by Laura McNeal
“Naw, my dad taught me. He loves a fire, everything about it. Every September we go cut the wood, rent a splitter, the whole nine yards.”
“Sounds like a pretty good ol’ dad.”
“Yeah,” Mick said quietly.
Myra was looking at Mick now, studying him. “How old are you?”
“Almost sixteen.”
“Really? When’s your birthday?”
Mick told her. June 2.
“So what do you want for your birthday other than smooching with Lisa Doyle?”
Mick laughed, then shrugged. What he wanted was to feel normal about Nora again, and about his father, and about his life. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Oh, we all want something,” Myra said. She smiled at him, but it seemed like a sad smile. “Some of us just don’t own up to it.”
She went back to staring into the fire. A long pleasant silence stretched out, and then Myra said, “I heard a line from a show tune the other day. I don’t usually like show tunes, but the line was, ‘I want you to see me, to see the face behind the face behind the face.’ ” She turned to Mick. “Isn’t that a good way of putting it?”
For once Mick thought he understood. “Kind of like when Reece and I saw you and Pam in the Jemison parade and thought of you one way, and then that day when we talked to you I remember how surprised I was that you were not only, you know, really really good looking, but also really really nice.”
Myra laughed quietly. “The face behind the face.” She gave him a strange smile. “You only have one more to go.”
Then she was staring again into the fire.
By eleven o’clock, Mick was fighting yawns and Myra was going through the video cabinet. “On the Waterfront!” she said suddenly, pulling the video from its case. “I’ve wanted to see this forever.”
“So do you ever sleep?” Mick asked with a grin.
Myra laughed. “Never before two. That wasn’t decaf our waitress was pouring me.” She pushed the video in, turned off the lights, and settled into the sofa. A minute or so later she said, “God, just look at Marlon Brando. No wonder Tennessee Williams was slobbering all over him.”
“Who’s Tennessee Williams?” Mick said, not that he cared. He was too tired to care about anything. It seemed like this day had started about fifty hours ago.
“He wrote Streetcar Named Desire and Brando was in that, too.”
“Oh.”
Myra glanced at Mick, and his tiredness must’ve showed. “Here,” she said. “Put your head in my lap and watch till you can’t.”
Mick lay down uncertainly, but in a few seconds he’d snugged his head into her lap and she’d covered him with the throw blanket from the back of the sofa. She lowered the volume on the TV and began slowly rubbing his neck. This should’ve made him sleepy, but it didn’t. Just the opposite. He had his right arm beneath him, but the other lay on top of Myra’s pant leg, just above the knee. Slowly, timidly, in this dark room with only the flickering bluish light from an old black-and-white movie on TV, Mick let his hand creep up and with every tiny increment of movement he became less sleepy. When his hand reached Myra’s thigh, she took hold of it and returned it to the knee. “If I wanted to be manhandled,” she said gently, “I would’ve stuck with a frat boy.”
Mick felt stricken with a confused shame. It wasn’t just that he’d done something wrong, it seemed like it was something more. Like he’d betrayed her. Or somehow fallen short. Either way, it felt pretty bad, but a second later Myra had gone back to rubbing his neck.
And that was how Nora and Mick’s father found them when they unlocked the front door and turned on the lights.
Nora and Mick’s father stood in stunned silence.
Mick sat up abruptly and said the first thing that came into his head. “I thought you were at Tug Hill.”
His father didn’t speak, but Nora did. She looked at Myra and said, “Who’re you, the baby-sitter?”
Myra’s voice was the slightest bit unsteady. “Actually, I’m Mick’s study date.”
Mick stared up at Nora and his father. They stared back—his father looking confused, Nora looking annoyed. Mick didn’t understand either one. He said, “This is Myra Vidal.”
Myra stood, but nobody spoke until Myra said, “You must be Mick’s folks.”
They still didn’t speak.
Myra said, “We were studying—geometry for him and Gide for me—and then we decided to watch a movie.” When Nora and Mick’s father met this, too, with silence, Myra turned to Mick. “Maybe I’ll catch the end next time.” She turned to the adults. “Nice to meet you,” she said, and then, after calmly gathering her books, she was gone.
