A couple in shorts and sweatshirts rounded the corner. Leonard Senior cleared his throat and made several circles with his thumb to prepare it.
“You folks hear the weather report today?” he called out. The couple looked at him, confused. “They called for snow!” he yelled. “Right here in Southern California!” The man released his arm from the hook of his girlfriend’s elbow, a move that seemed to signal his readiness to defend them both against this information. Just as the woman began to say, “Where did you hear that?” a jet of artificial precipitation shot out of Leonard’s house and fell down on all of them, melting on their sleeves. For one short and glorious moment, a few feet of sky was filled with snow, and Leonard Senior squinted so hard his eyes were nearly closed. He imagined that when he turned his head down, the ground would be covered and he would have to go inside and change out of his sandals and into a pair of real winter boots.
“What do you know!” Leonard Senior laughed. “They were right!” The couple smiled generously and touched the dampened speckles on their arms. “Wow,” they said, clearly without meaning it, “isn’t that something.”
Upstairs, Kerralyn and Junior watched from chairs by the window, their feet in tubs of warm sudsy water, a rainbow of nail polish bottles lined up on the sill. “Those poor motherfuckers are never going anywhere now,” Kerralyn said, scuffing the dead and useless skin off her heel. Junior filed down the nails on his left hand so short that the hidden edge was revealed, a tender arc of nerves.
“I’m getting in the bath. You should time Dad and see how long he keeps those people,” Kerralyn said.
“What about your toenails?”
“Reggie is picking me up at eight. No time.”
“Reggie is a shit ass,” Junior said.
• • •
LEONARD JUNIOR, alone in the window with his feet pruned and pale, ignored the perfect view down at his father’s bald head and looked instead at the phone next to him. He took Bess’s number out of his pocket. He compared her script to the even shapes of the numbers on the phone. He mapped out the movements he would make if he were to dial.
Bess was a lady who worked at the candle store at the mall. Things with Bess had gotten to the next level, flirting-wise. She was older and so free of all the high school associations. Junior wanted to take her to every place he had ever been. He put the paper down and picked up the receiver, listened to the question mark of the dial tone.
“Oh, hi, Leonard.”
They talked about Bess’s roommates, two women each with one baby, and about her shitty electric bill and her shitty gas bill and her shitty landlord. Junior tried to be sympathetic.
“They should give you a raise,” he said.
“Hell yeah, they should.”
“Plus I think you are very skilled. I mean, like, what’s the difference between the Fall Spice Apple, the Apple Pie and the Cozy Winter Apple?”
“That’s easy. The Fall Spice has nutmeg and clove, and the Pie has some kind of crust smell, I’m not sure how they do that, and the Cozy Winter pretty much just has a different label from the Fall Spice but the same smell, so I’d say you should choose based on your décor. Like if your room is more red or orange toned, I’d go with the Spice, whereas if you’ve got more white or sparkle themes, you’re better off with the Cozy Winter.” Junior splashed his feet in the pan of water and beamed. Here it was Wednesday, and if he pulled at its edges, he could almost consider this a long-distance date, their two voices running together like water.
“See that?” he praised her. “You have a real gift.”
“For candle smell at least,” she admitted, modestly.
They talked about people who annoyed them and things they wished they could afford. Then Bess said, “All right, Leonard. Tell me about my boobies. What are they like?”
“Oh,” Junior said. “Well,” Junior said. “Your boobies,” he started, “are like Fall Spice apples.”
“Hmm.” There was disappointment in her voice.
“They are like round and juicy Fall Spice apples,” Junior tried.
“Juicy, huh? Do you want to suck on them?”
“Sure, I’d like to suck on them. I bet they’d be delicious.”
“I bet they would too.”
Junior did not actually bet they would be delicious. He bet that they would taste like skin, though this did not stop him from wanting to try them out.
“Pretend that you are,” Bess said, and Junior looked for something on his own body that resembled a breast. He settled on his left knee and sucked it and licked it right into the phone, transmitting slurping noises into her ear.
“You are one hot papa, Leonard,” Bess said through some moaning.
“And you are one hot mama,” Junior added, but this turned out to be a bad thing to say, because once it was out there, the word mama, he felt his own mother, dead and ghostly, descend down on him from wherever she normally was. He felt her perch on his shoulders and put her ear to the phone, listening for every exact dirty word that came out of his mouth. She probably did not like Bess or think that she was the kind of girl Junior ought to call up in the first place, and when Bess said, “I’m going to take off my shirt now and you should too,” Junior felt his mother’s breath on his forehead, and he hung up the phone.
“Kerralyn!” Junior yelled, walking to the closed bathroom door. “Kerralyn!” He heard drops of water fall off a lifted leg back into the tub.
“What the hell do you want?” she asked from inside.
“Do you think Mom can see us all the time?”
“How the fuck should I know?!”
“But do you think so?”
“Do you mean like, can Mom see my naked-ass body right now from heaven or something?”
“Yeah, do you think she can?”
“Maybe. But I would rather not think about that. It’s not my damn fault if she looks.”
