Exes

by Max Winter

  *Which only created yet another rift between Eli and me. Eli loved man-size monsters like Dracula and the Wolf Man, and I, monster-size monsters like Mothra and Mechagodzilla. This disagreement extended to our playtime, as Eli always wanted to dress up* while I preferred to set up figures here and there and manipulate them like a god.

  *I’m not sure he ever outgrew it. In college, as a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Eli fought his mock battles clad in the same one-shoulder leopard-skin pelt in which he would also accept his diploma. Coen the Barbarian, he called himself—exiled half brother of Onan and rightful heir to the Throne of Nemesis.

  Individual Artist Project Grant Proposal (Dance/Performance) Rhode Island State Council on the Arts

  Project Title: Neoteny (A Burlesque)

  Vivian Goddard

  Project Description, 9/11/98

  The red curtain rises to reveal a hot white spotlight shining on an otherwise darkened stage. Two figures approach from stages left and right, barely visible—black silhouettes against a black backdrop. They step into the light and meet: boy and girl, naked but for clinging black swimsuits; their lean bodies glazed in droplets of water, their hair slick with it. The spotlight pulls back to reveal the silhouetted smokestacks and mills and water towers behind them. The girl leans forward, weight on her downstage leg, swiveling a bit at the hip. She bats her long, thick lashes at the boy, whose face is now lit by a smaller spot of red-gelled light. The white spot catches a glinting something or other running along the girl’s upstage thigh. The boy’s jaw is set firm, but his shoulders shake. He reaches for the girl’s crotch to grasp this glinting, dangling thing; he snatches it, pulls out a red-tipped tube, and holds it up by its string. The girl gasps, and the lights flood crimson. They freeze. The lights dim, then grow golden, russet tinged with Magic Hour pink. On the sound system, strings swell softly. The girl reaches out and closes her hand over the boy’s and opens her mouth to sing: “I’ve got the world on a string / I can make the rain go / got that string wrapped round my fin- / -ger.” She opens the boy’s fist and takes the tampon. She whips it around and around like a lasso until the short tube telescopes into an arm-length, red-tipped cane. She dances about the boy, twirling it, serenading him. “What a world, what a life, I’m in lo-o-o-ve!” The lights cut, and the stage plunges into darkness. The brass blasts loud and plosive. The lights come back up and reveal the girl, now wearing white tails and silk top hat. A bejeweled red satin catsuit clings to the boy’s body. The whole stage glows with rich, golden light as the black curtain rises and two curving rows of white marble stairs lower. Two by two, seven-foot anthropomorphic tampons—cotton-covered tubes out of which stick men’s legs clad in red fishnet stockings and Lucite stripper heels—stream from a door at the top of the stairs. They form a horseshoe around the boy and girl. The strings swell and the saxophones honk and the trombones blare and the trumpets squeal, squeal, squeal! The horseshoe widens, out rolls a long red carpet, and the boy and girl walk out along it—dressed now in wedding white and black-tie black—white-gloved hand in white-gloved hand. The smokestacks no longer appear in silhouette and now reveal themselves to be, when lit, big-city skyscrapers. They meet at the center of the tampon horseshoe and kiss. Pickle-bucket-size period cups brimming with red corn syrup are lowered from ropes and dumped onto their heads. But the young lovers just kiss on—oblivious, dripping blood, their eyes shut. A four-foot-square card lowers in front of them. Painted on it, a bloody splotch the shape of a valentine heart, and written below in finger-painted streaks:

  THE END

  (. . . . . .)

  Tampons: According to Eli, the boys in his class didn’t know the difference between these and their applicators, calling them both beach whistles. “Why do girls constantly remove them out of doors?” Jake asked.* “That’s not how it works, idiot,” Alix said. Slepkow wanted to be invisible instead of red. Viv, meanwhile, was long gone. See? You could almost hear her say.

  *How this subject even came up is anyone’s guess, let alone on the very first day of school. But my brother always did like to wing it. “So,” he’d start, ten minutes late and somehow wet, “where were we? Alix?”

