Alphabetique, 26 Characteristic Fictions

by Molly Peacock

  That night, the service was room service. He ate in bed, then called his wife and heard the twins gurgle on the phone, turned out the light, and slept the sleep of the temporary hermit.

  In the morning, he was called to wake. When he sauntered over to pee in the vast bathroom, bigger than his bedroom at home, the incense rose from tiny soaps. If not home, why not have a haven?

  After he dressed, he called his wife, who said, “You sound so peaceful, honey.” And as he placed a hefty tip in the small wicker collection basket on top of the mahogany chest of drawers, H noticed the hotel’s evaluation checklist, printed on the heaviest card stock. Pressing characteristically hard on his pen, he wrote in block letters his one-word comment, “HEAVEN.”

  Doctor I and the Illustrator

  It was independence itself she helped her patients aim for, though Dr. I expressed this indirectly. She vowed to ease the irrational, inspire the irritable, illumine the ill, and lead them all into images of themselves, pictures they could draw internally. Dr. I thought all her patients were intrepid, even the timid ones. She understood that ichors of being flowed up and down the cores of every last one of them.

  Dr. I needed all her insight to deal with a new patient, the silent man. Intimidated, he sat on the beige couch for nearly forty minutes and did not speak. His back was curved. His posture was terrible. “I’m an illustrator,” he said. “No words necessary.” At the end of the session he pointed to her computer and said, “Check the website.”

  Before the second session Dr. I learned that he designed icons. Logos for companies.

  “These icons are so imaginative,” Dr. I marveled.

  “Not really,” he said, “just …”

  “Just?”

  “The image speaks.”

  After thirty-five minutes of not speaking he said, “My son passed away,” and got up to leave.

  Between the interstices of silence in the third session, Dr. I finally learned that the man had relocated to be with his son in his illness, and had in the process deeply connected with his grandson. The impetuous boy was a delight. But the mother just couldn’t explain to the boy that his daddy had died. Thus it fell to the illustrator to do it. In despair he had conveyed the essentials to the boy through drawing.

  It was not until the fourth session, when he brought Dr. I the black-and-white cartoons he’d used to illustrate for his grandson his son’s exit from this world, that she discovered the man’s presenting problem was not death, but life. It seemed his grandson now looked to him to perform an impossible fatherly task. The imp had volunteered the illustrator to speak to his school. Not just the class, but the whole elementary school. Impossible! Yet inescapable. The thought of it brought the silent man to his knees.

  “It’s why I’m here,” he said to Dr. I. “Not about my son. My grandson.”

  Dr. I suggested biweekly appointments for a while. They marked their calendars. “What a chatterbox I’ve been,” he concluded.

  But the next time he did not come.

  At first Dr. I was surprised. He hadn’t seemed resistant, only quiet and monosyllabic.

  She sat her in chair and waited. Dr. I did not just wait, though. She thought about him. She spent the hour with an invisible patient applying all her experience, and to a degree, her innocence, into thinking about him.

  And the next time he did not come. Of all the actions she could take, she had to choose inaction; she had to wait. Therefore, Dr. I did not take off for a break at the coffee shop. She stayed in her chair. Inhabited it for this man. Is there such a thing as distance healing?

  Or is it just time? Having to so severely structure her patience for her patient soon became a kind of irritation. Like an ink blot her irritation spread into her general thoughts about her profession. For instance, that tired, if true, insect image people use to describe becoming independent: that individuals would wriggle from helpless caterpillars into butterflies. Insipid, if accurate. But to her the transformation seemed more architectural. A column of a self, the I within each of those patients, needed to stand up, and then to lean into the storm of life.

  The next week the man returned.

  When she explained that she had kept each hour of his absence exclusively for him, thinking about him and his situation, he was incredulous. But moved. His head seemed to float up to the top of his spine.

  It’s tiring work, standing up for your self. You come from the ground up. And yet you do have wings. A little i-child flies about, but a grown I has had to take those wings inside.

  Using her instincts, she repeated to him something he had said before to her. “The image speaks.”

