CVC

by Gloria Vanderbilt

  “I heard your dad is a queer. I heard your dad likes to…” Sam paused, screwed up his eyes in concentration. His tongue jammed against his cheek, ballooning it in and out.

  The trio of Lauras giggled, the giggles spreading out in a fan around them. Danny looked at Evan. Evan looked back at Danny.

  “I’m talking to you, Danny boy!” Sam called, rubber-lipped. “And. I heard it’s not just men your dad likes. It’s. It’s. Little boys. He likes to. Watch them.” The words were broken up as if Sam was unsure, remembering. The synapses firing too slowly in his brain. But then all at once the words came out in a rush. “That’s why your mom kicked him out. Isn’t it? Isn’t that why you had to move? What I can’t figure out is why she kicked you out too. It must’ve been because you’re queer. Are you, Danny? Are you and your dad just a couple of big ole queers?”

  The pressure system reversed so quickly Danny could feel his ears popping. And now the silence, the calm, the deadly quiet was all around him, and the hurricane was inside, whipping across his synapses, rattling his teeth.

  His fists clenched.

  There was a line of drying snot on Sam Stenson’s jeans. It caught the morning light like the edge of a knife.

  “Don’t be such an asshole,” Danny wanted to say.

  “Everyone knows what your mom really does when she says she’s working the night shift,” Danny wanted to say.

  “Just go to hell,” he wanted to say.

  Nothing broke that terrible silence.

  “No,” he wanted to say. “It wasn’t him. It was her. It was her.”

  “Slut,” he wanted to say. “Whore,” he wanted to say.

  His fingers unclenched.

  Sam look at him, glanced at Evan. The silence stretched a moment longer, two, and still there were no words, no punches thrown. The crowd began to stir, restless, making jungle noises.

  “Just leave him alone,” Evan said at last. “God, Sam, why do you always have to be such a jerk? We all know your mom could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.”

  Faint laughter.

  “C’mon,” Evan said to Danny. “Don’t worry about him. I think I heard the bell. We’ll be late for class if we don’t move.”

  At home that night Danny sat down to the umpteenth bowl of mac and cheese.

  “Did you learn anything interesting today?” Danny’s dad asked him.

  “No,” said Danny.

  “Nothing?”

  “No.”

  “Did you want Evan to come over after school tomorrow?”

  “No,” said Danny.

  Silence.

  “C’mon, talk to me, buddy. I’m drowning here.”

  “Why do we always have to eat this stuff for dinner?”

  Danny asked. “I’m sick of it! It makes me sick, I’m so tired of it! Okay, Dad? Just one night without mac and cheese! Okay?”

  Danny realized he was yelling. His dad was staring at him. It hurt Danny to see the pale look of fear flash in his father’s eyes, but it also felt good, saying those things out loud, seeing that hurt. Sometimes it felt good to hurt people.

  “Okay, buddy,” his dad said.

  They finished the meal in silence.

  Danny hardly looked at the sky anymore.

  When Danny put his eye to the spyglass, he kept the notebook his dad had given him beside him. He adjusted the dial methodically, checked the numbers, made a mark with his pencil. Adjusted the dial again.

  It was easy once you got the hang of it. No different than what they had been doing in math class, making bar graphs. Charting out the stagger of datasets on grid paper under Mrs. Pembridge’s sharp-nippled guidance.

  Danny licked his lips. He turned the dial. The window swam into focus. There was the teapot. The brown-and-tan duvet. He waited, but there were no figures in the circle of vision. He tried again, vision blurring and resolving, blurring and resolving. There. His mom standing by the mirror of the dresser, a finger pulling back errant strands of hair behind her ear.

  Danny made a note in his book. Turned the dial. Turned the dial again until he found her propped up on pillows with a paperback. She licked her index finger and turned the page. She seemed happy enough, Danny thought, content. He made a note. He turned the dial.

  Danny spent the night like this. The next as well. The next after that. He ignored when his dad knocked at the door, learned to turn up the volume on his radio, ate dinner silently, sullenly. Worked. The images went by, smearing across his vision, one superimposed on the next, on the next, on the next. Danny found it strange, captivating, the gradual progression backwards, watching his mom’s cheeks smooth out like the skin of an apple until there were only the faintest of lines where the wrinkles would later net at the corner of her eyes and mouth.