  The End: Not so fast. But what do I know?*

  *When us Blackall boys* weren’t reading or playing by ourselves or, later, watching whatever was on, we passed the time with games of rock-paper-scissors, at least until Eli saw fit to devise a fourth shape—the hole—into which all the other three items fell. You could throw it only once, but that’s all it took.

  *Look, Libby, how hard I’ve tried to leave you out of it. I’ve gone to absurd lengths! You can count on one hand how many times your name’s come up. You don’t have to believe me. Just trust me, okay? I’m trying my best for a change.

  The Quaker Guns

  Hank LaChance

  My foster kid showed up at the condo carrying a blue gym bag and a grease-stained box with the flaps tucked under.

  Phyllis held the door open. “Hank,” she said, “this is Carlos.”

  He was shorter than I pictured. “You’re shorter than I pictured,” I told him. Couldn’t tell how old he was supposed to be. Phyllis had said sixteen, but he could’ve passed for twelve.

  Phyllis is my late wife’s sister, and Carlos was her cleaning lady’s kid. His mom was out of town because it was going to take at least three months to fix Phyllis’s house after some nut had driven into it. With no house to keep all of a sudden, Carlos’s mom moved to Jersey, where she had family and there was work. But her kid had won some kind of scholarship at this fancy-pants Quaker school for being sharp and brown, and his mom didn’t want to make him start all over again with only a month left till summer. Seeing as how I had room, Phyllis asked me. It was the kind of thing that would have been hard to talk my late wife, Liza, out of saying yes to, so fine, I said. Okay. So Carlos wasn’t really a foster. But what else can I call him? I’ve got to call him something. A guest? The son of my late wife’s sister’s employee? Some kid? He’s his own situation.

  “Carlos is from Pawtucket,” said Phyllis, looking at him in a way I couldn’t imagine he cared for, but he seemed not to notice.

  “Central Falls,” Carlos said. Kid’s glasses made his eyes the size of walnuts.

  “Central Falls,” Phyllis repeated, like it was the goddamned UN all of a sudden. “He’s Colombian,” she said, pronouncing all the o’s. “American,” she added. “Colombian American.”

  I reached out my hand to shake his, but Carlos held on to his box. I clapped him on the shoulder instead, and he almost lost his footing. Maybe he’d stepped in some of that goose shit on the way from the car. He leaned into the doorjamb and raised the box with his right knee.

  “I’m from Central Falls, too,” I said. “Not much of a hockey town anymore, huh?”

  Phyllis shot me eyes and jowls. Like her sister, Phyllis looked older when she disapproved of something you said. But whose house gets driven into twice, and by the same exact nut, is what I’d like to know.

  “I don’t like sports,” Carlos said to his box.

  “Hank, why don’t you help Carlos with his things?”

  I tried to take the box, but Carlos just tightened his grip. I didn’t blame him: kid had his life in there. Bouncing around like that, two hundred miles from his mom and who knows how many from wherever he was really from.

  Phyllis had mentioned something about Carlos’s “not putting much stock in community,” which is how she talks, but that’s okay: I could give two for it myself. Liza always wanted a kid. You can say too little, too late, all you want, or some good it does now, but when can’t you say that? It wasn’t my fault the condo hadn’t turned out like I planned.

  Canada geese. My pond was lousy with them. That ham-and-egger Realtor must’ve cleared the assholes out of there with his car horn right before he showed it, paid someone to rake up their shit. And all along I thought the place was cheap on account of the two hundred-year floods they’d h
ad in the five years since they built it, which I never told Liza about. Every five minutes she’d’ve asked me if I really wanted to sink our retirement into this ticky-tack just on account of some man-made pond I all of a sudden wanted to look at. Old gal was shrewd for a Quaker.

  And before you get all worked up about me calling my late wife old gal, you ought to know that Liza used to get a real kick out of it. Phyllis, for one, never got how her sister and I liked to joke. “You can’t know what’s stuck to the bottom of a couple’s pot,” Liza told her once. Phyllis made just about the least Quaker face you can imagine, and I imitated it in her blind spot. “Hank doesn’t like metaphors,” Liza said, winking at me.

