by Drew Perry
“Aren’t I supposed to be?”
“I guess so,” she says. “But, what, I’m supposed to tell you how it all goes?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Doesn’t seem fair. I don’t get to be the scorned woman or the lovesick kid.”
“You can be both of those, if you want,” he says.
“It’s alright,” she says. “I’ll be those in a minute. First I’ll clean up your mess. Our mess, really.” She wipes her mouth with her napkin. “Here: Let’s figure this out. When do you take Hen to the doctor next?”
“What?”
“Straightforward question. Hendrick. Doctor. Next appointment.”
He looks around the restaurant, at all the families dressed for church, the kids looking uncomfortable, unhappy, like they’d rather be anywhere else. “She’ll want to go this week,” he says. “She’ll want to show them all of—whatever this is. Whatever he’s doing.”
“Well, then, that’s it right there.”
“What is?”
“You haven’t been to the doctor since she left, right?”
“Right.”
“Yeah—that’ll definitely be it. She’ll come over, pick you up, and the three of you will ride to the doctor together.” Jack tries to interrupt her, but she stops him. “Listen. You’ll be sitting there in the waiting room, full of its little choo-choo trains, all that wooden Brio toy shit, and something will happen, and you’ll laugh about how ridiculous all this has been, how all of this has been some huge mistake, and that’ll be it. The veil will lift. All this will be over.”
“What veil?”
“I’m just telling you the truth, Jack. We need some kind of out here, anyway. So that’ll be it.”
“We need an out?”
“All of us do. All four of us. Or would you rather we just keep things set up the way they are?”
“I sat with her in the hospital,” he says, trying to slow this down, whatever it is. “Nothing happened then. She comes to get him for lunch. You saw her this morning.”
“Oh, come on. This morning doesn’t count.”
“Why not?”
“For sixteen different reasons.” She takes another bite, leans back in her chair. “Stop playing helpless. You must have thought about this. All of us have, I hope. It’s just nobody’s doing anything about it yet.”
He says, “OK.”
“Here’s my version,” she says. “Yours might be a little different, but basically, it goes like this: You guys go to the doctor, whenever, later this week. Let’s say Thursday.” She shrugs. “For whatever reason. Because Hendrick talks now. Or talks some. It’s all very exciting.”
“It is exciting,” he says.
“I’m not saying it isn’t. You two have your little moment there in the waiting room. Your epiphany. You get back home, and you look around at the house, realize that it looks like what it looks like, and you decide to move back across the street at some point, because that’s the only thing that makes sense. And it’ll make you look sane, which will help. Then, once she’s got Terry to where he can get up and around for himself, she moves back in with you.”
“What about you?” he asks.
“What about me? I stay at the condo in Greensboro for a week or two, just to let him sweat it out a little more. I don’t want to come off like I’m too needy. Maybe I drink a little too much wine and bump into the doorjambs for a while, but eventually I give up and move back home, too.”
Jack says, “I’m not sure—”
“Here’s the best part,” she says. “All four of us wait a few months in our own houses before everyone decides that not talking to each other is stupid, that we should all find some way to put this behind us, or whatever the hell people say about this kind of thing, if there even is something people say about this kind of thing.” She takes a deep breath. “And then we’ll all go out for Mexican somewhere, and what will happen is we’ll laugh about all this. About our little fling. Flings. We’ll make miserable small talk. It will be horrible. Awful. Terry and I will ask you if you’ve sold the house yet. You’ll say no, you haven’t, but you’ve got plans to repaint the doors or something. You’ll tell us all about the mortgage payments, how it’s tough, but how you’ve figured you can make it a few more months if you have to. Beth will give somebody a knowing smile. Maybe it’ll be me. She’ll forget the rules. Eventually she and I can start trying to talk about school, and you and Terry can talk about whatever it is that you talk about—” She makes a motion with her hand. “Hockey and wood chippers and boobs. And then everybody goes back home to their respective original houses and you fuck Beth’s brains out, some fancy position you picked up from me, or that you remember from some college girlfriend, or something you dreamed of doing with the elusive and lovely Sarah Cody, and I service old Terry, the same old same old, only everybody imagines it’s really the other person they’re fucking. For maximum fuckedupedness.”