Junior considered this. “Can I come in?” He heard the metal slide of the shower curtain and then he opened the door and sat down on the closed toilet and said to his sister, hidden behind the undersea-themed plastic, “OK, then, how would you describe a boob?”
“One boob?”
“Boobs, however many.”
Kerralyn waited a second, then said, “Like a round globe of milk.”
Junior nodded. “What’s holding the milk in?”
“Who cares? You asked me to describe a boob and I did.”
“What’s the nipple then?”
“A fucking huge chocolate chip. I don’t know.”
“Fine. What else. Tell me about your stomach,” Junior said. “What’s it like?”
“It’s like a feast,” Kerralyn replied, “of smooth whipped cream.”
Leonard Senior slammed the front door behind him. “It’s a verifiable blizzard out there!” he yelled up the stairs. “It’s three days to Christmas and the snow won’t stop coming down!” His laughter rose up to them, through the floorboards and the carpet, where Junior was clothed and Kerralyn was not, their bodies, whatever they were like, hidden from all mortal eyes.
When Leonard Senior was younger, not yet a Senior, just a Leonard, not even young anymore really, after what could not have been described as a prime was over, he met a woman. She was younger than he but also not young. He met her at an all-night diner, where he bought her a piece of strawberry pie and a plate of onion rings.
He said: “You look lonely like how I feel.”
She said: “I have no idea how you feel.”
But she let him sit and watch her eat. Leonard revealed details of his loneliness—the proximity of television to bed, the white space of the refrigerator, the phone sitting quietly by the front door, and the light on the answering machine holding steady, never blinking. The woman did not look at him when he talked but moved the heavy strawberries around on her plate, mixed them with the whipped cream to make pink slop, which she placed carefully on her tongue with the tip of her first finger.
“You know w
here I want to go?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer, “Jamaica.” She began to sway as if to slow reggae music. “I think I would like to live there for the rest of my life.”
“What would you do for money?” he wanted to know.
“Fuck it, whatever. Sell shell necklaces. I’d be good at that—I like to make things.” Leonard pictured her sitting on a white beach with coconut palms reaching high above her head and water playing at her toes. He said, “That sounds good.”
“I hear you don’t even need a passport to go there. Just a bikini and some damn flip-flops.”
“And some sunscreen,” he added. “And I bet they have bad mosquitoes.”
“Some fantasy you’ve got.”
Leonard Senior took the woman home with him. She got into his car and after that she got into his bed. He turned the television on and they made love to The Golden Girls. Love was not precisely what they made, but they did make something. A thing that later, Leonard Senior, with his eyes red and his hand squeezing her hand, the two of them sitting back in that diner, this time with only coffees for a meeting she had called, first begged and then paid her to keep. “I will give you one thousand dollars, I will give you one thousand two hundred dollars, I will give you fifteen hundred dollars.” She sat there, eyes down, looking into her cup while the money in her invisible bank account went up and up.
“Will you give me fifteen hundred dollars, plus all medical expenses, plus a ticket to Jamaica?” she finally said.
“Yes, yes, I will do that.”
“OK. But I want nothing to do with this little sucker,” she said, holding thumb and forefinger in the measurement of one inch. Leonard did not know if this signified the size of the baby or the size of her love for it. He got the idea though, and he sat back with his feet crossed at the ankle and smiled up at the stained ceiling. He ordered up two pieces of strawberry pie when the waitress came.
He did not know yet that there would be two babies instead of one. That the boy would be named for him, the girl named for a woman who did not exist. He did not know yet the lie he would make up to explain the absence of a mother. He did not know yet about the trip he would make to the crematorium, where he would manage to purchase an urn, empty, and fill it with the ashes from his own fireplace, or how he would place it on the mantel of that same fireplace with a story about a beautiful wedding on the beach and another about a car accident.
• • •
KERRALYN SAT ON THE CURB waiting for Reggie Lazzarino, Leonard Senior stood at his post and Leonard Junior poured a tall glass of milk and sat down by the telephone upstairs. He watched his sister and his father not talk. He watched his father point at the light display and his sister not look where he pointed. Then he watched a car pull up and Kerralyn get into it and close the door. He watched his father watch her do this. He watched his father send them off in a single flurry of snow, hardly enough to celebrate by.
Junior thought about Bess in her apartment with her roommates watching television. In his picture they were eating baked potatoes, a thing that seemed adult and womanish to him. The potatoes would have a little butter and some broccoli florets and a single slice of white, never orange, cheese melted on top. Junior was nearly certain of this. He picked up and held the body-warmed phone in his hand until it began its noisy reminder that no one was on the other end.
In the street his father got lucky. A large group gathered around him. The snow machine was in the crook of the roof, just outside where Junior sat. When the button was pushed, his entire view was snowed out for a few seconds and he couldn’t see the reactions of the group until the storm had fallen below his line of sight.