  Liza died from dehydration, of all goddamned things: we both thought thirst only killed you at sea or in the desert. I have a young, gay, and sportsy niece who carries a squeeze bottle of filtered tap water with her everywhere she goes, and I used to give her a hard time about it, but she hasn’t once told-me-so. I also used to work with this chucklehead named Georgie, who called Bigfoot “that guy” and the Loch Ness Monster “that other guy,” and who once called into work thirsty. We all gave him hell about it, and I guess I owe him an apology too. But at this point I might as well fly a banner around the state. LOOK, I’M SORRY. HAPPY NOW?

  While Phyllis poked around, I showed Carlos to the spare room off the kitchen. I had plans to turn it into a workshop, but that could wait till school let out. I was sleeping in the guest room because the master bedroom was filled with boxes of Liza’s things and I wasn’t ready to get into all that just yet. Liza held on to matchbooks and pamphlets. Restaurant mints. Funeral programs for people she didn’t even like. The wood was raw in the spare room, and there was only a little crank window way up high, but it wasn’t so bad. I would’ve loved digs like these at his age.

  “You can set this place up however you like,” I said.

  Carlos ran his fingers along a knotted pine stud, winced, bit out a splinter.

  “This cot unfolds,” I said, unfolding the cot.

  Carlos looked around, peered into the closet. It was too shallow for pants and shirts, but perfect for cans. I think it was supposed to be a pantry. There’s no such thing as a spare room these days. It’s always a pantry or study or solarium or mudroom. Carlos stood there holding his box until I left him to himself. Fine with me. A man needs his privacy.

  Phyllis was in the kitchen smelling milk and asking about coffee, which meant she wanted to talk. I said something quick about Sanka in the cupboard and mugs in the sink, and snuck out back.

  As expected, the geese were a stone’s throw from the patio, so I grabbed a handful of pebbles out of the planter and chucked it at them. I couldn’t see their eyes, but I knew they were staring at me. Two, three times a day, at least, I’d run out there, blasting a boat horn at them and swinging a mop over my head like King Phillip. But they always came back. We kept up this song and dance for months. Now what? I threw the rest of the rocks, but the geese kept on milling and honking and picking nits like they owned the place.

  “Scram, shitheads,” I said, picking up some mulch and throwing that instead. It didn’t go very far, so I really leaned into my next throw and slipped on a green question mark of goose shit slicked with rain. I landed on my ass and felt the landing in my teeth.

  The alpha goose lowered his head and started bobbing it. He opened his beak and hissed at me. Then he spread his wings and started to charge. I ran back inside and got the slider closed just in time for him to run into it headfirst. He flapped his wings. I gave him the finger and shut my blinds.

  My back killed, but my back, always for shit, had gone out for good when I took a tumble at work, which is how I could afford the condo in the first place. After twenty-five years of running shipping and receiving for Hasbro, I wound up with a pretty good settlement, plus TDI—what we used to call Italian Retirement. I’m French-Canadian, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t picked up a trick or two about how things work along the way.

  But as far as the geese went, I was fresh out of ideas. It had been five long months, and I’d tried nearly everything: road flares, scarecrows, hot pepper, you name it. Only a nut does the same goddamn thing over and over.

  Groundskeeping’s hands were tied on account of the DEM, and I didn’t find out about egg oiling soon enough. (You coat the eggs in oil, and they won’t hatch. Then they blame the place and move on. A little Mazola does the trick. But past a couple weeks, there’s laws.) Also, Liza made it pretty clear she would never forgive me if I hurt the little s.o.b.’s. “I want no harm to come to those geese,” she said in her Quaker Meeting voice, which is a flat, I’m-only-just-saying voice. It didn’t help that she was from Connecticut. “These birds are lost, Hank,” Liza’d say, all Connecticut Quaker–like, whenever I so much as put my boots on. I tried to tell her they weren’t lost, just taking advantage, but Liza wouldn’t hear of it. You give someone a part-time job, a kind heart, and a view, and before you know it, they turn into Marlin Perkins. Once, she even swerved off the road to miss hitting a squirrel with no tail. “Come on,” I said when we got off the shoulder and going again. “No tail is natural selection.” On the way back home she focused on the slow-moving road, eyes peeled for critters.