She’s putting on a performance. The old men at the next table are staring. There’s a sign on the wall that says NO CURSING NO FOUL LANGUAGE. Jack folds his napkin down into a thick square. “That’s your ending?” he asks her.
“That is my ending,” she says. She digs her thumbnail into her Styrofoam cup, little runes one after another. “That, or everybody ends up in court suing the shit out of each other.”
Jack runs his finger along the edge of the table. He can see the four of them in some little booth at La Bamba, ordering Combination #6, nobody really looking anybody else in the eye. That’s her ending. His feet feel spiked to the ground. He could maybe sit here in Family Dining for the rest of his life, try to hold things still. Because what he’s starting to think is that he might not want an ending. Surely he doesn’t want that one. Rena gets up, gets a refill for her tea, takes a cobbler. She waves at him from over by the steam tables, does a kind of elaborate curtsey. She is a creature from a completely different world.
They finish lunch and it’s still raining, a little harder now. Rena drives them back toward home, taking surface streets, taking her time. Jack’s losing basic track of the way things are supposed to work. He wonders: Can people do a thing like this and then come out the other side unscathed? Or scathed, but not too badly? He feels like one of those kids back in the restaurant, dressed in itchy clothes, kicking their chairs. Or maybe he feels more like an infant: A baby cries because he’s not getting exactly what he wants right then. You’re the person you are when you’re six months old for the rest of your life, Jack thinks. We never change, never get much further along than that. We’re always teething.
He’s got more questions for Rena, but he’s not asking them. They ride north for a while until she picks out a new road, turns, drives through a long stretch of tobacco. Nothing out the windows but fields and the occasional little house where they’ve put in something like sliding glass doors across where the garage door used to be. Cars and trucks for sale at the end of driveways. The county’s got huge concrete pipes lined up in a ditch along the roadway, brand new fire hydrants every few hundred yards with orange bags tied over the tops. They must be getting ready to bring the sewer out from somewhere. They pass churches, a school, a post office. The post office looks too small for its parking lot, looks like a kid’s toy. The flagpole out front dwarfs it. Whoever works there is growing vegetables out front, and the yellow of a squash flower flashes as they drive by. That would be an OK life. Stamp letters, grow squash. That would be an alphabet you could understand. Rena slows for a stop sign. TOPENBOTTEM ROAD, the sign says. Off to the right, down in a little swale, is something called the Carolina Flea Market and Undersea Adventures Mini-Golf. The booths for the flea market are set back, and the golf course is up front. The holes have blue Astroturf instead of green. The top of the mini-golf sign is cut to look like waves, and there are painted blue bubbles going up between the words. A posterboard is tacked to it that says MINI-GOLF CLOSED—FOR SALE, and there are For Sale signs hung around the necks of the vario
us fiberglass undersea creatures set up in little scenes between the holes. There’s an octopus, a lobster, a shrimp wearing sunglasses and a ball cap that says HOLE IN ONE! There’s a catfish with an eye patch. Jack stares at them out his side of the car. “Pull over,” he says.
She’s already through the stop sign. “What?”
“Take us back to that putt-putt place. I want to take a look at it.”
“Why?”
“I just want to get out and look around.”
“It didn’t look like they were open.”
“I want to look at that catfish,” he says.
“I don’t think we have room for it in the car,” she says, joking.
He’s not joking. He’s jerked around in his seat, looking back behind them. It’s like some kind of lunatic sign. You do not pass this and not stop. “I just want to see it,” he says.
