“I don’t believe you,” Jeff says. His grandmother was supposed to be hardheaded and practical. She used to say, enjoying her own bawdiness, “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.” He supposes she might have been capable of a shrewd calculation: an unused shed for the presence of a grateful man. But what’s more impractical than trusting Victor?
“I believe him,” says Brooke. “I do. Grandma loved having a man around worshiping her.”
“Would you stop it, Brooke?” Jeff snaps.
“She never respected me or Mom. You just didn’t want to notice.”
“You’re being a child. She loved you.” Brooke is right, though. His grandmother liked her men. But to allow her daughter’s abusive ex-husband to move in because she liked him?
Maybe. Maybe she told herself she was being broad-minded, not letting social conventions or her family’s narrow ideas about loyalty get in her way. It’s horrible imagining his grandmother so weak: so hungry for attention that she would turn to a man thirty years younger, so cruel that she would choose Victor.
Victor puts a hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, son. She was old.” Jeff can smell his soap and cologne, and he understands that his father showered in preparation for this encounter. “She was sick. Things weren’t easy for her.”
Jeff smacks Victor’s hand away harder than he means to. This is the first time he’s touched his father in years.
Victor grins mirthlessly. He rubs the snake’s head with his thumb. “You think she needed your permission, Jeff? Where were you? Off at your fancy university, with your fancy girlfriend. Oh, Becky had lots to say about you.”
Jeff wants to scroll back to a time—less than an hour ago—when he was mourning the grandmother he knew. Victor is telling the truth, Jeff understands this. His grandmother betrayed him, betrayed all of them. Once, not long after the divorce, he walked in on a conversation between his mother and grandmother. “Maybe he’ll take you back,” his grandmother was saying, and Jeff had known how wrong she was to say it even before he saw his mother’s stricken expression.
“You know, maybe I’m sad, too,” says Victor. “Ever think of that? Ever think how you’re not the only one who lost an important person? Don’t you think I wanted to be at Becky’s funeral? I only stayed away for you two. You and your mom.” He turns his attention to the snake, stroking his thumb across the flat shiny skull. “I wanted to say goodbye.”
Brooke’s mouth twists. “You and Grandma, you weren’t, like, in a relationship, were you?”
“I’m not going to apologize.” Victor draws himself up, but won’t look at them. “She helped me out. She helped me with my drinking.”
“Not much, she didn’t,” says Jeff viciously. He kicks a beer can harder than he means to, and it rattles across the concrete, bounces off the glass front of the terrarium. The rats freeze, then resume their scrambling.
“You mean you loved her?” asks Brooke, and her tone is more wondering than disgusted.
“Brooke,” Jeff says. “Let me handle this.”
“Will you quit bossing everyone?” Her voice is low, her cheeks reddening. “I don’t need you handling things. Always calling me—‘Are you okay, Brooke? Are you dead yet, Brooke?’—fishing around until you find something to handle. Mom doesn’t need you.” She laughs meanly. “And apparently Grandma didn’t need you either. What do you think we did all those years you were off getting your degrees?” She clenches and unclenches her fists, looking helpless and pathetic.
Jeff is stung. Two years ago, when his grandmother phoned with the news that Brooke was in the hospital, Jeff flew home immediately. He can picture his sister exactly, despite the fact that he hadn’t been the one to find her, had in fact been two thousand miles away: unconscious in her giant sleep shirt, cheek pressed into the bathmat, some of the pills undissolved in the Technicolor vomit. The image still pains him.
The animal smell in here is so rich and awful, Jeff thinks he might throw up.
“Oh, that’s right,” Brooke says, “stomp off. Go nurse your precious ego.”
Jeff pushes past her to the door and bursts into the yard and the sun’s assault. Shaking, he gulps at the clean, dry air.
IN HIS GRANDMOTHER’S KITCHEN, Jeff circles the table, trying to locate her presence in this house. But she is gone. He feels wet and heavy. Years ago, when his grandmother’s aunt died, he’d caught her here weeping. “Well, I’m up next!” She laughed through her tears and dragged a Kleenex hard across the fragile skin pouched around her eyes. He watched the skin slide back into place, not knowing how to comfort her. “And that’s not the scary part. The scary part is there’s no one to turn to. Who will take care of me?”
