Shaken and Stirred

by Joan Opyr

  Lucky Eddie was late. We’d been in the Hang Chow for twenty minutes and drunk a pot of tea before he sauntered in, Jack behind him, and, bringing up the rear, a woman in her mid-forties with long black hair. She was dressed like the seventies Cher, complete with flared hip-hugger jeans and a fringed pocketbook.

  “Frankie,” Eddie said, looking around the table as if trying to spot me in a large crowd. “Ah, there you are. Stand up. I want you to meet Shirley Chantrell. She’s a friend of mine from Parents without Partners.”

  “Parents without Partners,” my mother said slowly. “What in the world . . .”

  I stood up. “Hi, Shirley. Please, have a seat.”

  She gave me a limp handshake and a vague smile. Eddie pulled out a chair for her and she sat down. My mother and grandmother introduced themselves. I avoided my mother’s eye and caught Jack’s instead. He shrugged. There was a story there, but I was going to have to wait to hear it.

  “Dinner’s on me,” Eddie said. “Whatever you want. Where’s your grandfather?”

  “He’s, um, busy.”

  “Working late,” he observed equably. “He’s getting kind of long in the bone to be working those hours, isn’t he?”

  “Tooth,” I corrected automatically.

  “Yeah.” Eddie examined the menu. “So, what’s good here?”

  “Everything except the Mongolian Beef,” I replied. “Too many green onions.”

  “I like green onions,” Eddie boomed. “I’ll have that.”

  We ordered family style. My mother ate in complete silence. Nana kept up a cheerful patter about absolutely nothing, and Jack nodded and answered my questions about Jane and his plans to join the Marine Corps. Shirley spoke very little, just enough to say that she had two teenaged girls who were spending the week with their father in California, and that she was glad to be able to make the trip to Raleigh with Eddie.

  My father, meanwhile, shoveled rice into his mouth like a thirdworld orphan. Food flying, he kept up a running commentary about the drive, how much work was being done on the West Virginia Turnpike, how quickly they’d managed to get from Detroit to Raleigh, and how much the roads had changed, particularly around Research Triangle Park.

  “I wouldn’t have known the place,” he said. “Who’d have thought? This used to be a haystack town.”

  “Hayseed?” I suggested.

  He squinted in a fashion reminiscent of the old Eddie. Then he smiled.

  “She might be smarter than her old man,” he said to Shirley. “But we’ll see if she does as well in college as I did.”

  Eddie had taken two drafting classes at Henry Ford Community College in the mid-nineteen seventies. He’d gotten an A in both, but over the years this experience had transformed in the telling. First, it became an associate’s degree and then a bachelor’s. Sometimes, he claimed to be an engineer at Ford’s. On other occasions he said he was a computer programmer. According to my mother, when we lived in Michigan he operated a stamping machine that pressed sheet metal into car doors.

  “Have you decided where you’re going?” he asked. “You were thinking about N. C. State and Duke.”

  “Carolina,” I said. “University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

  “Going to be an engineer like your old man?”

  “No, I’m going to be an English major.”

  He grimaced. “What’re you going to do with that? Teach?”

  I nodded. “College. I want to be a professor.”

  “I always thought I’d make a good highway patrolman,” he said. “A motorcycle cop. They like tall guys for that job. I passed the height test.”

  “What happened?” Shirley asked.

  “Too smart on the aptitude test,” he said. “I’d have had to go in at a higher rank than usual. The cops’ union didn’t like that.”

  Shirley looked as if she really believed him. Jack grinned at me. I looked into my teacup to keep from laughing. My mother glowered, and Nana came to our rescue.

  “So you’re going to be a sailor,” she said, patting Jack’s arm. “All the nice girls love a sailor!”

  “A marine,” Jack replied. “Not a sailor.”

  “A marine,” Nana pondered. “I don’t know how the girls feel about them. Poppy, how do you feel about marines?”

  That wiped the smile from my face. Jack looked away, and I felt the blush begin in my cheeks and creep down to my neck. It was then that my mother spoke up for the first time since we’d ordered dinner.

  “When I was a girl,” she said, “we called Marines jar-heads. No offense, Jack.”

