In the elevator, the dentist used a rubber gum pick and Booker stood still with his hands clasped behind his back. He wished he had some instrument to prove how orally hygienic he was.
Out of the corner of his eye, Booker noticed that there was something drawn on the velvety wall of the elevator. He turned to look and saw a picture of a penis and the word Shit. He did not want the good dentist to see something obscene—especially since it didn’t even make sense—on his nice elevator, so Booker quickly rubbed his hand over it back and forth to erase it. The dentist looked at him quizzically. “I wanted to check and see if the wall was as soft as it looked,” Booker explained quickly. The dentist squinted his eyes and continued picking his gums for a moment. Then he turned to his right and rubbed his hand over the wall.
“That is soft!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never touched it before. All these years and I’ve never touched it before!” He said it like he had just discovered that there was a bright blue lake right behind his house, hidden in the trees, full of trout, with a pier and a nice little red rowboat. He put his hand on Booker’s shoulder and smiled like he was staring out at this most beautiful vista. Like there were cranes in the sky above the turquoise water, and snowy peaks, and naked ladies lying on a cluster of warm boulders.
“Do you have one of these? A Gum Explorer?” the dentist asked.
“No, sir. But I’d like to get one,” Booker said. “I’d like to get one right away.”
• • •
MABEL HAD ONLY BEEN WORKING Canned Foods since mid-morning. She used to be in Produce, which she preferred. She would rather eat it and she would rather stock it.
It was during her break that things changed. “You look sexy when you eat that carrot,” Mr. Joseph T. Bowers III, Manager, said while they sat in folding chairs in the back of the supermarket amongst boxes of discontinueds and damageds. He leaned down and kissed her forehead with his warm, horrible lips.
Mabel kneed him in the groin and watched him curl up on the floor like a bug.
She got moved to Aisle Nine and told to keep her mouth shut.
Now she had to go through the things that had been long unsold and “refresh” them. The unpopular and dusty hearts of palm and cocktail franks. There were a lot more cans in that aisle than she would have guessed a few days ago, back when her primary concerns were weeding out soft limes and fluffing the Swiss chard.
“Does this suit you?” Mr. Joseph T. Bowers asked, looking at her with greasy eyes.
“Get out of my aisle,” she said.
In the afternoon, while she was doing the garbanzo beans, a woman came into Aisle Nine and started pulling cans off shelves at an unusual rate. She was wearing tight zebra-print pants and a black blazer with most of her breasts sticking out. She noticed Mabel looking at her and smiled a big, glowingly white smile. She put her hand out, offering a shake. “Jessie McFleece,” she said, “Can Opener Gourmet Cookbooks.” Before Mabel could even respond, Jessie McFleece went into what was obviously a well-rehearsed PR speech. “Truth is, I’m lazy,” she began. “I’m always cooking up a new way to save time.” She winked and said, “Pun intended! I’m going to try a lasagna tonight.” Mabel looked into the cart. Nothing but cans: mushroom soup, carrot spears, bright green peas, and stewed tomatoes. Tuna, meatballs, spinach.
“Yum,” Mabel said.
“You betcha. My kids L-O-V-E it. Husband doesn’t mind it so much either. We are just a regular old American dream.” They both looked at her chest.
“You know what? I need a better reason to live,” Mabel said. “If anyone asks, tell them I quit.”
In the parking lot, Mabel came upon a fellow employee. She untied her green apron with the words Saver! The name says it all! embroidered across the front. She stepped on it. “You can step on it too, Booker,” Mabel said to the boy. He was humming and shifting back and forth on his feet as if he was warming up for a waltz. “You look like you’re in a good mood.”
He leaned in close and whispered, “Actually, I started a new job today. As a dental assistant! I’m just here to get my last check.”
“Congratulations. We both have something to celebrate, because I just quit. Good luck at the new job.” She paused for a second. “I hope you like teeth.” He smiled and offered her a stick of gum. She put it in her mouth and saved it up in her cheek, feeling the sting of its spiciness against that soft flesh. Booker tore the plastic cover off a rubber toothpick and began to run it along his gum line. Mabel tried to smile. “I can see you’re committed,” she said.