Mother, sister, Jeff. His family is just too small. Someone should have foreseen that this would be a problem, someone should have made other arrangements. Jeff senses isolation waiting for him, a yawning, sucking nothingness, a dark wind blowing at the edges of this bright, solid world. He can feel its gust.
When Brooke came home from the hospital, Jeff knew he had to talk to her, but had been too afraid. So instead, his grandmother sat Brooke down and said, “No more of this nonsense. This can’t happen again.” And miraculously, it hasn’t. All the while Jeff lingered in the kitchen, a coward, safe in the knowledge that if he, like his sister, should ever let slip his grip on life, his grandmother would be there to boss him back into shape.
Jeff knows he has to go back out there, deal with Victor, untangle this mess, but instead he wants to cry at the injustice. No one should have to be responsible for these lives. “You love it,” Lisa told him once. “Who would you be if they didn’t need you?”
WHEN JEFF OPENS the guesthouse door, Victor is on the couch, leaning over his thighs. The snake is on the ground, making her deliberate way across the concrete to the terrarium. Jeff shudders, seeing her in motion like that, and when he steps into the house he positions himself behind one of the vinyl-covered restaurant chairs.
“Jeffrey,” says Victor, his voice subdued. “Your grandma and I didn’t, you know. If it makes you feel any better.”
This does, in fact, make Jeff feel better, but he resents the ebbing of his outrage.
“I don’t want to hurt you, honey. I’m asking a favor. Please.”
“You can stay, Victor,” Brooke says. “Jeff, you don’t want to sell, I know you don’t. Victor can help get the house ready to rent, and then he can manage the place.”
“Manage.” Jeff’s voice is flat. The snake has arranged herself into a pile next to the terrarium. She gazes through the glass. The rats watch her warily, motionless.
“Thank you, baby,” says Victor, his voice slack with relief. He exhales and drops back against the couch. “I thank you.”
“When Sabrina gives birth,” Brooke continues, “he can sell the babies, and then he can pay Mom rent, too. It’s the solution that makes the most financial sense. And apparently Grandma was okay with it.” Her expression is bland and controlled, but she keeps tucking the same short piece of hair behind her ear. “So.”
“Mom will never go for this.”
“I’ll convince her.” Brooke watches him steadily. It’s the same expression Jeff imagines she wore when she stood before the mirror with her full glass of water and smorgasbord of pills. He imagines she held her own gaze as she swallowed.
“I cannot believe you’re taking his side, after everything he’s done.”
“I’m not taking sides.”
The snake’s head glides closer to the glass, and the rats scramble and squeak.
It won’t work. Brooke will make a hash of it, Victor will disappoint, their mother will weep and rant, and Jeff will be called in to set things straight. He laughs acidly. “You’re as bad as Grandma, trusting him.”
His sister’s tone is calm. “People change, Jeff. I changed, not that you notice. I’m not still seventeen years old and suicidal. Grandma changed. Maybe Papa has, too.”
Brooke doesn’t even know Victor, not really, but i
t seems she sees some other version of their father, the version, perhaps, that Jeff himself missed so desperately after the divorce. For over a year after, Jeff cried soundlessly in his room, longing for his father: his father of the infectious exuberance, his father of the surprising generosity. Possibly this is the Victor Jeff’s grandmother saw, too.
Gently, Brooke says, “You shouldn’t always have to deal with everything,” and Jeff feels that something essential has been wrenched from him.
“Come on, son,” says Victor. “We’re family. We’re all still family.”
Jeff whips around, pulling the chair with him, the metal legs scraping the concrete. He understands that somewhere deep in his reptilian brain, he is still afraid of this man. “You’re not family, Victor. You forfeited that right.” He holds the chair before him like a shield. Rage catches inside him. He wants to maim and destroy, like Victor, like Brooke. He and Brooke, they’re both their father’s children, Jeff thinks, his heart crashing around behind his sternum. The snake adjusts her head imperceptibly and eyes him. He thinks of his father’s hands on her body, that revolting gentleness. He lifts the chair over his head.
