I’m not into music as much. Just sometimes The Black Crowes, to help me when I get stressed. “Hard to Handle” has to be about my boys. (It was just one more disappointment to learn that the Crowes didn’t even write that one.) Anyway, I thought people here in Pritchardville didn’t butt int
o other lives.

  Plates called to set up a few more “talks.”

  It wouldn’t be on any schedule, he said—maybe two next week, the week after, then more. We’d see. They’d operate around my calendar. I wondered who the hell “they” were. “More people like me,” Plates laughed—glug, glug, glug, like Coke going too quick from a bottle.

  The first meeting was set for a Wednesday, 9 a.m., at the Human Services building in Palmetto Bluff.

  “Sure, come in late Wednesday, I don’t mind,” Mrs. Crailt yawned toward the massive bookstacks that are going to come crashing through the third floor one day. “Assuming, that is, Nanette, that you have periodicals E through H re-tagged.”

  The night before the meeting, the kids watched Rugrats. At the commercial, Dyl’s voice cracked as he asked what the FBI was. He sat chewing on the sleeve of his Jimi Hendrix footie pajamas.

  “A bunch of squares, that’s the FBI,” I say.

  Dylan whines, “I told you, Mo”—as insecure as unexpectedly victorious little brothers always are. When the kids had been younger, it was adorable the way they’d acted together, Mo cheering while Dylan walked with a magazine balanced on his head. Now Morrison’s shooting Dyl a look that says, “Shut up, asshole.”

  Dylan tells me that the elementary school principal, along with some other men, had questions—about me. And the way Morrison’s staring into his hands, I know someone’d grilled him, too.

  “So, what’d they ask you guys?” I try for casualness: Hey, look, your mom doesn’t give a shit about the stupid principal’s office. On the tube, the Rugrat with Charlie Brown-ish head and hair is laughing like a full-grown individual.

  Mo’s eyes are doing this slow side-to-side—just like The Rave does when he’s nervous.

  “Well,” he says, “this guy was going, ‘How does your mommy treat you,’ and I was like, ‘Mommy? We just say Mom or Nanette. I was like, Our place’s not the same as other kids’ places, but it’s awesome sometimes, too.’”

  Little Dylan arches his back and interrupts, “Like, um, when you let us pick CDs to listen to at dinner, and how you don’t yell so much when I pee on the floor—and I know I gotta stop doing that, Mom—and he said, ‘She sounds nice,’ the guy. I didn’t tell him about you and Dad, or when you punished me for when Mo broke the glass, but you thought maybe I did it, too, even though I didn’t.”

  “Oh,” I say. Either Mo or Dyl seems to have put the TV on mute. “Oh, good.”

  In South Carolina, wherever a building rises three stories or more, worn-out shops or houses squat around it, jealous as groupies. That’s how it is with the Human Services building—a tall, yellow-trimmed ex-mansion with high cheek-bones.

  At five to nine, the lights are bright in its eye-windows. It’s almost welcoming—nothing like what I’d imagined. Inside, there’s gleaming wood. Still, I’m a little pissed as soon I walk in; no one’s told me which room to visit.

  A tubby in a cheap orange blouse gives me a dirty look as she marches down the carpeted stairs that I’m marching up. But then a fat, pink hand settles on my shoulder.

  “Mrs. McQuaid.” Plates’s voice is deep in my ear. He stands at my back. “Come on, come on, we’ve been expecting you.” It’s nine on the dot.

  “Oh, but-”

  “Did you bring your boys?” Fat hand on my tailbone, Plates is walking me up the stairs.

  “Did I—no, nobody told me—”

  Plates sidles next to me at the start of the second-floor hallway, his breath minted by mouthwash that’ll burn away by noon the latest.

  “Oh, well, I guess that’s fine, then. But Mrs. McQuaid”—he’s looking at his watch—“who takes care of the kids when you’re out?”

  “Well, they’re in school.” Like that, my underarms go sweaty. Should kids be somewhere besides school?

  “Of course they are.” Plates, moving his lips as if he had a mouth sore, looks anything but mannish. “Sorry—I have to ask these questions, you understand.”

  “Yes.” I’m nodding a lot. “Of course.”

  “This way, please.” Plates has teeth that lean into one another and jostle for a better view of the world outside his mouth. He takes me by the elbow down the stairs again. My own teeth are no great shakes, I know that.

  If the Human Services building once was an old mansion, what is now the empty waiting room must’ve been the broom closet. The receptionist has blond hair only a laboratory could invent. She keeps having to finger up her bifocals as she wheeze-laughs through a personal call. Plates and I stand waiting in place until my back starts to ache. The Far Side taped to her monitor features a moose with a bull’s-eye for a birthmark.