Leonard Senior waved up at his son, a strong salute. The room was quiet. The phone did not ring and later it did not ring some more. Junior gave himself a second pedicure and manicure and finished his milk. He plucked the hairs that bridged the distance between his eyebrows with his sister’s tweezers like she had shown him. In a sudden moment of bravery, he picked up the phone again.
Bess said, “What type of shit was that?”
“I want to tell you about your boobies and your stomach.”
“I’m on the other line, Leonard. It’s going to be a long call.”
He started to say, “I’d like to take you to every place I’ve ever been,” but somewhere in the middle, she was gone, replaced by the phone’s over and over cry that its job was over, it had endured his wet breath and stupid words and wanted to be replaced now in its blue cradle.
Junior wrapped his arms around his own chest like they were someone else’s arms. He rubbed his hands on his back like they were someone else’s hands on his back. He imagined that his fingers were tipped with painted nails and that they were slender and long and so soft he would have to comment on it to the owner. “Your hands are so soft,” he would have to say, because it would be true, and Junior believed in telling the truth. In this room though, there was only him, his upper body twisted up into a neat knot.
Junior went downstairs and tried to watch television, explaining each segment of the show during the commercial break to his mother, as though she could hear him but not the TV, as though his voice alone could travel the distance. “She’s a nice girl, Mom,” he said to the urn. “What would you want me to say, if you were a girl? Would you want me to tell you I loved you? That I would love you until everything in the world was completely used up?” His mother did not answer him from above or from inside his head or from anywhere.
• • •
IN THE CAR, Reggie Lazzarino had everything laid out perfect. When he picked Kerralyn up at her house, there was a single red rose on the passenger seat.
He said, “Wow, you look like a dream,” and then later, “I can’t believe how beautiful you are.” When they ate burritos, he looked into her eyes the entire time and asked her about her wishes. Reggie said, “Kerralyn, what do you wish for?”
Kerralyn said, “I don’t know. I wish for money, I guess.” Reggie nodded soulfully, like she had said something profound. “What else is worth wishing for?” she asked him.
“You’re a really smart girl,” he answered.
They shared a cookie and he drove to the edge of the cliff, where the ocean looked like a terrible hole. He said, “Kerralyn, if you want to really know the truth, then you’ll have to know that I want to kiss your lips.”
She said, “You don’t have to sweety-sweet me anymore, Reggie. We have now come to the part of the evening where the bullshit stops.”
He said, “You’re a really smart girl,” and they smashed their mouths together, he smashing more than she, she actually having to pull away slowly because it felt like her face might break open, like he might unhinge her jaw and leave her with her chin hanging free, the dark passage into her throat permanently visible.
Once they had de-shirted and Reggie had his big hands on her breasts, Kerralyn asked him, “What are my boobs like?”
“Tits,” he answered, stupid.
“I mean what would you compare them to?”
“Why compare them to anything else? Tits are the best thing they could be.”
“Then what’s my stomach like?” she asked him, pulling her head away.
“The stomach of a pretty girl,” he said, touching it.
“A metaphor. Say, ‘Your stomach is like soft cream,’ or something.”
“It’s like a platter of buttery dinner rolls,” he said, squeezing.
After this, Kerralyn did not ask any questions. When Reggie put his hands beyond her dinner rolls, she sat there in the passenger seat, unmoved. He unbuttoned and unzipped and breathed onto her so close that her neck had rounds of moisture on it. “This is nice,” Reggie breathed. “You are a very smart girl,” he breathed. “Your legs are like . . .” but Kerralyn stopped him.
“Just be quiet,” she said. “Don’t talk to me anymore.” So Reggie stopped talking but did not stop maneuvering the vehicle of his hand over her, plowing roads through the wilderness.
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When he finally crawled over, released the seat all the way back and wriggled his hips into place, Kerralyn was so quiet and still, her only presence in the car outside of the heft of her physical form was her heat mixing with his, making a bubble around them both. The windows were opaque with it. They were white with it. They were heavy and beginning to drip.
“I want you to call me Reginald,” Reggie said, “like my father.” Kerralyn did not call Reggie anything. “I mean right now,” he corrected her, “I want you to call me Reginald like my father right now.” Kerralyn still did not call Reggie anything, so presently he started to do it for her. At first it sounded like he was prompting her, like a baby, as if when she heard it again she would repeat. “Reginald, Reginald, Reginald,” he said. But soon he was not listening for her echo anymore; he had gotten used to her silence and filled the small space with his own voice and his own name. “Reginald, Reginald, Reginald, Reginald,” he chanted, his butt hitting up against the dashboard. Will this get me to Thursdays? she wondered. And what must you have to do to be a Saturday girl?
Kerralyn closed her eyes and watched the bright shapes behind her eyelids and listened to Reggie breathe and repeat his name like this was the last minute of his life and he wanted the universe to remember him, he wanted to prove that he was here, that in a world of Andrews and Marcuses and Tyrones, he was a Reginald in a line of great Reginalds and this moment was no different. This moment was a flag he was staking in the ground so that it might wave in all manner of future winds.
A Guide to Being Born: Stories Page 12