For once the man isn’t grinning, isn’t smiling and sliming his way through life. Maybe this is the Victor his grandmother knew: open and vulnerable.
“Oh, no,” says Victor. “Please.”
Jeff understands how Victor must have felt just before his fist met the frail give of throat. But even as he throws the chair, Jeff is aware that he intends to miss the boa constrictor, because even now, feeling as he does, he can’t hurt an animal, can’t give himself so fully to this destruction.
“No!” Victor cries in anguish.
The chair does indeed miss the snake. The shock flashes across the glass of the terrarium and the whole sheet pauses, holding its shape and breath. The rats freeze for a single stunned moment. Then the spell breaks, the pieces rain down, and the rats spill like river water from the terrarium.
As if they’ve waited for this moment, the rats swarm the snake, plunging their sharp teeth and snouts into her flesh.
The boa contracts and strikes outward, over and over, whipping across the cement, trying to fling them loose, and though some of the rats are cast off by the force of her panic, most hold fast. The boa constrictor throws back her head and opens her fanged mouth wide, and Jeff sees all the way down her pale blue-white throat.
FAMILY REUNION
“WHAT’S AN ATHEIST?” THE GIRLS AT SCHOOL HAD ASKED Claire at recess when she was ten and a new kid and too dumb to know when to shut up. They were sitting on the grass near the fence, finger-crocheting. Claire was desperate to be liked by these girls with their neat ponytails and jean skirts and coordinating socks. Her strand of finger-crochet looked dingy and tangled, nothing like the smooth braid Josie Lewis produced.
“It means you have faith in the fossil record,” Claire had explained, which was how her anthropologist stepfather had explained it to her. Really what it meant, Claire knew, was that you were from the wrong kind of family, a family that rented and wasn’t from Salt Lake City and was disfigured by divorce. It meant that instead of a minivan you had a father in San Diego who drank Fosters for breakfast. It meant you weren’t Mormon. “Basically it means you believe in Homo habilis.”
“Ooooh,” breathed Lindsay Kimball, whose grandfather was the prophet. “You said homo. I’m telling.” She brushed grass off her skirt and trotted over to the playground monitor.
Claire sighed and followed. Once again, she’d have to sit out for recess.
Claire was always in trouble for swearing, usually for saying “Oh my God.” It popped out without her noticing and was hard to control because no one could explain to her why Mormons thought God was a bad word. She thought they were supposed to like God.
It was particularly galling to get in trouble for swearing, because her mom didn’t even allow stupid or hate or shut up, which all the other kids got to say. And her mother didn’t care whether these words were directed at people or not; Claire couldn’t even say, “I hate eggplant,” which she did, passionately. “So you want me to lie?” she’d asked her mother over ratatouille. “You want me to lie for the sake of appearances?”
“Try detest,” her stepfather Will had suggested. “Try loathe or abhor or execrate.”
Claire’s mother shifted Emma to her other breast and smiled across the table at Will, shaking her head. “Thanks, sweetie. That’s very helpful.”
As far as Claire was concerned, none of these people knew what real swears were. If the girls at school knew the kind of words her father said, they’d never speak to her again. Mother-fucking-cocksucker-piece-of-shit and stupid-cunt-bitch. Sometimes he screamed these words at strangers—cashiers at the supermarket, for instance, or other drivers on the stalled freeway. Last summer, he’d taken Claire to the pound to adopt Zark the dog. The day had been a good one, until there’d been a problem with his credit card, which had culminated in him kicking a chair, throwing pens and animal-care pamphlets around the room, and screaming at the poor woman cowering behind the counter.
But her father didn’t even have to be mad to say those words. Or even that drunk. Sometimes he said them when he was telling a joke. Claire didn’t know their exact meanings, but preferred not to delve too deeply. Every July and August during her six-week visitations, she tried her best to shut the words out. After all, she had her innocence to preserve.