  Sometimes Danny recorded the moments when she was with his dad, the grey streaks at his temple receding like a tide as the image changed again and again. He was smoking now. Danny watched his arms thicken, his back straighten from its fishhook slump. Danny watched the distance close between them, the way they touched each other, the casual kisses in the morning, the way his dad might run his palms across the side of her face, curving around her ears. The way she would lean into him, sometimes, when she was very tired in the evening.

  But mostly Danny watched his mom. Watched the years lift off her, the thick, invisible weight of them peeling off as he turned back the dial click by tiny click.

  Slut, he wanted to think. Whore, he wanted to think.

  But then sometimes there he was in the room too. Seven years old. Five years old. Four years old. Vibrating like a puppy, hands in her makeup drawer, interfering, until she would scoop him up underneath his armpits and sit him down on the bed as she got ready for work. Sliding the studs of pearls into her ears. Rouging her cheeks.

  Three years old. Two years old. He watched himself shrink smaller and smaller, the mass of him disappearing into thin air. Where am I going? Danny would think. Fingers whittling down to the length of crayons. Of baby carrots. Pudgy baby hands still grasping at the hem of mommy’s dress as she swept by him and landed a quick kiss on his forehead.

  And then he was the size of a football, and she would keep him swaddled in a blue blanket, torpedo-shaped, legs vanished to a single vertex. They would keep him between them, his mom and his dad, their bodies pressed close but not too close. His dad slept uneasily in those months. Danny would catch him waking in the night, a look on his face like he was afraid he had rolled the wrong way and smothered the little lump of his son.

  Smaller and smaller until baby Danny disappeared entirely into her body, and there was just that hot-air-balloon bulge in the stomach and the breasts pillowed above, and then that shrunk too, smoothed over, the mountain becoming a molehill under her navel.

  It took Danny nine days to chart out the length of his lifespan. He charted it in smiles. He charted it in touches. He charted it in wrinkles and haircuts and naptimes and workdays.

  Slut, he wanted to think. Mommy, he wanted to think.

  Danny did not watch for his dad. It was that other thing he watched for. Whatever it was that had come between them, that must have started earlier, mustn’t it? Something like that couldn’t simply arrive without warning. Without being anticipated. Expected.

  So Danny watched for it. Watched for Henry Croydon or someone like him. Charted out twelve years back into the past, and then another nine months. He watched for that other thing. He waited for his mom to become the slut he knew she would become.

  He watched. It had to be there. Something had to be there.

  It wasn’t.

  “I want to live with Mom,” Danny said at the dinner table that night, the hot damp of July having crept into the apartment almost overnight, soaking armpits and crotches with sweat. They were eating Rice-A-Roni mixed with slices of chicken breast.

  “What?” his dad asked. He was serving himself a big spoonful from the pot. A glob broke off and landed on the morning newspaper, which had been used as a makes
hift placemat. “I want to live with Mom. I want to move back. I don’t like it here.” With you, he wanted to say. I don’t like it here with you.

  “But, Danny. You can’t.” He paused, stricken. “I mean. Danny, please. We had an agreement. Your mom needs time. We all need some time.”

  “I can have my old room back,” Danny said.

  “C’mon, buddy, I know it’s been rough here, but it’s not that bad, is it? I mean, we’re all upset. I know it’s not ideal, but I’ve been trying. Look, I’ve been trying, you know I’ve been trying.”

  “Mom said I could have my room back. Mom said it wouldn’t have to be an office if I lived there.”

  “You can’t, Danny. Please. I’ll do better, I’ll make us something better tomorrow. Chicken fingers, huh? How about that? How about hamburgers and French fries? You love hamburgers and French fries. You can help me in the kitchen, that’d be fun, wouldn’t it? Danny?”

  “I hate,” Danny said delicately, “hamburgers and French fries. I hate this apartment. I hate you. I’m going, okay? I’m going.”