“OK,” she says, and turns the car around. She pulls into the lot, and he’s out of the car before she’s even got it fully stopped. It’s still raining. He walks right up to the fence. His head’s sparking on him. This is not the behavior of model citizens. The catfish is eight feet tall. Maybe a little more than that. It’s standing on its tail, and has its flippers folded across what would be its chest. In addition to the eye patch, it’s wearing a painted-on button-up Hawaiian shirt. Underneath the paint, which is flaking off in fingernail-sized pieces, the fiberglass is a grayish white. Rena walks up behind him, holds an umbrella over them both. “Is it smoking?” she asks him. It is, in fact, holding a cigarette in one of its flippers. It looks like there’s glass in the end of the cigarette, maybe for a red light, for the glowing ember. Rena says, “I don’t think they should let him be smoking in front of the kids.”
“We should go get Hen,” he says. “He would love this.”
“OK,” she says.
“Do you know where we are?” he asks. “Do you know how to get back here?”
“Sort of,” she says, looking back at the road, frowning.
“We have to bring him back here, maybe play a round or something.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re closed,” she says. “Like, permanently.”
There’s a trailer hunched off to the side of the course, to the side of the parking lot. It’s blue. All the stripes in the parking lot are blue. There’s a car out front of the trailer, an old Buick, fabric top peeling back, but he doesn’t see anybody. Pine trees are growing up through wide cracks in the asphalt. The putt-putt’s a mess, pine needles and leaves and plastic bags all over the course. The undersea creatures are for sale: It’s never occurred to him that anybody would have to do anything with the animals when a putt-putt closes down. Or that putt-putts even close down at all. But of course they would, like anything else. Maybe there’s some huge warehouse somewhere full of elephants and giraffes and rhinos. Zebras. Maybe they’ve got them all grouped together, all the rhinos in one room, all the giraffes in another. “We have to bring him back here,” he says.
“Has he got a thing about fish?”
“No,” Jack says, except that he’s sort of got a thing about everything. Depending. A part of Jack is sorry he saw this first, without him. He wonders what they’d want for the whole set, for the catfish and the octopus and everything else.
“So let’s go get him,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s do that.” With his good eye, the non-eye-patched eye, the catfish is looking at something off in the distance. He’s having a smoke, thinking about what to do with himself. He’s working on personal matters.
They get back in the car. Rena shoves the umbrella behind his seat. She says, “Why the catfish? Why that one, specifically?”
“I just know it’s something he’d want to see,” says Jack. “That’s all.” And he already knows he’s going to have to buy the catfish, knows he needs it. Hen needs it. What he doesn’t know yet is where he could put it. At the yard, maybe, up front, by the sign. Butner would surely be on board with something like that. They could have it out by the road, slow people down, bring them in. Or he could donate it to Hen’s school, see if they wanted to put it on the playground, adopt it as a mascot. Or, he thinks, he could drive that thing over to Canavan’s ruined front lawn and install it next to the driveway, bury it up to the base of its tail—a sure signal he’d be sending up to Bethany, to all of them, a smoking putt-putt catfish planted there, the flag of his nation.
Rena drops Jack off at the house, says it’s probably best if she’s not there when Beth brings Hen back, says she’ll come back later. Jack tells her that’ll be fine. He sits in the living room and thinks about putting one undersea creature in each room in the house, naming the rooms that way. The Jellyfish Room. Like some kind of bed and breakfast. He waits for Beth. She comes back right on time, but won’t come in. It’s pouring now. She stands in the door, huddled half under the little roof, ushers Hen inside, says, “Where is she?”
“She’s not here.”
“Good,” Beth says.
“Look—”
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t tell me about how you’re sorry. Don’t tell me anything.”
“But what if—”
“I mean it, Jack, goddamnit, OK?”
“Alright,” he says.
“I can’t talk to you right now.” She squeezes closer to the door, trying to stay out of the rain. “I’m getting soaked,” she says.
“Do you want a towel?”
“Have you even got one over here?”
He doesn’t. Not an extra one, anyway. “I can find something,” he says.
“Jesus Christ, Jack,” she says.
