by Laura Ruby
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You want to save those children. That mother, too.”
I squeezed the scrap of paper in my hand, tried not to see my father’s polite, empty smile. “Come on. I just met them.”
She pressed a spoonful of mashed bananas into Dad’s mouth, which he spat out. “Don’t kid yourself into thinking that you’re going to be their hero.”
“They just needed a little help.” Dad shook his head, trying, I think, to fling the banana from his chin without touching it with his hands.
She wiped Dad’s face with a dish towel, giving me the same look she had given me when I was eight, when she’d found me holding vigil over a dying chipmunk the cat had used and discarded. “I know you, Benny.”
Ryan sulked in the backseat of the car because I refused to turn around and go back for the inflatable dragon tube we’d bought him in Florida.
“Auntie Flo doesn’t even have a pool,” I said.
“I don’t want it for a pool,” said Ryan, as if only the strange or foreign used flotation devices in pools. “I need to sit on it. This car hurts my butt.”
“Oh, God,” Ashleigh said. “Can’t you make him shut up?”
Moira picked at her fingernails. “We’re almost there, Ryan.”
Ryan’s hot little eyes were centered in my rearview mirror. I knew he was giving me telepathic commands to turn the car around. I squinted behind my sunglasses and used the power of my mind to fight him off.
Sometime before, I had bought a book, Your Challenging Child, the kind of book that promised to teach you the unteachable, like how to live peaceably with a kid that screams, “Lines! Burning lines!” for nearly twenty minutes until you figured out he was talking about the seams on his socks. On the quiz inside, Ryan tested not only as “sensitive,” but also as “transitionally challenged.” Have you ever noticed how many times you pass from one thing to another without even thinking about it? Ryan thought about it. We told him, “Ryan, stop building that castle, remaking your bed, riding the dog, we have to go now,” and you saw his eyes widen and the banshees begin to howl, the way they would for him when he was thirty-five and on the train headed for work. Only then the banshees wouldn’t be clamoring for his dragon tube, they would be telling him that he left the stove on in his studio apartment and his calculators would explode and his cat would be asphyxiated or at the very least several other tenants would drift into brain-creaming comas if he did not return, now, immediately.
“It’s called obsessive-compulsive disorder,” I told Moira.
“I thought you said he was challenged. I thought you said that we have to stop using such negative terms to describe him.”
“A disorder isn’t negative, really. We can get him some help for that.”
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? He’s hard for you, he’s too hard for you, and you’d rather he have a disease. This way, when he throws a fit in the grocery store, you can tell the checker, ‘Hey, not my fault, he’s obsessive-compulsive.’”
“It isn’t my fault. And it’s gotten worse since your ex started his überdad kick a few months ago. Is he going to do this every time his girlfriend dumps him? How many amusement parks are in Illinois, anyway?”
“Stop it. You sound like a child yourself. You want to think Ryan’s some sort of damaged goods. You want to think he’s weird.”
We had a deal, Moira and I. She worked as a programmer about eighty hours a week to make the vast quantities of money we enjoyed so much, and I, because my hours were the same as the kids’, tended to them. I took them to school and picked them up. I brought them to the orthodontist when their teeth were growing sideways and the doctor when their fevers short-circuited the little digital thermometer. I was, consequently, invariably, the one who bore the brunt of burning lines and dragon floats, unacceptable gifts, and uningestible medicines that constituted child abuse.
“Moira,” I said finally, “he is weird. Obsessive-compulsive is just another way of putting it.”
“Really?” she said, not asking. “And which diagnosis do you think you’d qualify for?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Where do you fit in on the psychological continuum? I mean, you used to love him, right? More than me.” She put up a hand when I started to protest. “A lot more than me. And now what? Four-year itch? General itch? The thrill is gone?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Sure. Sure you don’t.”
Ryan, in the rearview mirror: “My real daddy would have gotten my dragon tube for me.”