  Before his dad could get up from the table, before he could even stand, Danny was at the door, Danny was slipping on his sneakers, he was in the hallway, he was on the street, he was racing across it and entering the code. He was standing in front of the elevator. The elevator door opened. He stabbed at the button for the seventh floor. The elevator door closed. His heart beat like the wings of a hummingbird in his chest, individual thumps turned to a steady buzz.

  Danny listened to the sound of the floor passing, the tinny chime as another one sped beneath him. He imagined his dad at the table, still staring at that stupid spoonful of Rice-A-Roni. Still eating mechanically as if nothing had happened. As if you could simply keep going like nothing had ever happened.

  He wondered if he had called his mom. Danny didn’t care.

  The elevator door slid open and Danny stepped out, turned left and walked through the overbright hallway to Unit 24. He knocked.

  He imagined his dad finding the journal. He imagined his dad reading the journal. Wondered if he would understand it.

  The door opened. Sarah Englemont’s door. Sarah Englemont’s apartment.

  “Danny,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  She was beautiful. She was twenty-six and beautiful, her hair flowing in loose, delicate curls around her shoulders, hair the colour of honey, hair the colour of champagne, skin sweet-smelling, sweet like his dad had smelled.

  “You’re not supposed to be here, Danny,” Sarah Englemont said. “Does your mom know you’re here?”

  “No,” said Danny.

  “I can’t let you in,” she said to him. “Your mom would be so mad, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “But you have to,” Danny said. “Please.”

  She shifted her weight from foot to foot, but her slender arms continued to block the door. This wasn’t right, Danny thought. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was supposed to let him in. She needed to let him in.

  “I can’t, little guy. I’m not even supposed to talk to you. I’ve given notice.” She bit her bottom lip, leaving a faint trace of lip gloss on her front teeth. “I’ll be out at the end of the month but it took some time to find a new place. Longer than I thought it would. Will you tell your mom that? I didn’t mean to talk to you. I’m, just, I’m so sorry, okay?”

  Her mouth was curled up into a tight little knot.

  “Look, Danny, I have to go, okay? You can’t stay here. Just go back downstairs, will you?”

  A look came over her face.

  “Oh, Christ, Richard. I didn’t know he was going to come over. He just showed up.”

  Danny turned, took in the details of his dad’s face in a moment, the flushed skin, the thin slot of his mouth. His eyes were wide.

  “It’s okay, Sarah,” his dad said. His voice was strained, strangled. His hand fit over Danny’s, and the skin was hot and dry. “This isn’t your fault. Your problem to deal with. I’ll take him home.” The hand jerked. Danny followed it, only pausing for a moment to look back.

  Sarah framed in the doorway, hand smoothing the curl of her hair. The smell of sweetness on the air.

  “You can’t do that, Danny,” his dad said. Angry? Scared? Some other emotion you got when you turned forty? The elevator dropped beneath them and Danny felt his stomach go with it. “You can’t run out like that. You can’t bother Sarah.”

  Danny said nothing.

  “Please,” his dad said. “I’m so sorry, Danny, but please don’t talk to her again. Your mom would kill me.”

  “Why?” Danny asked.

  “Because,” his dad said, voice quiet, so very, very small. “I’m sorry I did this to you, Danny,” he said. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean for it to happen.” Then his voice disappeared entirely inside him.

  Danny let the world drop away from him, felt it rushing by outside, floor after identical floor.

  He looked at his dad. It seemed as if the lines on his face had been drawn on heavy with a Magic Marker. Danny imagined them getting darker and darker, the skin sagging, coming apart in weighted folds. At the eyes first. Around the mouth. Ginny Crowther smoking at the window, the thin plumes breathing out between her lips. His dad’s body folding up inside itself, the muscle receding to straw bones, the back hooking and humping, the hair gone grey and brittle as grass.

  He had seen it. Danny had seen that. He could look through the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass, train it on his dad while he slept, and turn the dial forward. Again. And again. And again. Watch his dad waste away. Watch the wallpaper peel behind him, watch Danny grow up, go away to university, come back once. Twice. A young man. A man growing older. Watch the way he never hugged his father anymore, watch that space between them become a pregnant thing that grew and grew and grew.