  He left. But the next time he came back.

  “I could show them something. Illustrate.” For the silent man, it all came down to a gaggle of children wiggling on the floor of a gym waiting for him to say something.

  The possibilities for what that might be intoxicated both of them. (Dr. I imagined she heard the sound of a once-rusty pump. Could it be drawing the ichors of existence through his veins?)

  “A huge pad,” the not-quite-as-silent man said. “An easel.”

  At the appointed time of the assembly, he brought to the school a tall easel with a gigantic flip pad. From all the other kids, he selected his grandson to come to the front. He asked him a few questions, the same way he inquired of his clients at work, and then, as the boy directed, he drew an icon for him in response: a little-kid coat of arms with an insect theme. The man fashioned it with a caterpillar and a butterfly. Something all the kids could try for themselves.

  Needless to say, all the children wanted him to create an icon for them. He relented, but now he was only on the fourteenth of his 341st flying-insect coat of arms.

  Dr. I learned this, in detail, as the man cartooned the event for her the following week. “You ignited their imaginations!” she said.

  Yes, he was surprised how much they’d liked it.

  “I got inspired,” the man told Dr. I.

  And so he shielded their inkling hearts.

  While Jiggle Juggles, J Makes Jam

  When you’ve been jilted, judged, jeered at, and japed at by a jealous jerk who’s put your self-confidence in jeopardy by going for your jugular, you can always make jam, as J in desperation did.

  She bought ripe oranges for the marmalade, perfect spheres. She was jaded, joked at, jolted into life alone—again. Her little daughter Jiggle jumped around the house in her striped jammies, jitterbugging here and there in a world of her own.

  J peeled the oranges and measured the sugar and set the huge pot to boil. As J made jam, Jiggle was a jack-in-the-box, a one-girl jamboree. Jiggle was all beginning—she was January. She was all bloom. She was June, she was July.

  For every bit of the mother’s jaundice, the daughter was jonquil.

  When you have suffered from jeremiads and jactations, you can always line up jars and boil them in the canning pot as the marmalade bubbles and your hair sticks in sugary tendrils to your temples—and, out of the corner of your eye, watch a jimsonweed of a girl doing a jig, her jelly belly bobbling. Through the jungle of recriminations and blame for the jackass who walked away, Jiggle brought J the scent of jasmine.

  The girl took the three extra oranges and started to juggle, just like they taught in gym. She chanted the words of the instructions as she did it:

  One ball eye-level, elbows in.

  Two balls, up, up, catch, catch.

  Then the third: criss-cross applesauce.

  Just let one drop.

  “Don’t throw ahead of you,” she warned herself as she picked up the bruised oranges.

  Jiggle was on a junket.

  But J was on her journey.

  The marmalade bubbled, the hot jars joggled, and J reached in with her tongs to remove and turn them onto the fresh dish towels on the counter. She jiggered her jam funnel into the jars, poured the marmalade, and used her magnet wand to fish out the metal tops from the simmering water and pop them on the jars in a
jiffy.

  Then she sat down in the quiet joy of a job completed and watched Jiggle juggle.

  Why justify? J thought. Why joust with a jackass? Be jovial!

  Well, she wasn’t quite to the outright jovial stage, but a jot of joie de vivre had returned with the popping of the lids on the marmalade jars. Some of her old juice.

  A Knight’s Knack

  Kid K thought he had it all in hand. The brash knight-errant charged his mount from crusade to crusade. He held the reins, got the kudos—and kanoodled with all the princesses. Knightlife was a tournament!

  Young K started his career so long ago that knight was actually pronounced k-nick-t. His loyal squire called him “a parfit valiant k-nick-t.” Kid K was certainly brave, right down to his very kidneys. But he was also a bit of a k-nucklehead. He could handle a steed with silvery ease, or kiss a lady holding back her hair, but kindness with words wasn’t his long suit. “Son of a bawd!” “Beggar!” He said the first thing that came to his mind, uncensored. “Filthy-stockinged coward!” “Heir of a mongrel!” “K-nife-nosed k-nave!”