  Liza’s doctor was one of these young bucks who don’t put much stock in a woman’s pain. Her checkups might as well have been drive-throughs. Phyllis thinks we should sue, but I told her we both live decently, so what for? To teach him a lesson, she says. I said there’s only one lesson, but it can’t be taught and he’ll learn it soon enough. We all do. Besides, it’s me who should have paid better attention.

  Anyway, by the time Carlos showed, I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

  Liza’d been making noises about foster kids for some twenty-odd years before this Carlos thing fell into my lap, ever since the doctor told us my sperm didn’t have pointy enough hooks. I had no idea the little fuckers were even supposed to have hooks. Liza wanted to blame it on off-gases, but you can’t blame everything on what you do. That’s just what work smells like these days. And adoption wasn’t in the cards, what with my real kid already out there and me having long since missed my chance to tell Liza about him, so I just told her I didn’t believe in it.

  By the time we met—Liza and me—my son was, what, eleven and change? And I hadn’t seen him in as many years. At that point it didn’t even have a thing to do with what kind of kid he was, though if I was being honest, I could guess what kind he’d turn out to be. Things moved real quickly between Liza and me, and before I knew it, we were married, and I couldn’t tell her all that stuff without looking like a real asshole. Not telling someone something is the worst kind of lie, because you don’t even give them a chance to tell you you’re full of shit. That’s the problem with meeting someone late in life. You know exactly how lucky you are.

  He must be almost thirty by now, my son. Look, it makes me sick to think about, but I mailed checks every other week till he hit eighteen. At this point he wants nothing to do with me, and I don’t blame him. Whoever he is, he’s his own man.

  Last I saw him was at his mother’s funeral, when I snuck in the back. I went up to him, after. He looked like a photo of me I had forgotten all about. “Rob?” I said.

  He squinted.

  “It’s me, Hank. LaChance. I’m . . . I’m your—”

  “I know who you are. But I don’t know you. And you don’t know me.”

  My neck tightened, then my shoulder. “Okay. That’s okay. I just, I’m . . . I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”

  “You are.”

  “About your mother. About . . .” I put out my hand, and he just looked at it, then back at me. I nodded and left.

  _____________

  I guess I can see now that Liza wasn’t really settling in all that well. After moving from School Street, we spent the first couple weeks getting the new place squared away. Sure, I saw the geese, but figured they’d be heading no
rth soon enough. Little did I know that migration’s a thing of the past, what with weather change and all. Far as they’re concerned, the New England suburbs are spring year-round.

  I didn’t have much of a nest egg—and neither did Liza—and knew this was the last move before my very last one. But not hers. I thought for sure I would go first.

  We had to get rid of a lot of stuff to fit everything, but eventually Liza found a spot for her hunt table and the davenport—which is what she called a couch—and her figurines. It was tight in there, but it felt like home. Did to me at least.

  But Liza did a hell of a lot more sitting in the new condo. She’d sit in the breakfast nook mostly, and also on the davenport, but never on the patio, which actually looked out onto something, unlike the nook, which looked at a wall decorated with a wreath of dry corn. “What’s so interesting about that corn?” I asked her.

  “Oh, let me be,” she said, and went back to staring.

  “I just want to know what you see in it, is all.”

  “You can’t take every last thing apart, Hank. Honestly!”

  “Take what apart? I only take apart things I’m trying to fix.”

  “What is there to fix?”

  She had never been what you’d call a big sitter, Liza. She used to stand, mostly—hover. But now, in the condo, it was all she could do to stand in front of the stove long enough to fix a decent meal, let alone make the trip to Almacs for groceries.