I had an even harder time with Francis. He was only nineteen, a fearful guy with nervous habits like picking at his skin and biting his nails and patting his hair down, habits I was supposed to try to curtail by handing him a Slinky or a Rubik’s Cube to keep his hands busy, but I rarely did. I just smiled when he got agitated, tried to say something soothing, did my best not to condescend.
“It’s all right, Francis,” I’d tell him. “Nobody’s going to bite you.”
But he was rarely soothed. I had to hold my tongue when he’d caution me not to drive too fast in the Offerings van on field trips or stir too much sugar into my coffee. “Rots your teeth,” Francis said, wiggling a finger. The others cast him as a party pooper, a wet blanket. “Fwancis,” Paul called him. Francis looked like the runt of a litter—small shouldered, pale, with blackheads and pimples around the corners of his mouth and nostrils. His anxiety was ridiculous sometimes. “When I die, will somebody eat me?” he once asked.
Most days they were all happy. Like children, the residents seemed to have the wonderful ability to forget themselves in simple activities. They could be moody, but rarely did a worry or care transfer from one day to the next. Each night I stopped by Marsha’s office to hand in my report. She and I shared a sense of humor about our work there, how an entire day could be spent playing tiddledywinks or watching cartoons or marathon episodes of Family Feud, a show that had a cultlike following among the residents at Offerings. Marsha was a kind and thoughtful woman, and troubled in a way I could never figure out. I tried to be friendly, compliment her on her earrings, wish her a good night, what have you. She was married and twenty years my junior, so of course nothing ever happened between us.
• • •
Not long after my wife had died, Lacey, my daughter, had come and emptied the house of its finer furniture. It was my wife’s stuff—her eye, her taste—and looking at all of it just sitting there collecting dust disturbed me. I was glad to see it go. I never cared much for nice things or money anyway. It had been my wife’s idea for me to go into business with her father. The man had started a company renting out construction equipment, built himself up, succeeded. I cared nothing for that business. He kept me on the in-house end of things, which protected me from the gritty details. The worst I ever had to do was fire one of the cleaning ladies in the office for stealing food from the break room. “It came from upstairs,” I told her. “If it were up to me, none of us would work here.” She took it well enough, and I went back to my files, literally pushing papers around on my desk until I could go home. The best part of my day was the drive home at sunset on the freeway—the silhouettes of high pines black against the pastel sky, the sun smoldering as it disappeared.
It went on like that for decades, me twiddling my thumbs behind that desk, my wife at home filling the house with antiques and fake flowers, dipping her fingers into cheesecakes and frostings and hollandaise and gravy. She died young of a heart attack, out of the blue. She wasn’t as fat as other women I’ve seen, and she was never crass or inarticulate, but I hadn’t found her attractive for years. Sometimes I feel I barely even knew her. The only times she seemed truly joyful were when she was on her way out to go shopping or to get her hair and nails done. My poor wife. I didn’t know how little I loved her until she was dead.
Once it was emptied of all my wife’s things, the house felt as though it had returned to the earth, some natural state of being. Maybe that is why, when Marsha Mendoza gave me a small succulent in a terra-cotta plastic pot for Easter, I stopped off at the public library and picked up a book about the species. They’re such hardy little bastards. Stick a leaf of one in a cup of dirt and it will sprout roots all on its own. Its ability to regenerate, to thrive, is astonishing. By mid-May I had propagated a dozen new plants in china teacups and platters and little soup bowls that my wife had kept in a display hutch. My daughter had taken the hutch and left the dinnerware in piles on the hardwood floor. I wasn’t going to use the dishes for food. I ate everything off paper plates, a bachelor in the classic sense. It filled me with great pride to watch those succulents grow. I got in the habit of giving them out as presents whenever there was an occasion. I even gave one to Paul for his thirtieth birthday.
“Fuck-you-lent,” he said, setting the little plant on the table. He spread his palm and held it out to me for a high five. We had all gathered around to watch him blow out the candles on his birthday cake.
“What if it dies?” Francis asked. “What if he kills it?”