We arrived at Auntie Flo’s with Ryan still fuming but having a hard time holding on to the rage—because of my superior will and because he was anticipating all the cupcakes and Jell-O and tortilla chips that Flo was literally going to stuff him with. I, on the other hand, wanted to punt him into the next yard.
Auntie Flo opened the door, and Ryan ran inside, screaming, “Eggs! Eggs! Eggs!” which, scrambled, is his favorite Flo food.
Ashleigh drifted in after her brother. “You’re so loud, Ryan. Mom? Why is he so loud?”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Moira, putting an arm around Flo’s thin shoulders. “Auntie Flo likes things lively.”
Ashleigh rolled her eyes to the whites, focused them on one of the many renderings of the Virgin Mary Flo painted in her spare time.
Flo lifted Ashleigh’s hand and patted it. “Did you want some eggs, too?”
“I don’t eat eggs,” said Ashleigh, her face a rictus of teenage horror.
“Hi, Flo,” I said, and pressed a kiss on her rouged cheek. “Where’s the man of the house?”
She pointed. “Where else? Drowning his sorrows in baseball.”
I walked to the TV room to find Harry, Flo’s husband, shouting at the screen. “Hey there, Harry. How are you?”
“Do you believe these guys? They pay them eight million a year and they couldn’t hit a barn door. I don’t believe it.”
“Eight million? It’s pretty incredible all right.” I leaned against the doorjamb. “So, how are you feeling?”
He shrugged. “Some days good, some days not so good.”
“I hear you.”
“I’m seventy-eight years old.”
“I know.”
“Seventy-eight years old. How am I supposed to feel? I used to weigh a hundred and ninety pounds. Now I weigh a hundred and thirty. What do you think that means?”
“I think it means that you write a diet book and make eight million bucks.”
He laughed. “You said it. Eight million bucks. Do you believe these guys or what? I could have hit that pitch. And I can’t even get up off this couch.”
I sat in the only other chair in the tiny room, a green velvet chair with a hand-stitched doily draped over the headrest.
“Seventy-eight years old,” he said. “Georgy died when he was only forty-one. What the hell kind of life is this that a father could live twice as long as his boy?”
I rested my head on the doily and thought about my father, who had essentially been playing at dying for years. He told the same story over and over again, mostly to young women he met while walking the dog: “I had this great therapist over at the rehab center. Sally Klagenhorn. She was so pretty. Then she got married. You know what her new name was? Sally Keister. Get it? Keister! And she had a nice one, too!” When he started grabbing the keisters of the poor young women who took pity on him, my mother started walking the dog.
Uncle Harry, a large, gregarious man who had spent forty years of his life delivering mail for the post office, always ready to talk with anyone about anything, had shrunk suddenly, in size and spirit, almost instantly the day his only son, Georgy, died of melanoma three years before. Now, Uncle Harry had two topics: the demise of baseball and his own demise. One thing lamented, the other courted.
“It’s a terrible thing when a man outlives his son,” I said.
He shook his head. �
��Nobody should live this long. It ain’t natural. Sometimes I can’t feel my feet. I have to look down to see if they’re still there.”
Moira peeked her head into the Florida room. “You two need anything?” She looked from me to Harry and back to me again, one eyebrow raised slightly. I was supposed to be convincing Harry to see a doctor about cancer treatment options, and Moira would expect an update on my progress soon enough.
Harry continued to stare at the TV screen, so I answered for both of us. “No, Harry and I are fine just as we are.”
Harry grunted, eyeglasses dancing with little pin-striped men. “That’s a sin. It’s just a sin, plain and simple.”
“Who’s that?” said Moira. She was looking out the front window at a bottle green station wagon crawling into the driveway. A woman got out of the driver’s side and opened the back door. A small boy climbed out from the back, absently but skillfully throwing a yo-yo.
“That’s Shakti,” said Harry.
“Who’s Shakti?” I said. “What’s Shakti?”