BY AGE ELEVEN, Claire understood that the best way to overcome her disadvantages was to convert. And so she was a frequent visitor to her friends’ houses in the upper Avenues. The families of her school friends were moral and prosperous and safe. Their houses had wide hallways, white carpets, rubber trees with leaves that the mothers dusted.
On Sundays, Claire began to accompany friends to church, where she solemnly plucked her square of Wonder Bread and paper cup of tap water from the wire basket as it was passed around. She sang with exuberance in Primary. When she visited people’s houses for Monday night Family Home Evenings, she sat up straight and raised her hand and answered questions about the Pearl of Great Price and purity of body, while the other kids squirmed.
At church and school, Claire hid the truth about her own family: the foreign films, the ratty hand-me-downs from the kids of Will’s dissertation advisor, and the hikes. Her two-year-old sister’s nose was perpetually chapped and snotty from dust allergies. They didn’t take baths every night, or even every other night. Instead of mashed potatoes and mac and cheese, they ate dahl with asafetida and rotting cheeses and baba ganoush, all kinds of wet, spicy foods that stank up the house while they were cooking and stank up the bathroom even worse after.
Claire became adept at playing Mormon, and while she never fooled anyone, at least she didn’t offend anyone, either. Claire hoped they thought about her soul, and discussed what a credit to the Church it would be. One day, she prayed, they’d recognize her as one of their own and invite her to convert for real.
But despite Claire’s efforts, no one did invite her. And there was always some other group, some other activity Claire wasn’t a part of. Sure, she might attend church, but then there were Mutual and Young Women’s—clubs you actually had to be Mormon to join. And recently Young Women’s was absorbing her friends entirely. They now wore deodorant and knee-length khaki skirts and crossed their feet at the ankles. They talked about Firesides and Beehives and Standards Nights and Personal Progress. Claire felt her tenuous grasp on social acceptance slipping away.
AT THE BEGINNING OF JUNE, Claire’s mother signed her up for a Girl Scout overnight, even though Claire wasn’t in a troop. From what Claire could tell, Girl Scouts was a sort of consolation prize for girls who weren’t preparing to be defenders of Zion. There in the damp bunkhouse she met Morgan Swanson. Though Morgan was sturdy and grubby-looking, she had the mannerisms of a sitcom girl: hands on hips, looking out from under her bangs, she’d say “Well, s-o-o-o-ry.”
Morgan lived six blocks down the Avenues and went
to a different school. For two weeks they spent day after day together, laughing hysterically, whining on the phone until their parents let them spend the night. In the afternoons they’d meet at the corner store halfway between their houses. They’d buy Dots and Pixy Stix and then walk to the cemetery, where they’d eat the candy sitting on gravestones. Morgan tossed the wrappers on the ground; Claire wadded hers into tight balls and tucked them into divots in the lawn.
Afternoons following sleepovers, Claire lolled on the living room carpet, snapping at her mother and Will, snatching toys from Emma. When she was reprimanded, Claire tried out her new comebacks—“Right, I am so sure”—and was exiled to her room.
Claire had been stunned to discover that Morgan’s family was LDS. She considered herself something of an expert on Mormons, and Morgan’s family was nothing like the families who lived in the upper Avenues. Their house was narrow, their stairs cluttered with laundry and toys and Good Housekeeping magazines. Claire had only met Mr. Swanson once; he’d nodded at her, then loosened his tie and went to watch TV in the cramped master bedroom. Morgan’s mother Patsy, however, was enchanting and given to loud hooting fits of laughter. She fed them frozen chicken nuggets and ice cream. Morgan’s family was small: just Morgan and her parents and two little sisters.
“I smell birth control,” said Claire’s mother.
“Gross,” said Claire. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She pressed her lips and looked away.
ONE EVENING IN THE MIDDLE of dinner, the phone rang. Claire felt nauseated. She knew who was calling.
Her mother stood. “Hello?” Then her voice hardened. “She’s eating right now. Yes, the ticket arrived.” Will was watching her mother. Only Emma still shoveled couscous around her plate.
Night at the Fiestas: Stories Page 12