“Those plants are almost impossible to kill,” I said. “Their Latin name is Sempervivum. Live forever. Don’t worry about it.”
Claude distributed huge chunks of cake around the table. I helped Paul up out of his chair and hugged him. He was about sixty pounds overweight. His parents lived in Florida, visited him rarely, took issue with the incidental costs he incurred at Offerings, mostly from extra food. At least once a week, a delivery guy would wander into the foyer looking for Paul with a satchelful of pizzas and chicken wings. Paul could sit contentedly for hours in front of the television with bags of yogurt-covered pretzels and caramel popcorn. Occasionally he overate to the point of being sick. “Gotta throw up now, Larry,” he’d say. Fifteen minutes later he’d be at it again. What could I do? I wasn’t there to keep him on a diet. Besides certain rules for safety within the facility, the residents could do whatever they wanted. The handbook stipulated only that a resident’s contract at Offerings could be terminated if he or she violently attacked a staff member or another resident. And overnight visits were not permitted.
I often wondered whether Paul understood what it meant to make love to a woman, just the basic practicality of what goes where, what it would mean to begin and finish. Perhaps he’d had some experiences with women he didn’t care to share with me, though I think if he’d had any, he’d have bragged about them plenty. “Sex o’clock, Larry,” he said daily before waddling over to his room, shutting the door, and pulling out his box of pornography, I assumed. A birthday trip to Hooters had been his idea. He’d gone to a Hooters once in Las Vegas, he claimed, and had the time of his life.
“Las Vaginas,” he joked. “Food and girls, girls and food. Mm,” he said. He licked frosting off his fingers. “Hooters has everything.”
“I’ve got money,” said Claude, though I don’t think Claude had much sexuality.
“They’ve got food here,” Francis reminded us, poking at the cake with his pinkie.
“Larry will take us to Hooters,” Paul announced, smiling proudly. “Girls,” he said. “Ooh.” He shut his eyes and lifted his arms, twisting invisible knobs as though they were a woman’s nipples. He gyrated, licked his palm. I hid my revulsion behind a cough. “Girls,” he cried again, his eyes rolling back in ecstasy. “Girls, girls, girls.”
• • •
Lacey and I had never been close. We never bonded. She loved me no more than I’d loved her mother, I guess—the sort of strained affection captured best in stiff family portraits taken at the mall, a hand cupping a shoulder, a benign tilt of the head, eyes wide and vacant for the camera. My wife had insisted on posing for those photos every Christmas, and I had complied until I couldn’t stand to anymore.
“Take the photo without me,” I said to her one year. “Mother and daughter.” I expected her to put up a fight, but she simply stirred the cream into her coffee, a smudge of bright pink lipstick on the porcelain rim. I watched her sip and squint as though she were imagining it—mother and daughter.
“You’re right, Larry,” she said. “It’s better without you.”
We talked like that. She bought herself expensive jewelry with her father’s money—gold tennis bracelets, heart-shaped pendants, something called chocolate diamonds—and wrapped them up and signed my name on the gift cards. “To my dear wife, with love, Larry.”
“Oh, honey, you really shouldn’t have,” she’d say after dinner, pulling the box out from u
nder her seat cushion. She put the bracelet on, held her wrist out admiringly. Of course it felt awful. “I love you, Larry,” she’d coo, getting up to kiss me on the cheek. Her lipstick was always thick and greasy. It took cold cream and a shave to get it off my face the next morning. Her jewelry sat in towering stacks of little boxes on her dressing table until she was dead and Lacey came and swept them into a plastic laundry basket along with a few items from the closet—a fur coat, a few purses, some fancy shoes. Everything else got donated. Her makeup and perfume I threw in the garbage, much of it unused, unopened.
• • •
Francis decided to stay behind while we went to Hooters. He joined a group in the TV lounge to watch Les Misérables. All the residents at Offerings loved Broadway shows. There must have been two dozen VHS cassettes of musicals on the shelf—Annie Get Your Gun, Bye Bye Birdie, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Wizard of Oz. Grease was the big favorite. Everyone knew all the songs by heart.