  “Okay,” Danny whispered, child’s hand hot in his dad’s. “It’s okay. Let’s go.”

  K’ ari Fisher

  SADDLE UP!

  My father stopped drinking for one week after the camels arrived. It was my mother’s idea to buy them. Sure, my father sold the mules and arranged for their transport, but my mother was the temptress – my father just bit the apple bobbing under his chin. “Look at that!” she had said. “They can walk forty miles a day and can carry two times the amount of one of our mules. It says here that they’re called Ships of the Desert. ” She dragged her finger slowly across the bottom of the lithograph and smiled up at him.

  It was that Elliott Shows who gave her the paper: a running advertisement for twenty-five domesticated Bactrian camels with an address from a San Francisco merchant and underneath, a colour lithograph of the first U.S. Camel Brigade. In it a group of smiling young soldiers leading docile camels with guns mounted to their humps. “Look at those heroes,” she said softly. “It says here that camels will eat anything.”

  My mother hated the mules.

  It was, possibly, because the mules preferred to eat their bedding hay over her leftover cooking. Or, maybe it was because of my father’s unbelievable blindness.

  “Mules have heart,” he once told me on a rare occasion he was home, as he was showing me how to comb out chig-gers without getting kicked in the shins. “Once they’re yours, they’re yours forever.”

  Yet, the minute you turned your back, the mules either ran like a crazed horse or kicked you in the head like a donkey. And my mother was right: the mules were finicky. They would only eat uphill on the trail because they didn’t like to stretch their necks. They’d refuse their feed until it was laced with sweet corn. And they were so arrogant that they’d only pick one place in the pen to leave a pile of droppings, their favourite place, like a horse stallion.

  But they were nothing like stallions.

  Even I had to agree with Mom that Dad and his mules paled in comparison to the Stetson-bearing, red-necker-chief-sporting pack horse freighters of the B.C. Pony Express. Dad wore a boiled shirt with mustard armpits and a dusty sombrero tied tight arou
nd his neck. He swore its brim kept the rain off his head better than any rodeo flange could.

  “Can you imagine it, Chepé?” my mother had said. “The first Cariboo Camels. You’ll be like Abraham riding across the desert. See those long, strong legs?” She winked at him.

  It was obvious there was much more going on than a simple conversation.

  “Look at that, son.” My father waved the paper at me, jabbing at it with his stubby finger. “Couldn’t you just see me on top of a camel? The mules can only break three miles an hour. I’d like to see the first wolf to come drooling around these beasts only to get kicked in the gums.”

  I frowned.

  The kids were already teasing me about my father. He is one of the shortest men I have ever seen; his clothes are special made by the tailor. The few times I ever saw him without his shirt, I was shocked by the great brown spectacle. My father is savagely furred, with thick arms and a wooden neck. The camels looked swell, but I could only imagine him up there, squat between two wobbling humps. I remained silent and concentrated on slurping down my watery soup.

  “Then again, we owe all that money, maybe it’s not a good time to make an investment.” Mom tapped the table. She shifted her weight and the chair groaned under her.

  Money was a sore spot for Dad.

  He hardly kept any records and when he did, he wrote in carefully formed Roman numerals. I wasn’t sure he really knew how to write actual words. And he’d had a string of bad luck. Last trip he lost two mules to predation and had to pack parts of a steam boiler on his own back. On the first run after spring breakup, a mule packing gold was swept down Snake River never to be found. Plus, Laumeister’s mule train only took three months for a return trip and Dad often took four. In many areas the trail was a rough-hewn cliff-side path only wide enough for single-file mules, people on foot, a solitary horse. Sure, gold towns were growing and people were still hiring the Chepé Mule Train – but it was clearly out of necessity. Generally speaking, it wasn’t my father who made the hard decisions around home, but the mules were undoubtedly his domain. Dad looked confused. Still, I didn’t think he would actually go through with it; everything we owned was made for mules – forty mule-sized trail bridles hung in the tack shed.