“Shakti. Georgy’s girl,” said Harry. “That’s her boy, AJ. Nice kid. Quiet as a damn mouse, though.”
“You mean the woman who . . .” Moira trailed off, searching. “The woman he was with right before he died?”
“You never met Shakti? I thought you met her at Easter.”
Moira plucked imaginary lint from the folds of her skirt. “No, Uncle Harry. Never had the pleasure.”
“Oh, you’re going to like her, Moira. She’s just great. She still calls every Sunday morning like clockwork. A real sweetheart.”
Moira didn’t look as if she were prepared to think this Shakti was much of a sweetheart. “What about Trish?”
“Oh, we still talk to Trish. Not as much, to tell you the truth.”
“Why not?”
“Where was she when Georgy got sick?” said Harry. “Shakti had to quit her job to take care of him.”
Moira pursed her lips and stared out the window, struggling mightily, I thought, not to remind her uncle exactly who had been fucking around on whom, something that was very important to Moira, even if the guilty party was her cousin, had died young and tragically, and, it could be argued, was receiving his just rewards as we spoke.
Shakti and her son had taken a platter of cookies from the trunk of the car and were making their way up the front steps. We could hear Auntie Flo greet them through the thin walls.
“Hello! Hello! Come on in. Everyone’s already here.”
“Oh, Flo! It’s great to see you! You look wonderful. AJ, say hello to Aunt Flo. . . . AJ?”
“Oh, don’t bother him now. Boys his age don’t have much use for old ladies like me, right, AJ? There’s chips and soda in the kitchen if you want some. I can make you some eggs later.”
Flo and Shakti appeared in the door of the Florida room. Flo took Moira’s arm. “You two remember each other, don’t you?”
Shakti offered, “Of course,” just as Moira said, “I don’t think so.” The two women smiled at each other slightly, Shakti’s quizzical, Moira’s as inscrutable as a virus.
“No?” said Shakti. From the name, I had expected an Indian woman, but Shakti was pale and small and freckled, with long straight brown hair she wore parted down the middle.
“I’m sorry, I thought we had met. I’ve seen a lot of pictures, I guess,” Shakti said. “And Flo talks about you all the time.”
“That must be it,” Moira said, standing up straighter so that she could sharpen the angle between her eyes and Shakti’s.
“I feel like I already know you.”
“Really?”
Before Moira could really start putting on the freeze, Ryan let go one of his legendary shrieks, one that could have deafened us all even if we had been sealed in an iron box and buried under the driveway.
I muttered, “What now?” and earned a look of hurt and contempt from Moira, who turned and dashed out of the room, followed by everyone but Harry, who remained in his seat to witness the various athletic atrocities committed by his favorite team.
“Oh, I hope nobody’s hurt,” Shakti said as we power-walked toward the kitchen.
“I hope we don’t have to hurt anybody,” I replied. We found Ashleigh flipping through one of Auntie Flo’s fashion magazines, circa 1962, Moira cleaning up an overturned plateful of scrambled eggs, Ryan red faced and pointing at AJ. AJ was standing in the corner by the back door of the house, throwing his yo-yo, his back to the kitchen table.
“AJ? What happened?” Shakti said.
“Your son wanted some eggs,” Moira said. “So he took some from Ryan’s plate.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Shakti said. “AJ, you should apologize to the little boy.”
“He stole my eggs!” screamed Ryan. “Those were my eggs! Auntie Flo made them for me.”
“Oh, Ryan, calm down. It’s not that big a deal,” I said.
“It’s a big deal to me!”
“What isn’t a big deal to you?” I walked over to the table and started gathering egg pellets from its surface.
“Why do you always talk to him like that?” said Moira. “He has no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Ryan, do you know what I’m talking about?”
“My eggs are all over the floor!”
“Don’t worry, honey, I’ll make you some more eggs,” said Auntie Flo. “And I’ll make AJ some, too.”