“Les Jizz,” said Paul, cackling.
“How much money should I bring?” asked Claude, fingering through his wallet.
“Bring it all,” said Paul.
I did nothing to rein in their excitement. Claude put on a clip-on tie. Paul paced in the hallway as I filled out the form to borrow the van.
“Going out?” asked Marsha Mendoza as she walked past.
“Birthday dinner,” I answered, gesturing toward Paul and smiling as best I could. Marsha gave Paul a hug. He groaned as they embraced, eyes widening lecherously. I looked away.
“Hooters, huh, Paul?” I asked after Marsha had left.
“Hooters,” he said and chuckled, wiping his mouth with his hairy forearm.
On the way there, stopped at a red light in the Offerings van, I watched all the regular people mill down the sidewalk. I rarely interacted much with anyone back then who wasn’t retarded. When I did, it struck me how pompous and impatient they were, always measuring their words, twisting things around. Everybody was so obsessed with being understood. It made me sick. I glanced up at Paul in the rearview mirror as he touched his fat, chapped lips. His hands always smelled of butane and the powdered cheese and spices that coated his favorite corn chips. I could hear Claude breathing from the backseat. He was always congested, his nose always whistling like a drafty window. I checked my reflection in the vanity. I sprayed my mouth with Binaca.
“What’s that?” Claude wanted to know, but I didn’t answer.
“Hoot hoot,” said Paul, slicking his hair back with sweat when the light turned green.
I had been to Hooters once before. With all the nice restaurants in town, my father-in-law had taken me there for lunch on my fiftieth birthday.
“No disrespect to my daughter,” he’d said, swinging the door open to that nauseating aroma of french fries and cigarette smoke and beer. My birthday falls around Christmastime, so all the waitresses wore stockings with one green leg and one red leg under their tiny orange shorts, little red Santa hats with big white pom-poms, a tuft of fake mistletoe tied with silver twine like a pendant around their necks. Their “wifebeater” tops left very little to the imagination. I tried to hide my concern, but it was impossible. Hooters was no place for good people.
“Be a man, Larry,” my father-in-law had said, punching the menu I was holding with his fist. This was years before my wife died. “Life is short. Happy birthday, son,” he said.
He was in his early seventies by then, with a gut that strained the buttons of his work shirts, his belt on its last hole. He loosened his tie, took a look around. “Not as good as the Hooters in Galveston,” he said, “but they’ve got a few good-looking girls. That black gal?” He nodded. The booth was brightly lit, the oblong, pale wood table lined with paper place mats showing large owls with huge, dilated pupils, as though the birds were watching us, probing some deep subconscious level of our minds, priming us to be charmed. I turned my place mat over. I would not be hypnotized.
“What can I get you?” asked our waitress a moment later. She was a lanky blond teen with fake eyelashes, teeth like porcelain, nails and mouth a strange, neon purple. My father-in-law ordered for us both—an assortment of appetizers, burgers. “We’ll hang on to the menus,” he said, “in case the birthday boy here wants dessert.” I tried to smile politely as the blonde’s jaw dropped.
“You’re kidding me,” she said. “Well, aren’t we lucky to have you come and see us on your special day? Now, let me guess,” she cocked her hip, tapped her chin with a finger, looked skyward, up at the gypsum ceiling. “Thirty-eight.” She stabbed the air. “Am I right?”
“A clean fifty,” my father-in-law answered for me, smiling.
“Someone’s been taking care of himself,” she went on. Where did young women learn to speak that way? I wondered. What school had she gone to? What did her parents do?
“It’s nothing,” I said awkwardly.
“It is most certainly not nothing.” She pretended to be mad for a moment, then softened, looked down on me with a conspiratorial wink. “You hang on to that menu and let me know what dessert strikes your fancy, and it’ll be on me. A birthday treat. And me and the ladies will do a little something special.”
“Please,” I said, putting up my hands. “Don’t sing.”
“Don’t sing?” she said.