A few seconds passed in silence and then Nora said, “How old is she anyway?”
A sourness flooded into Mick. “Guess I forgot to ask.”
Nora glared back. “Where’d you find her, in the Yellow Pages under ‘Escorts’?”
“Hey, c’mon, Nora,” Mick’s father said, and Nora turned her glare on him, but it suddenly dissipated. “Maybe I’m just too tired for this,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”
After she’d gone, Mick’s father said, “We couldn’t find a room. Well, we did find one, but it was three hundred bucks, a suite with a hot tub. I would’ve sprung, but Nora said, ‘Three hundred bucks for a place to sleep? I don’t think so.’ ” Mick’s father smiled at Mick. “So she sleeps in the car while I drive home.”
Mick waited a few seconds. “Nothing went on here, Dad. All we did was study and then we were just watching the movie. And Myra’s really nice. I mean, I know she’s got looks, but she’s been really nice to me.”
“Hey,” his father said, “maybe she just has an eye for quality.” Then, in his joking voice, “Besides, I always knew the Mickman would come home with a knockout one of these days.” He looked at Mick. “It was just a day or two earlier than I expected.” A pause. “I guess to a parent everything seems a day or two early.”
And then he was stepping away. “Okay,” he said, “let’s kill the lights and hit the hay. I think I can sleep for about three days.”
Mick followed tiredly behind. He thought he could, too.
But that night, a little after two o’clock, Mick suddenly awakened in his bed. A faint clicking sound seemed to be coming from the hallway. He went to the door and pushed it open.
It was Nora, in her robe, sitting at the computer.
A look of surprise crossed her face, and then was gone. “Oh, hi, Mick,” she said in a loud whisper. “I’m working on lesson plans.”
Mick knew that she expected him to nod and go back to bed, but he didn’t. He began to walk around the desk. “Which class?” he said, and watched her hand move to the escape key.
“That sheep-to-sweater enrichment class,” she said, “but I’m done now.”
When Mick’s eyes reached the screen, it was dark.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Community of True Inspiration
It was like stepping into the House of Brisket when Lisa Doyle and her mother opened the front door after church. Lisa’s mother gave her two-note, I’m-home whistle and slipped out of her black leather pumps. “You here, Elliot?”
Lisa removed her shoes, too, and padded into the kitchen, but her father wasn’t there. He must have put the brisket on the grill and then started messing with the greenhouse he was building. It was cold out, but gorgeous. Ordinarily, sun plus brisket equaled total Sunday happiness, but Lisa still felt weird about not calling Mick back and about whatever was going on between Janice and him who was psychotic Maurice.
It had been strange enough to see Janice loafing around with Maurice in a golf cart, but then, last night, right after she got the nerve to call Mick Nichols, there Janice was again, on the porch, wearing a tight low-cut shirt while Maurice’s gangmobile with tinted windows waited at the curb.
“Want to drive around with me and Maurice?” Janice had asked, almost breathless, really, as though she were inviting Lisa to join her
and Prince William.
“Um, no, thanks,” Lisa said. “I’ve got that paper to finish.”
“The Community of Truly Weird Inspiration?” All sophomores had to write a paper on state history, and Lisa was doing hers on the Ebenezers, who had founded a place they called the Community of True Inspiration.
“Yep,” Lisa said. “They knit, they cook, they pray.”
“They have no fun whatsoever,” Janice said.
Lisa looked at Janice’s neck and wondered if those were hickeys.
“C’mon, Leeze. It’s Sat-ur-day night.”
Over Janice’s shoulder Lisa could see the tinted window on the driver’s side of the Honda descending, revealing Maurice’s face and shoulders. Lisa said, “Did you mention to him how much he creeped us out when we were jogging?”
Janice laughed. “He didn’t even know that was us. He said that because we looked so cute and smoochable in our sweatsuits he just felt obliged to introduce himself.”
Lisa glanced again over Janice’s shoulder, which Maurice seemed to notice. He snapped a quick bubble and said, “Buenos noches, Doyle. Coming?”