“Look, I live across the street and I have a friendly cockatoo. Come over and eat dinner with us. I’m a harmless dental assistant.”
“Have I just ruined my life?” Mabel asked. “My father is going to be furious.”
“Are you allergic to anything?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then come on.”
• • •
BOOKER CYRANOWSKI had worked at the Saver for years, since the day he graduated from high school and took his old Cadillac, which was the nicest color green he’d ever seen on a piece of metal, down the very familiar farm road, out the highway and on up the coast.
“Bye, rabbits,” he yelled out the window to the rabbits. “Bye, tree,” he yelled to the scrubby little pine in the middle of the sage and matted grass. “Bye, birds!” That one he screamed at the top of his skinny little lungs so they would hear it. He turned up the radio and swooped his hand in the wind.
Behind him he knew his seven brothers and sisters and his mother and father still stood out front with their hands on their hips. They’d go back to the strawberry field later, they’d pick since it was the end of picking season. Booker’s Polish father, Bruno, and Mexican mother, Estrella, would take turns reading to the whole team, as they were called, stories of revolutionaries for whom the children had been named. Cesar, Rosa, Martin, Che, Coretta, Zapata, Booker, and the youngest, Andrej, named for Bruno’s grandfather who had, as family legend went, carried all four of his children on his back all during the First World War.
Booker imagined them together in the little living room, over a pot of beans and kale. He was the oldest and the first to leave. His parents were proud to see him head out, to fight the good fight. They were sorry, too, that he wouldn’t be working the earth with them. But in his mind he saw the symmetry: his family grew food to sell that was chewed by the teeth of the people, the very same teeth he would someday be cleaning. As he drove, he thought of all those teeth, healthy in their nests of pink gums.
Booker bought himself a toaster at the big department store, and a cockatoo at the small pet shop. He had always wanted a bird, and without his family he figured he would get lonely. In the pet store, he put his finger through the cage bars and asked her in a quiet and high-pitched voice if she liked to be read to. She was pink and he named her Sue, after no one in particular.
• • •
IN HIS APARTMENT, Mabel found that Booker had books. Most of them were about birds, lots about the Civil Rights Movement and the Mexican Revolution, and a few about the state of Arizona, where he confessed he’d never been. Booker pressed Play on his answering machine and a man’s voice came out.
“Dear Booker,” it said. Booker talked over it to tell Mabel that it was his dad.
“He always leaves messages like he’s writing a letter,” he explained. “He comes from another time and place.”
The message went on. “Dear Booker, it’s your dad and your mom and everyone, and we know it was your first day of work at your new job there, and we are very proud of you for going out and doing it, like you always wanted to. The team loves you. Yours, Dad.”
Mabel was holding a book in her hand, The Sonoran Desert.
“I’m into the outdoors and I think saguaro cactuses are amazing,” Booker said, opening up to a dog-eared page. Mabel read the highlighted sentence, “The outer pulp of the saguaro can expand like an accordion, increasing the diameter of the stem and, in this way, can increase i
ts weight by up to a ton.”
“Wow.” Mabel tried to care about the cactus, because it was clear how much Booker did. But the real excitement was Sue, whom he took from her cage and brought over to Mabel on his index finger.
“It’s OK, you can touch. She’s Sue the Cockatoo.” Sue the Cockatoo checked Mabel out and seemed mostly to approve. Mabel stuck her finger out and Sue beaked it. Mabel made bird noises and Sue made no noises. Then Sue made bird noises and Mabel made bird noises and felt good, like they had connected. Booker put Sue down on the table and she walked awkwardly around.
Mabel watched while Booker stuffed two Cornish game hens with two whole hot dogs each, nested together and sticking out the back of the birds. He hummed and rubbed dried oregano and butter on the pinky-white skin. The birds went in the oven. Then Booker shucked corn, a few of the silky strands falling on the floor. Mabel collected them and braided them together. Booker opened the dishwasher, which was empty, and put the two ears of corn inside, in the place the silverware should go. “My mom’s special recipe,” he told Mabel.