“Larry, let them sing,” my father-in-law protested.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s nothing. Thank you,” I said. I could feel my face burning. I gulped my ice water. She stood there pretending to look displeased at my self-denial. I said thank you a few more times.
“Well, okay,” she said finally, voice lilting, and then she leaned toward me. I thought she might be trying to rub her bosoms in my face, but then she said, “Looky here.” The charms on her bracelet jangled as she shook the mistletoe above my head. Her breath smelled like candy.
“Aren’t you sweet,” said my father-in-law.
Then the girl kissed me on the lips. It was terrible. I should have stopped her, but I didn’t want to embarrass the poor girl. I wiped my mouth with my napkin.
“Happy birthday,” said my father-in-law, slapping the table and chuckling as the girl rose, sweeping her hair back and fixing her Santa hat.
“Want some more water?” she asked, not an eyelash out of order. She looked pleased, as though she’d just petted a dog. “You okay, honey?” She put a hand on my shoulder.
“Yes,” I said. “Fine. Thank you.”
Truth be told, I’d lost my enthusiasm for women somewhere along the line. Later, as a widower, I was relieved to be celibate, continent, out of the sex game for good. After my wife died, my daughter encouraged me to date, find some gentle but sporty senior citizen to wine and dine. As if I’d ever had any interest in wining and dining. “Or find someone young enough and you could even have another kid,” she said.
“What would I want with a kid?” I replied. “What are you getting at?”
“Mom wouldn’t mind,” she said next. “Trust me.” They’d had plenty of secrets between them.
“I’m happy,” I told my daughter. “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine here all alone.”
• • •
When Paul and Claude and I arrived, we found that the Hooters had been closed and turned into a Friendly’s. Paul took it badly. “Friendly’s is for kids,” he complained as we walked through the parking lot. I couldn’t imagine the decor or menu at Friendly’s would differ very much from Hooters’. They both had a lot of cream-colored plastic and tacky people, bright lights and bad food, I presumed.
“It’s all the same,” I told Paul, swinging the door open.
“They have a gumball machine,” Claude pointed out as we walked in. He fingered his tie, smiling politely. The place was full of fat ladies and their men, who looked wrinkled and haggard, heaps of mashed potatoes disappearing under the crooked awnings of their thick musta
ches. There was one table of pug-nosed young women, bored and stirring their milkshakes with their straws, a half-eaten plate of fries split between them. A few children fussed and lolled around in their high chairs. The air was humid, the lighting bright and fluorescent, the carpet gray and stained. It was not a happy place. As we waited for someone to greet us, an Asian family passed us on their way out.
“Ching chang China,” Paul sang, tugging at the corners of his eyes. I ignored it. Then he turned to me and crossed his arms over his fat belly. “I hate it here, Larry. What happened to Hooters?”
“Maybe a city ordinance. No idea,” I answered. Claude took my arm as though to comfort me. Paul shook his head and picked at his lips and stared out over the tables.
We followed a short Latina woman to a booth. “This okay?” she asked, her smile wavering slightly as she registered that Claude and Paul were retarded. One must make certain adjustments—that’s normal. Paul squeezed in on one side of the booth, and Claude sat next to me on the other. The woman slapped down huge, laminated menus on the table from under her arms. I thought of Marsha Mendoza, her dark lipstick, the furrowed sadness of her mouth at rest. But our waitress looked nothing like Marsha. She bore no resemblance to any Hooters girl, either. She was heavy. Her lips and eyes were rimmed with dark liner, her hair maroon and stiff. Her hands were small and meaty. She looked like a hardworking woman, someone’s stern mother, eyebrows raised high in expectation. She left us to peruse the menus.
“You see, Paul? Nice lady like that’s going to be our waitress. Now pick what you want to eat before she comes back.”
“She’s not that nice,” Paul said, opening the menu. “Hooters got nicer ones.”
I doubted that Paul could tell the difference. He had no clue what real beauty was.
“I’m having ice cream for dinner,” Claude said, “because it’s Paul’s birthday. Happy birthday, Paul.”
“Paul, what are you getting?” I asked, trying to sound chipper.
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