“Can’t!” Lisa called. Then, softer, she told Janice, “I don’t think my dad would like it.”
“Sometimes you are so tame,” Janice said.
Lisa became again aware of the internal pilot light that had been burning more or less constantly since Mick smiled at her. Now, before Janice could turn and go, she said, “I called Mick Nichols tonight. In fact, I was talking to him when you knocked.”
A laugh burst from Janice. “Well, aren’t you the spunky monkey!” Then, as if something just occurred to her, she said, “You were talking to him at home?”
Lisa said she’d called him at home, so, yeah, he was at home. “Why?”
“Well, earlier tonight he was at Bing’s and you’ll never guess who with.”
A strange wariness stole over Lisa. “So then I guess you’ll just have to tell me.”
“Former Miss Jemison. Myra Vidal.”
“Myra Vidal?”
From the car, Maurice called, “Yo, Janissimo. Let’s get mo-bile.”
Lisa gave Janice a look. “Janissimo?” she said.
Janice shrugged, grinned, and turned to go. “Call me later, okay?”
After Janice had raced back through the rain to Maurice’s car, Lisa knew she should call Mick back. She’d said she would. But now she didn’t feel like it. The pilot light had gone out. She went upstairs, where she read that the Ebenezer men and boys sat separately from the Ebenezer women and girls at the Fourteen Holy Helpers Church. “Good thinking, Holy Helpers,” Lisa had said in a soft voice to herself, and had gone to bed without calling anyone.
From the upstairs bedroom, where Lisa had gone to change out of her church dress, she could look down into the greenhouse in progress. A toolbox lay on the yellow, snow-bitten grass, and inside the unroofed framework, her father’s bald spot gleamed. He was measuring and making pencil marks. His radio was beside him, and she could hear the droning play-by-play of a ballgame.
Her dad had never been Mormon. He was a history professor, a man who relied on checkable facts and primary sources. “A man says an angel told him to look in the ground,” her father said. “He says he dug up gold records, The Book of Mormon. He says he translated it, showed the gold tablets to twelve people, then the angel took the tablets back. Took them back! If a history professor tried that, he’d be a laughingstock. A farm boy does it and he’s a prophet.” So her father came to church only on daddy-daughter nights and bowed his head politely when her mother blessed the food.
Lisa cranked open the window. “Who’s winning?” she called.
“Mets,” her father said, “but give them an inning or two and that’ll change. Want to come listen with me?”
She shook her head. “History paper.”
“Ah, the Ebenezers!” he said. “The crazy old knitters. If you need some help, just yell and I’ll make myself scarce.” Her father’s idea of a joke. In fact, both he and her mother would help Lisa with her homework for as long as she could stand it, which wasn’t very long.
Lisa left the window open and sat down, but she hadn’t been reading long before she heard the compressed sound of car doors. “Missionaries at the threshold!” her mother called.
Lisa checked her teeth and her face in the mirror, and wondered if she felt more of a stomach buzz when she thought of Elder Keesler or when she thought of Mick Nichols. She experimented as she walked down the stairs. Mick Nichols. Elder Keesler. Mick Nichols. Elder Keesler. Hard to tell. And probably a sin to think of an elder that way. The doorbell rang, and her whole nervous system seemed to vibrate slightly.
When she opened the door, Elder Pfingst smiled and extended a rough, callused, pinkish hand. Polyester trousers, poly-cotton blend white shirt, but at least his pilled tie wasn’t of the clip-on variety. And Elder Keesler was indeed wearing the cool retro tie. He extended a smooth, large hand, and touching it made her stomach do some sort of a flip. Fortunately, before she had to say more than “Hi,” her sawdust-sprinkled, Heineken-scented father tramped in the back door and said, “Welcome, Holy Helpers. How goes the work of the Lord?”
Elder Pfingst and Elder Keesler looked confused.
“Um, it’s a joke,” Lisa said. “The Holy Helpers founded some towns near Buffalo, and I’m writing a paper about it for History.”
“Let them come in, Elliot,” her mother called from the kitchen. “Ask them into the living room while I get this food into a serving dish.”