“I see.” Mabel thought for a second. “And they cook in there?” She paused again, though he was nodding.
“They steam.”
On the couch, they drank sparkling cider out of coffee mugs. His had a picture of a rainbow and said 3rd Graders Are Number One, and hers had cats on it whose bodies spelled the word LOVE. They polished off a bag of Fritos. Booker told Mabel all about Sue the Cockatoo. He got her when she was a baby, just a hatchling, he kept saying. “She likes peanuts in the shell best. That’s her chocolate pudding.”
“I like chocolate pudding, but what I really like is tapioca,” Mabel said, a little tired of talking about the bird. For a while they discussed desserts. Neither one liked cake: too cakey. But both loved pie. “You can come over to my house sometime and I’ll bake you a cherry pie and we can eat it outside with our fingers,” Mabel offered. “But I live with my dad. Shit. Can I actually use your phone?”
She dialed her home number. “I’m sorry,” she said, twirling the cord around her finger until her skin turned purple. “I miss you too. Order some pizza or some Chinese food. We can have it again for breakfast. Don’t forget about street sweeping tomorrow. I know, Dad, I’m sorry. I love you.”
The dishwasher-steamed corn was covered in butter and tasted good and sort of clean. They laughed hard when Mabel went to cut a piece of meat and accidentally shot a hot dog out of her tiny chicken’s tiny chicken-hole and onto Booker’s plate. He gave it back to her. “Your hot dog, madam,” he said.
“Much obliged.”
They lay down on the floor to let the food settle.
“So why did you quit?” Booker asked.
“That motherfucker Mr. Joseph T. Bowers tried to kiss me in the break room this morning.”
“Will you sue?”
“Nah. I kneed him in the balls. And he’s already fat and lonely.”
“Here,” Booker said, patting his chest. “I’m sorry that happened.”
Mabel looked at him. “You’re a nice guy, right?”
“I’m a harmless dental assistant.”
She listened to his body make alive-noises. She thought about what it would be like if those noises were louder, if all the time when people were walking around buying turnips and drinking cappuccinos they could hear the juices in their guts making high-pitched squeals and low burbles. If they all had to speak up to compete with their own intestines.
“Where did you get your name?” Mabel asked.
“I’m named after Booker T. Washington. My dad’s really into civil rights.”
“Didn’t he invent peanut butter?”
“No, that’s George Washington Carver.”
“Oh. Apparently it’s been a long time since fourth grade.” Booker’s stomach made a long, howling screech. “Did you hear that?” Mabel asked.
“Hear what?”
“It’s very busy in here. Amazing.” She poked his belly. “You know, I didn’t used to like my dentist, but now I have a pretty good one. I like the free toothbrush,” Mabel said, and then before she could stop herself, “I have a retainer.”
“My mom has false teeth that she soaks in an ashtray at night,” Booker offered, laughing.
“Wow.”
“Where’d you get your name?” he asked.
“It was my grandma’s name. My middle name is Lady, which was my mother’s name. She died due to complications after childbirth. I guess you could say I killed her.” Mabel’s hands got slippery and she tried to ignore the picture of her father sitting in the living room of their grubby apartment this morning cleaning his boots with the end of a chopstick. “I have an idea,” Mabel said. “Why don’t you check and see if I have any cavities?” She lay on her back and opened her mouth as wide as she could.
Booker looked carefully inside, tooth by tooth.
“You have a mercury filling in number twenty-two. You might think about getting a porcelain one someday . . . I’d need tools to really tell, of course, but your teeth look good to me. You have nice, strong molars,” he told her, and he came so close that she could smell his spit, and she kissed him, one fast-and-over kiss on the mouth. “We could know each other really well,” he blurted out.