  Then came the accident …

  Don’t look!

  Yes … it involved an ax.

  Yes … it was gruesome.

  Oh, close your eyes to the bloody hand in the dust, the fingers sticking out …

  (But every time we write a k, we still sketch a ghost of his fingers protruding from his severed knightly hand.) It was his right hand, the rein-holder. His love hand. The loss made him want to lie down and die.

  When his squire brought him breakfast, he said kNo, and then kNo to his trusty steed and kNo to his classy suit of armor and kNo to kissing every one of his grieving amours. His thoughts, which he never paid much attention to anyway, simply came to a stop. Dropped, just like the k that was beginning to loosen from the very word that defined him.

  “Kill me!” he implored his squire, but the loyal man refused.

  “Kill me!” the k-nick-t insisted. “I’m a lily-livered rogue, I’m a filthy-gloved coward. I’m a beggar and a k-nave.” None of this was true, his faithful servant knew, except for the fact that K wore a very disreputable looking mitten-bandage over his wrist. He thought he was a coward because he was crying, but his old squire saw the kernel of a different bravery.

  He sewed his liege two special gauntlets, one for his left hand, one for his right arm, all stitched with seed pearls, one for every tear K had shed.

  “You mayn’t continue to joust, milord,” the squire ventured, “but there are things you can still do single-handedly.”

  K regarded the gloves with wet eyes. Did he really want to die?

  “Try them on, my liege.”

  The minute K donned the seed-pearled gauntlets, the k in the word knight clanked to the ground, its sound disappearing. Without the premature clatter of his first letter, K’s thoughts became attempts. He essayed. I’m still kicking, he told himself.

  Stronger, if slower, his thoughts slid from one another. To imitate a rare true-penny is my aim, he decided.

  As his thoughts became stately and deep, his talk slowed. A honey-tongued gallant may I become, he resolved. And he found that it was easier to listen to others. Well-wishing, best-tempered, lion-booted may I be.

  How to live became his mission. But unlike most philosophers, K didn’t live entirely in his head. He was sharply aware of his body. Every time he picked up a knife and held an apple close to his chest to peel the red skin, he valued what he had—and lived in a certain amount of fear that he’d lose his other hand. “Oh, precious sweet-suggesting valentine of mine,” he crooned.

  He came to understand that how to live meant how to go on. Decades passed. The former knucklehead became a man with a knack. In time, knack grew to know-how.

  Eventually he outlived his contemporaries. Then he outlived reigns and generations. Castles crumbled. Dray horses became thoroughbreds. Thoroughbreds became automobiles. Royalty became Hollywood. And he remained, a silent-k’d knight, remarkably fit, still using his same suit of armor, his pearly gloves, still quickly dropping on bended knee to a lady (and deft at removing her knickers single-handedly).

  One day, when asked for his philosophy by his new squire, K said, “Smooth-faced celestial well-wishing.” And at the new squire’s stymied look, the knight amplified, “Cuckoo-budded compassion.” His old squire, the glove maker, had centuries ago passed on, and many attendants had come and gone, and now this squire was a mystified personal assistant in flip-flops. K tried again to help out his new young squire PA: “My philosophy is …” The knight was going to say that it was “Wafer-caked best-temper and song,” but realized that if he really had an attitude of wafer-caked best-temper, he would simplify for the boy.

  “Kindness.”

  L at Her Pool

  L was lazing in a chaise by her pool when she heard a languid voice behind her. She was startled, but the lush baritone was so assured she didn’t immediately turn around. Instead, she stayed poised in her white retro swimsuit and let the voice envelop her like a cloak.

  You’ve done a lot for Hollywood film, it said. You’ll be remembered, just as your mother was. To say L was at a lull in her career was a laughable understatement. She had been all but forgotten. But that compliment lifted her up. That was what a compliment did, made you look at yourself afresh. She blushed a bit, then looked down at her toes.

  Lovely swimsuit. I like the retro look with the red toenails.

  Who was this Lancelot?