  “None taken.”

  “Now,” she continued, “does anyone mind if I finish the General Tso’s chicken? It’s hard work listening to bullshit. It makes me hungry.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Hunter came home at three o’clock that night, three sheets to the wind. It was no surprise. He’d been displaying all the usual signs of an impending binge. That morning, none of us could do anything right. When my mother failed to laugh at one of his jokes, he said she was a Friday fart at a Saturday market. Nana, he accused, was buzzing around like a fart in a windstorm, and for no reason that I could discern, he called me a dried apple fart. He said we all drove him crazy. I said that was because he was a miserable old fart himself. That did it—I’d summoned the devil. A crack, a sizzle, a whiff of bourbon, and he was off.

  I had time to lock Maurice in my bedroom before Hunter stomped back in, a six-pack in one hand and a can of tomato juice in the other. It was going to be a long night. Hunter diluted his beer when he wanted to stay drunk but not pass out.

  “He doesn’t know shit from Shinola,” he muttered. He got a glass from the kitchen and flopped himself onto a dining room chair. “The sorry son of a bitch. Thirty-four thousand goddamn dollars.”

  Nana sat yawning in the rocking chair. I sat yawning on the sofa. My mother had long since gone to bed. Hunter poured himself a beer and tomato juice and stared at the glass as if it were about to spew forth some oracular wisdom.

  “Sorry,” he said again. “Sorry son of a bitch.”

  According to time-honored family practice, it was my job to ask him who the sorry son of a bitch was. Instead, I kept mum. I thought about Susan and my pending escape. She’d assured me that the woman at the Cat’s Cradle was just a friend. She seemed pleased that I’d been jealous and was inclined to tease me about it. I didn’t mind. I took the reassurance at face value. We had a real relationship, something that would continue into the future, something that would last. We’d be together, no matter what. Hunter had to repeat himself twice more before I finally said, “All right, who in the hell are you talking about?”

  He frowned at me and took a sip of his drink. The new drapes on the window behind him were ugly, but they were fireproof. I wondered idly if flame-retardant had to mean beige.

  “Larry Wisniewski,” he said. “That’s who.”

  “Wisniewski?”

  “Wisniewski-ski,” he stuttered deliberately. “Another goddamn Polack. We’ve got a plague of Polacks, don’t you know? They fall from the sky like shit-brown rain.”

  “It’s raining shit and Polacks,” I agreed, looking at my watch. “You missed dinner with Lucky Eddie and his new squeeze.”

  “His what?”

  “He brought his girlfriend with him. Shirley Chantrell. They met in Parents without Partners.”

  “Chantrell,” he said, as if testing the name for flavor. “Chantrell, hell. Parents without what?”

  “Partners. I’m guessing they didn’t have a chapter of Parents without Children, so he had to join this other group. Jack said he did it to pick up chicks.”

  “Chicks,” Hunter replied. “More like chicken shits. Ha! You hear that? Chicken shits.” He laughed, and unless I laughed too, he was bound to repeat the punch line.

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “What’s the problem with Larry Wisniewski?”

  Hunter fixed me with a glassy stare. “He makes six thousand dolla
rs a year more than I do, that’s what’s wrong. That sorry son of a bitch. Where’s Eddie staying with this Parents without Pussy?”

  “The Brentwood. How do you know Larry makes more money?”

  “Why’s he staying at the goddamn Brentwood?”

  “Because he can’t stay here. How do you know Larry makes more money?”

  “Fred saw his goddamn paycheck, that’s how. I’d sleep in a goddamned ditch before I slept at the fucking Brentwood. There’s no telling what’s in those sheets.”

  “How do you know they have sheets?” I didn’t bother to ask how Fred had gotten hold of someone else’s paycheck. Found it, no doubt. He was probably out trying to cash it.

  My grandfather dropped the subject of Lucky Eddie for the time being. “I trained that son of a bitch, Wisniewski-ski. He didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. I taught him, and they pay him five hundred dollars a month more than they pay me. I’ve been there forty years, since 1944.” He waved four fingers in the air for emphasis. “Since 1944, and they piss in my goddamn face.”