Her father nodded toward the pile of shoes on the entry floor. “Check your guns and shoes at the door,” he said, and they slipped off their shoes. Elder Pfingst’s socks were white; Elder Keesler’s, an expensive-looking gray.
“So where’re you boys from?” her father asked, rubbing his elbows conversationally.
“Clinton, Utah,” Elder Pfingst said in a cheerful voice while Palooka, her father’s spotted mutt, rammed his nose into Elder Pfingst’s privates. “Whoa,” the elder said, rubbing Palooka’s head. “You’re a good old dog, aren’t ya? A good old dog.”
Lisa’s father shifted his gaze to Elder Keesler, who said, “Boston,” and got the next crotch-poke from the Palookster.
“Down!” Lisa said, blushing at the way all of their attention was now focused between Elder Keesler’s legs.
“Watch the Holy Helpers, Palooka,” her father said blandly, and Lisa pulled the dog into the kitchen.
The kitchen, luckily or unluckily, was close enough to the living room so that Lisa could hear her father saying, “Can I get you fellas a beer?”—his standard opening line to Mormon missionaries. “Just kidding,” he said, and the sofas whumped a little bit, meaning the sitting down had now occurred. Lisa yearned fervently for an Ebenezer meal, men at one table, women at another, and all conversation banned. Then she wished briefly that her father were not the Howard A. Ballangast Professor of History and self-appointed Mormon-griller.
“So what made you go on a mission, Elder Keesler?” her father asked.
Lisa dropped ice cubes into a pitcher and realized she was nervous for Elder Keesler, who was clearing his throat.
“Well,” he said, “if you believe you know a truth, and you think it can make people happy, I think you should share it.” He paused, and no one said anything. Then he added, “That, and the chance to ride a bicycle in suit pants.”
Her father laughed, a good sign, and Lisa began to breathe easier. Style points to Elder K., she thought.
“What about you?” her father asked Elder Pfingst.
“Same thing,” he answered. “I wanted to share my testimony.”
This standard-issue pronouncement was met with silence. No style points for Helper Pfff, Lisa thought.
“Okay, people, let’s eat,” her mother said, and once they were each seated in front of a rose china plate and a white napkin fan, Lisa was free to notice that Elder Keesler’s hair was black, but his eyes were gray-blue. That he w
ore a ring with a flat blue stone in it. That he held his fork hump-up in his left hand while cutting carrots with his right, thereby allowing a quick and graceful biteful the moment cutting was complete. It looked refined and she made a note to try it herself. She was noticing that he hadn’t drunk a single drop of milk when her father asked his favorite question: why the Mormons hadn’t given the priesthood to blacks until 1978.
“Don’t worry,” Lisa said quickly. “Dad always asks the missionaries that. It’s the price you pay for his brisket.”
“Oh,” Elder Keesler said, running his finger around the rim of his full milk glass. “Did you want to try that one, Elder Pfingst?”
Elder Pfingst shook his head and smiled broadly. “I think the eldest elder should lead the way in all things,” he said.
“Well,” Elder Keesler said slowly, “you can see it as a sign that the prophet is listening to God, or that he’s listening to social pressure.”
“Which way do you see it?” her father asked.
“I guess I’d lean toward the former,” Elder Keesler said.
“Well, let’s see then. Either God once said that blacks didn’t deserve the priesthood, and then he waffled and said they do, which even in the most generous light would mean that God used to be racist and now isn’t,” Mr. Doyle said. “Or the church, run exclusively by white American men, used to be racist and now isn’t—or doesn’t want to seem so.”
“Well,” Elder Keesler said, nodding and casting a rueful look at Lisa. “I see your point.” Then he looked back at Mr. Doyle. “But I guess I’d argue that it’s a little ungenerous to criticize the Church for correcting course in a country that’s still correcting course in regard to those whose lives began in a slavery that was not only barbaric but constitutionally sanctioned.”
Lisa felt a strange thrill sweep through her, the thrill of hearing someone find the right words and tone to defend the Church to her father. Her mother usually resorted to things like, “Well, Elliot, God’s ways are not our ways,” and when she herself was cornered the best she could do was, “I just like the way it makes me feel, Dad.”