  Her hand went automatically to her hair, and she pulled at her curls. It was the same gesture she’d made since she was five years old, while tugging at her mother’s silk robe with the fur trim.

  When L turned around at last, she found the flatterer’s face was hidden beneath a mask and hat. Was that a hint of a pencil mustache below the shadow of the brim? He wore a long black satin cape with a crimson lining, and he smelled of musk and lust and … it couldn’t be … a distinct whiff of lily-of-the-valley. After a moment of staring, L’s eyes locked with the eyes that might be behind the brim and the mask.

  Then with disappointment and surprise she watched him turn away, beginning to disappear through the striped canvas walls of her poolside cabana. At the very end, his cape snagged on the cabana pole, and as he turned to urge it back with him, he knocked his hat askew. In seconds he vanished entirely.

  Was he real? Oh yes, there at the tiled edge of the pool lay his leather mask. He must have lost it in those last seconds of his exit.

  L laughed the iconic, laconic laugh that had made her famous, a second-generation, but no less luminous, movie star than her mother Miss Lily Valley had been. Time to let go of vanity and get to the hospital, she whispered to herself. She really had no time for a phantom lover.

  When she rose from the chaise, she swooped up the mask. Later she deposited it at the back of her lingerie drawer, enjoying for a moment the creased leather amidst her lacy frou-frous. Then she forgot all about it in the rush to her husband’s side.

  Her third husband, the one she adored, was desperately ill. The first two were troublesome necessities, but this third … he was a kind of luxury at the end of her fulsome career. A career she had left for him. As she worked for his wellness, she realized with shock that laurels, even lustrous ones, don’t last.

  L’s mother, Miss Lily Valley, had been a child star in the early talkies, a legendary girl with full, dark bangs, whose career lasted till she was nearly eighteen. Then she retired to have a family. But L, as an adult, had walked out on glamour for a newly chosen role—to give the love of her life all she herself had received: compliments. At first she was like a woman with a fortune so large she could give vast quantities away every day. Compliments? Lifeblood! She had banks of them. She knew how they fueled life. The admired thrive.

  But her failing husband could not return her compliments. He was turned toward the next life, and compliments come only from this life. As he faced the shadows of the future, he forgot sweet-talk.

  L sei
zed her role. She complimented him on everything: his liver, his lymph, his lungs, his LDL cholesterol, his leucocytes, his limbs, his limbic system. She knew she had depleted her fortune of tributes, but she didn’t care. In the matter of life and death, she tore the leaves off every laurel and pressed them to his forehead.

  Under her ministrations he lingered—but at last her crooned litany had no effect. He passed into the next world.

  Afterwards, time lounged on. L lowered her pace. She had no choice. The cameras had long passed her by. Yet even with all the time in the world to practice, she could not learn to compliment herself. She tried. But trying was faking it.

  Ruefully she discovered the lesson of the compliment: like light through a lens, praise had to come from the outside in.

  One day as she lay on the solitary chaise at her pool, L suddenly smelled lily-of-the-valley, and beneath it the scent of musk and leather.

  Milady, I’ve come back for my mask, her ghost Lothario said, as if only sixty seconds had passed, not three times sixty weeks. Loose, limber, there he was, the glare of the sunshine behind that hat obscuring his face. His cape flapped its crimson silk interior. He lifted one leather-booted leg and leaned onto the chaise, his shadow enveloping her.

  “How do you know I have it, milord?” she asked. I know. Well, of course he did. She got up and was about to saunter casually to her bedroom closet as if she were on camera. But she stopped.

  “The price of the return,” she said languorously to him, “is a look at your face.” Lickety-split, he bowed his head.

  Suddenly, he was all hat, and L was superstitiously unable to lift the brim. Instead she reached beneath and felt the thick hair of his full bangs.

  Slowly she tipped the brim to reveal the lower part of his face. Yes, the pencil mustache was there. The lips were wide with a quirk of a smile. She anticipated that his eyes would be dark as forests. Yet as she pushed the brim fully back, his masculine visage disappeared. In its place loomed the luminous face of a child.