  When Receptionist hangs up, she and Plates start to gab—she calls him Hot Plates. The whole time, someone’s piping in Muzak of Frampton’s “Show Me the Way,” a version with strings and keyboards like thick gloves that dull its punch—where’s the Fender Rhodes, voice box guitar, the fuzz-toned lick that lifted a thousand skirts? White-washing like this is what separates good from evil, ask anyone. In the meantime I’m standing here like a jackass, breathing in the dead air, trying to shut my ears to this dead music.

  Finally Plates asks Blondie, “Stampp’s in, huh-3B?” Back on the second floor, Plates—now a three-year-old shy to wake his parents on Christmas morning—taps on the open door of a conference room. Inside, this old, fat guy’s sitting on the lip of a metal desk that could be from the Eisenhower administration.

  “Mrs. McQuaid?” says the guy that I don’t know yet. ‘You’re quite tardy.”

  All Plates does is frown and shake his head. I take a breath. “I’m here now, though, sir.” My biggest smile. “I was with Mr. Plates for a bit.” Again, Plates says nothing to back me up. Trying not to lose it, I turn to the window, where the top of an elm is shivering like a humiliated thing getting yelled at.

  The fat guy on the desk sighs—“Twenty minutes is twenty minutes”—he jumps to his feet and offers me his hand. It gives like a bag of flour. “Do you know what I mean?

  “Well, Mrs. McQuaid.” The guy rattles the phlegm in his throat. “John Stampp. FSACWCCA.”

  And Plates stage-whispers, “Federal Sub-Agency of Child Welfare, Child Care, and Abuse.” You’d guess something’s tugging inside his cheek, the way half his face hollows up when he shrugs.

  Meanwhile, this guy Stampp is saying, “This won’t be too prickly, I hope.” He hesitates before prickly, worming his eye-brows as if he’s being naughty.

  It’s anger or nervousness that has me scratching my palms.

  Mr. Stampp: Stick a pair of hairy ears on an egg, glue it on top of a potato, don’t worry about a neck, and there you have him—plump in the way friendly neighbors are, imagine a David Crosby shaved clean. I try to look for something human in the guy’s face, but what can you expect from the eyes of a man who has not an ounce of life in him?

  “Sirs, can I just say something?”—sounding, I hope, not overconfident but not insecure, either. I have a flash of how they see me: middle-aged and lonely, a package of things you can’t hide no matter how you talk. “I’d like to say something in my defense.”

  Stampp smiles and it almost seems a real smile; his cheeks gentle into ballish little circles. “Of course you may, Mrs. McQuaid.” But his eyes look no more humane than smudged marbles.

  “Sirs, I love my kids.” I want this to sit for a while. The black-and-white George Bush tacked to the wall is the older one, the father. And suddenly, out the window, what looks like a flock of envelopes glides by with a floaty whoosh, hundreds of them swimming in the air, for some reason twirling, apart and together, papers gone bright with the sun. I want to make a big deal out of this—there’s a pack of glowy little ghosts boogying just outside—but it’s only Plates and Stampp with me in this wood-paneled room, and the sight would be gone before I could explain it.

  “I just wanted to let you know that, sirs.” I stop myself from chewing my lip. “I mean, my children are happy.” What I’m saying
is true, but the quake in my voice marks me as a liar.

  “Ma’am, how often do the children see their father?” Smiling Stampp’s voice is as bouncy as his jowls.

  “Every three weeks—two and a half weeks,” I say. “Every two, two and a half weeks.”

  I want to cut my own throat immediately. Either I should have told the truth (“almost never”) or said once a week.

  “Mr. Stampp is going to ask you some questions now,” Plates says.

  “Shoot,” I say.

  And he gives me a third degree, a blur of words, all my answers on the heels of new questions like cats chasing dogs: So, I see you are a musician, No, Mr. Stampp, I’m the associate librarian at the Pritchardville Library. It says here you’re an entertainer, Well, sir, I’m a librarian. May I ask how much an associate librarian job receives a year by way of salaried compensation, Do I have to get into that, sir? I can check the IRS records if I have to, It pays twenty-four-six a year, sir. And I have no doubt you’ve a good reason for not bringing your kids here this morning, Yes, sir, I thought, I didn’t know—And, Mrs. McQuaid, you are not yet divorced, Close to it, sir. I see your husband’s name is David McQuaid and is it true that he makes his living as the percussionist in a rock-and-roll outfit and as a hand model, Well, sir, my ex wasn’t a beauty, but he was all right, I say.

  “Springfield,” Stampp mutters, bending over his desk to jot something.

  “Steen,” I say. “There’s Rick Springfield, who’s no Bruce Springsteen.”

  Plates gives me this openmouthed stare as if I just dropped a china plate. By now my heart’s a grimy balled-up sock. “So, can you tell me why I’m here?” I ask.

  “I guess you’re the comedienne, why don’t you tell us?” Stampp turns back to me, his eyes showing their first spark of life. “Tell us a joke about selling kids on-line.”

 

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