I watched AJ for his reaction to this charming family drama. He didn’t even turn around.
Shakti grabbed a sponge and began wiping the surface of the table. Ashleigh lifted her magazine so she could wipe underneath. Moira glared when Shakti accidentally hit her in the arm with the wet sponge, and Moira, dangerously, opened her mouth to speak.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t we all have some eggs? I think we could use the protein.”
Later, out in the yard, I strolled around the perimeter of the prodigious garden with Doris, Flo’s ancient cat, observing as she stopped to smell this or that blossom. Every once in a while she would sit down and watch as a bee sailed from the nucleus of a flower, pointing at it with her nose the way we might with a finger. It was only after I watched her do this several times that I realized Doris believed the bees were trapped inside the flowers and that she was the only one with the power to release them.
“Cool cat.”
I turned around. Shakti was standing there, head tilted slightly so that her brown hair hung like a curtain from the top of her ear. Her thin dress clung to the tips of her breasts.
“Yes,” I said. “She is a cool cat.” Doris strolled over and rubbed my legs so that I would stoop down and pet her, which I did. “A great cat. I love this cat.”
“I’m sorry about what AJ did.”
“Please. Don’t worry about it. He’s a kid. And Ryan is spoiled.”
“Like you said, he’s a kid.”
I closed my eyes for a second, wondering if my resentment was that obvious. “Yes, you’re right. He makes me so angry sometimes that I forget that. Moira has to remind me.”
“Moira’s beautiful.”
“Yes, she is.”
“And fierce. A warrior.” She pumped both fists.
I laughed. “That too.”
“She’s angry at me because of Georgy, I know that. But Trish and Georgy were having problems before I came along. They weren’t sleeping together. Trish didn’t love him anymore, you know.”
From the look on Shakti’s face, I didn’t think that she believed Georgy’s line anymore, but it was important that she keep toeing it.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “People only see what they want to see. Or what they need to see.”
“We need villains.”
I was startled. “What did you say?”
“Villains. And heroes. Good people against bad.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Ah, but they’re not exactly ‘bad,’ I said, “they’re sick.”
“Oh, yes,” said Shakti. “You’re
right. Sick.” She tucked her hair behind a small, shell-like ear. “That’s another thing I’ve seen a lot of. Sickness.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“A colon therapist.” She wandered over to the flower bed, tipped a tall blossom toward her face, but didn’t sniff it. “I opened a clinic after Georgy died.”
“I’m afraid to ask what a colon therapist is.”
“The colon is the part of the body that no one wants to speak about, that everyone wants to ignore. Until they’re eating a bottle of Tums every day. I offer nutritional counseling, massage therapy, and colon irrigation for the relief of those kinds of problems.”
“Bellyaches, you mean.”
“Did you know that the colon mirrors the way that you live?”
“Um. No, I didn’t.”
“It does. Why do you think there’s so much colon cancer in this country?”
“Too many big steaks?” I asked.
She nodded. “That, and repression. All these angry people, working too hard, stressed out. But no one knows how to talk about stress. They don’t know how to let go of it. The hurt stays inside.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. I found myself wishing for another egg disaster.
“So,” she said. “What do you do?”
“I’m a teacher. Fifth grade.”
“Really? That must be wonderful. All that positive energy.”
“They’ve got energy all right,” I said. “Kids are never so confident as they are when they’re ten and eleven. They think they can rule the world. They think they can fly.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And I guess it’s your job to ground them?”
“They still get skinned knees. They still cry. It can’t all be Batman and Catwoman.” I shuffled my feet, and I hate when people shuffle their feet. “I don’t mind. Really, that’s the best part. Fixing them up so that they can go back to being superheroes again.”
“Do you suffer from constipation, Ben?”
“Excuse me?”
“Constipation.”
I blinked. There it was, the diagnosis. Moira would have been grimly pleased to hear it, even if it was medical rather than psychological. “This isn’t usually a topic at family gatherings.”