He says, “What do you want me to do?” And at first it looks like she might actually answer him, might even step inside to discuss the matter, which would be fine—somehow it all weighs about the same today. Besides the prospect of buying the catfish, he can’t hold a whole idea in his head for any length of time. Maybe she reads that on him, because instead of saying anything else, she turns around, runs through the rain to the wagon, leaves. He’s found another way to disappoint her, a new way, and he’s not even sure what it is.
“Jesus Christ, Jack,” Hendrick says, and he’s probably right, too. Jack gets him set up with the National Geographics and the TV. It’s raining too hard to go back to see the undersea creatures. He wouldn’t even be able to get Hen out of the car. He’s not huge for standing in the rain, generally. They’ll have to go tomorrow. Jack’s disappointed—he wants to go now, right now. A dog on a TV commercial barks and Yul Brynner comes in to see what it was, then settles down in the hall. Their day winds itself through. He feels trapped in the house. He wants out, wants something to do. Hen’s fine. Jack marches up and down. Late afternoon, Rena shows up with wet bags of groceries: Cornish game hens, bell peppers, expensive cheese, bottles of wine. She’s got a recipe. A project. She’s got projects for him, too: She takes over the kitchen, digs a cutting board out of some drawer, hands him a knife and a pepper, says julienne. Jack slivers peppers. They drink wine. It rains.
All this is associated with Tropical Storm Ashley, says the TV, which over the course of the last couple of days has gone ragged out in the Gulf and half-fallen apart despite the breathless cataclysmic predictions—first named storm of the season and it could be a monster, folks, you’ll want to keep it tuned right here—and it comes ashore as just that, a tropical storm, not a hurricane, in Florida, does nothing, really, but rain and blow the live weather reporters around some. During the afternoon and evening the storm sprints through Georgia and into the Carolinas. Live from Augusta and Greenville. White guys in yellow and blue slickers stand in the rain and talk about how there’s really not that much damage. They use phrases like dodged a bullet and Mother Nature’s wrath and agricultural concerns. The storm stalls out and spins.
Jack gets Hen put to bed, and he and Rena sit up a while, watching the TV, watching it rain. Across the street, Jack’s yard is a lake. Over here it’s a lake, too. A woman looks into the camera and tel
ls everybody watching at home not to drive into standing water, not to drown. She says that. Do not drown. Hendrick ate Rena’s dinner, ate the game hens, the peppers, everything. He said gracias, said que bueno. It’s possible he might be starting to crack open a little, Jack thinks, just enough for somebody to be able to see inside. Though he’s trying hard not to hope for anything. If Hen wants to eat game hen, let him. Don’t make it a thing. Let him be himself, and see what might happen after that. At this point, Ashley is mainly a rain event. There may be some embedded thunderstorms overnight. Jack stands at the window and looks out at his driveways, waits for alligators, for pairs of alligators, for some dude to ride by, lean out of the ark, explain that at seven years old you may see some signs of change. You may see some improvement. No doctor would say that to them. None ever has. Hen’s birthday is in a month.
“What would you do with it, anyway?” Rena asks him. She’s finishing a glass of wine, sitting sideways in one of the plastic chairs.
“With what?” he asks.
“With that catfish. That’s what you’re thinking about, right?”
“Maybe,” he says. The radar spins across the screen. He worries about the undersea creatures out there in all the rain, then remembers: They’re fiberglass. And fish.
“So what would you do with it?”
“Put it out front of PM&T? Set up some kind of little playground over there or something? I don’t know.” He keeps glancing over at her just to make sure she’s still there. It’s like she’s a planet, like she’s got her own moons. He’s one of them.
“What does a catfish have to do with mulch?” she asks.
“Probably nothing,” he says.
“You could change the name to ‘Catfish Mulch.’ ”
“I could get Butner to paint an American flag T-shirt on him.”
“You want a catfish wearing a T-shirt out front of your store?”
“People would stop to see that, don’t you think?”
“And then think to themselves, ‘I could really use some mulch’?”