  I propped my feet up on the glass-topped coffee table and picked a book from my mother’s library pile. It was Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. I’d never heard of it.

  “Have you talked to Mike about it?” Nana asked.

  “That dried up little shit? Hell, no!”

  “Mike’s your friend,” Nana said. “He’s always looked out for you.”

  “Well, not anymore,” Hunter replied. “Not anymore. He’s been referring his customers to Larry Wisniewski. He tells them Larry’s the best goddamn mechanic in Raleigh. Wisniewski-ski. Son of a bitch.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “Does Wisniewski-ski drink?” I asked.

  Hunter held his hand in the shape of a gun. “Bang,” he said. “Don’t you start with me, goddamn it.”

  “Have you talked to either of the Bloom boys?” Nana interrupted. “Rob or Fletcher?”

  “Fletcher T. Bloom.” Hunter held his lips in the O shape. “Fletcher T. Bloom, the Third. The third, the turd. Fletcher T. Bloom, the Turd. He’s a turd-tapping son of a bitch. You know that? Just like that other turd-tapping son of a bitch.”

  I put Rubyfruit Jungle back on the book pile. “Which turd-tapping son of a bitch would that be? I’m losing track.”

  “Your dear sweet daddy, that’s who. You just let me know his room number.” He made the gun shape with his hand again and took aim. “I’m going to load up my pistol. I’m going to shoot him full of shit and then kill him for stinking.” He put his finger gun down and picked up his glass. “You know what’s wrong with this world?” he asked, beer and tomato juice slopping out of the glass and cascading over the edge of the table.

  I walked over and handed him a napkin. “You’ve got a drinking problem,” I suggested. “What’s wrong is that your mouth is open but nothing’s going in.”

  Hunter grinned broadly and dabbed at the tomato juice. “Thank you, honey. Thank you very much. You are perfect, you know that? A perfect goddamn Polack. What’s wrong with this world is that Richard Nixon resigned. He shouldn’t have done that. Not in a million years.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Nana said. “That happened ten years ago.”

  Hunter slammed his fist down on the table, shattering the glass. “It doesn’t matter when it was! He shouldn’t have done it. What I’m trying to tell you is that Nixon didn’t do anything wrong. Not like that son of a bitch from Texas—what was his goddamn name?”

  “Lyndon Johnson. Look what you’ve done to the coffee table! Did you cut yourself?”

  “Fuck the coffee table! I’m trying to tell you something. That bastard, Lyndon Baines Johnson, he tape-recorded everybody.” He waved a hand to include the White House, the Congress, the broken coffee table, and the people in our living room. “He had machines all over the goddamn place. No one gave a damn, but Nixon shit in his white hat, you know why? Because he lied about it. All he had to do was say I’m sorry. Admit it, and say I’m sorry. We would have forgiven him!”

  “My coffee table,” Nana wailed. “I paid good money for that.”

  “We would have forgiven Nixon,” Hunter said firmly. “I’m sorry. That’s all he had to say. That’s all you ever have to say. I’m sorry. Dolly,” he turned to my grandmother, “I’m sorry. I’m just as sorry as I can be.”

  “For what?” she said. She looked exhausted, and she was out of cigarettes. For the past ten minutes she’d been tapping her fingers on the arm of her chair.

  Hunter closed his eyes and stuck his chin out. “For nothing,” he said. “Never mind.”

  “What about my coffee table?”

  “Forget the coffee table,” I interrupted. “It’s toast. Hunter C. Bartholomew, you’ve got plenty to be sorry for. You can be a pretty sorry son of a bitch when you put your mind to it.”

  Hunter gazed at me slyly. “I’m not the only one who’s sorry. Do you know where your daddy was the night you were born?”

  It wasn’t a question but a challenge. My father had disappeared the minute my mother went into labor, leaving Hunter and Nana to drive her to the hospital. It was an old scandal that had long since lost its power to shock. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that my father had been less than enthusiastic about parenthood, but Hunter seemed to regard it as proof that no matter what, he was better than Lucky Eddie. He’d driven my mother to the hospital, and he’d waited to get drunk until after he knew my mother and I were okay.

  “No,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Should I care?”