And just like that, Mabel saw a crack form on the surface of her life. An opening. She did not know if it was deep or shallow, or where it led, but she did know something that did not exist before had begun to exist now. “Do you know who you are, without your family? Who only you are?” she asked, without meaning to. Mabel did not know why she’d asked the question. She felt blood rush to her cheeks and wished she could have said something normal. Complimented something manly about Booker, or simply given him the coy, sexy glance she knew she was supposed to have practiced. But Booker did not pull away from her, or look at her like she was a crazy person, or even sigh. He squinted at the ceiling, and thought, and then Booker whispered, “Pretend we are two huge saguaro cactuses, side by side in the rocky ground.”
Mabel wanted to know the answer even if it belonged to another question. “OK. I’m pretending,” Mabel agreed.
“Our arms are wrapped around each other’s necks. It is warm out and we are growing bright pink flowers. Our spines prick into one another’s four-hundred-year-old skin and the water inside us seeps out in little beads. We could survive without rain for months. You can’t believe how many stars there are above us, just millions. Everything around us is alive and busy, but all we have to do is stand still. The small birds that make homes in our bodies have left us alone in the dark.”
Snow Remote
POST-THANKSGIVING, this was Leonard Senior’s territory: pacing up and down the 100 block of Sapphire Avenue, his trigger thumb all the time ready. He wore a red sweater, the same red sweater every evening, tucked into a pair of slacks. A reindeer with a flashing red nose was pinned over his heart. He was lit up in red, green and blue by his homemade light display; the animatronic and the flashing. The whole block was lit up, in fact. The neighbors across the street had a separate set of heavy drapes made for these months. Their measly store-bought light-icicles hung limp and drooling toward the ground. Their palm tree was bare and brown, not wrapped in Christmas glory but standing with its one big foot in the earth, sulking.
Leonard Senior waited for a chance to snow.
• • •
LEONARD SENIOR and his teenage twins ate dinner together, but tonight, like most of the cool nights of December, it was a brief affair. Leonard Senior boiled the water and heated up the cheese mix while Leonard Junior poured the salad into a bowl. Then Junior watched the macaroni while Kerralyn set the table. “Don’t make much for me,” she said, “I have a date.”
“Tonight? A school night? Wouldn’t you rather go out on a weekend?” her father asked, his disciplinary sword undrawn.
“No, sir,” she answered. “This very night is when I’m going out. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, buddy. I’m not the kind of girl to get the Friday d
ate, but I rate for midweek.”
He said, “But I think you are perfect.”
Kerralyn told her father she appreciated that and she would do her best to work her way up to weekends. “Baby steps,” she told him. “I’ll try for Thursdays this year. Maybe Mom has some advice.” She smirked, looking at the urn on the mantel.
Her brother did not say that her date was ugly and stupid. He did not say that if he was lucky he would get a Monday date, Monday afternoon probably, everyone home in time for their sorry family dinner. He sat down at the table, where they each dipped their fork into the large metal bowl in the center of the table and ate directly off it. They had never stopped setting the table with plates, but they hadn’t used them in years. Every night, Kerralyn set them out, and then when they finished eating, she piled them up and replaced them in the cabinet.
“Well, we’re coming right up to the big day,” Leonard Senior said.
“You got your stocking all ready, Dad?” Kerralyn teased. “You got your list for Santy?”
“Your mother would be so disappointed in us,” Leonard Senior said, looking at the urn surrounded by a pine sprig and two candles in silver holders.
“She probably is disappointed in us,” Leonard Junior corrected. “Right this minute.”
• • •
ON WEEKNIGHTS, people did not pass by often. Leonard Senior paced, his thumb always poised, the whole block and beyond lit up by his very own house. Santa rode his sleigh across the rooftop, an abbreviated two reindeer pulling it along. There was a dancing gift box that went up and down and a snowman who waved. Inside his one store-bought item—a giant inflatable snow globe a good seven feet tall—Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus were always out in the cold, always covered in a dusting of white flakes. Mary and Joseph sat up and the powder gathered on their heads, making little white cones out of them, but Jesus, lying flat on his holy back, had the stuff all over his face. The undersides of his body were newborn pink, but his smile and eyes were deep in a layer of plastic flakes.
A Guide to Being Born: Stories Page 11