  “I don’t give a damn whether you care or not. He didn’t show up until the day after you were born, the drunkest son of a bitch you’ve ever seen. He made your mama get up out of the hospital bed so that he could lie down on it.”

  “I know all of this,” I interrupted. “What’s your point?”

  “You don’t know a goddamn thing. I should’ve killed the son of a bitch!”

  “Hunter!” Nana snapped. “That’s enough.”

  “He was in jail for soliciting!” Hunter cried triumphantly. “Got picked up behind the Church of the Good Shepherd trying to get some hooker to polish his pecker. I had to go and bail him out.”

  Nana groaned and covered her face with her hands. Hunter reared back in his chair, a nasty self-satisfied grin plastered across his face. He and Nana both seemed to be under the impression that Lucky Eddie’s true nature had been a mystery to me, and that this news was a shocking revelation.

  I wasn’t shocked. My mother had never mentioned it, but I’d long since guessed that there was something more to the story than “Eddie got drunk the night you were born.” My mother had never described what it was like to be married to him. She talked about the overdue child support, the lying, and the fights. She didn’t talk about their sex life, or Eddie’s weirdness, but I knew. In our garage in Michigan were stacks of pornography far more graphic than the copies of Playboy Eddie occasionally forgot in the bathroom. Sex was a taboo subject with my mother and with my grandparents as well. It was the unnamed horror. If we had to talk about it at all, we used euphemisms like “ran around” or “acted up.” We said Hunter ran around with Tammy Carter, never Hunter had sex with her. We said he acted up. That he fucked a woman younger than his daughter was understood.

  I waited, wanting to compose my response perfectly. “And what,” I said at last, “does a seventeen-year-old blow job have to do with the many things for which you should be sorry?”

  I waited for an explosion that never came. Nana gasped, and Hunter lost his shit-eating grin. He contemplated the broken glass floating in the pool of beer and tomato juice.

  “Did you think this would devastate me? Lucky Eddie would screw a snake if someone held it still for him. The fact that he’s a bastard doesn’t get you off the hook. Just what have you been up to, Hunter? You’re never home, you’re skipping work. You’re falling to pieces. This is rock bottom, and you know it. Mike Sava know
s it. Larry Wisniewski knows it. We all know it.”

  “You’re crazy,” he muttered. “A crazy, crazy Polack. It’s sad to be crazy.”

  “Tell me about it,” I agreed. “It’s sad to go from perfect to crazy in less than five minutes. I’m glad to know that at least I’m still a Polack.”

  “A crazy half-assed Polack.”

  “A crazy half-assed popeyed Polack. I graduate tomorrow, Hunter, and then I’m moving out. Don’t you come to my graduation, though. Stay away. At the moment, I’d rather have Lucky Eddie there than you.”

  He didn’t come. My mother and grandmother came. Mike Sava came with Susan. Lucky Eddie, Shirley, and Jack Leinweber were there. Hunter disappeared for three days, which turned out to be a dress rehearsal for the big vanishing act he pulled two weeks later.

  Graduation was held in the Civic Center downtown. I got out of wearing a dress by wearing a pair of shorts under my gown. My legs were tan enough that I could get away with not wearing panty hose. The only down side was that my feet felt damp and sticky in the blue pumps. I couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over so I could get into the normal clothes I’d left in a bag on the back seat of my mother’s car.

  Nana sat next to Jack, who sat next to my mother. Susan sat bravely between my parents. Mike sat on the other side of Shirley and made polite, one-sided conversation. When the principal called for the students in my row to step forward, I saw Lucky Eddie lean over and whisper something to Susan. I prayed that it wasn’t lewd or obscene, but judging from Susan’s reaction, I was praying in vain. She edged closer to my mother.

  My father had outdone himself in stylish attire. In the three years since I’d last seen him, he’d abandoned the disco look in favor of the urban cowboy. He wore a western-style suit made of gray polyester and a pair of black cowboy boots. His thin dark hair, balding on top, was pulled back into a ponytail, and despite the fact that it was night and we were indoors, he wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses. He didn’t look like a motorcycle cop. He looked like someone who’d been busted by the vice squad.