This Wicked Tongue

by Elise Levine

  There is another member of the townhouse group, who Martin sometimes forgets about. The man never attends the meetings and has refused to join the association, period, so Martin’s mother dislikes him. He’s a divorced financial guy, middle-aged like Martin’s mother and also white. His young, pretty Japanese ex and their daughter sometimes live with him in his lot-and-a-half western end unit. So he counts as half of a couple with half a kid.

  Martin’s mother also dislikes the man for the money he has spent hiring an interior designer for his unit. She dislikes him for the expensive—and she means ex-pen-sive—landscaping featuring costly mature trees and heirloom perennials he has put in his yard. The man is likely on the spectrum, Martin’s mother declares at the association meetings. You bet he’s all about fee simple, Martin’s mother likes to say in her precise, clipped voice to the other townhouse owners.

  The man’s teenage daughter, pretty and older than Martin—Mallory or Ashley or Allie—does not attend the Lab School. Pretty and too dumb, Martin decides, when she and her glossy friends ignore him one sweltering evening as he strolls past her dad’s shady trees and shrubs, attracted by the girls’ silvery laughter, their smiles flashing like minnows through the twilit-green leaves.

  Martin’s dad calls one night in the middle of August. They haven’t spoken since the beach trip, the longest they’ve gone without contact. Martin is online and too busy to answer. His dad leaves a message—Hiya kiddo!—sounding drunk and also, for once, like he’s trying too hard. Kiddo yourself, you fuck! Martin mouths when he finishes listening. He laughs his villainous laugh. He determines he is too busy to ever return his father’s call.

  Another night, after organic pot stickers and carrot sticks with honey mustard dip on the TV-dinner tray tables in front of the couch, his mother folds her arms over her chest and asks if Martin would like a dog. Summer shadows wash outside the open French doors. Soon it will be dark and Martin’s mother will close the doors and shut the curtains. The room will shrink. Martin, his mother says again, eyes narrowed behind her glasses. I asked you a question.

  Martin thinks. Zipping around the park with his own dog barking and nipping at his heels—until the obedience training, which Martin is sure his mom would insist on. Running into the neighbours at the park with their dog and chatting about doggie daycare, which Martin’s mother would likely be into big as well. Chatting about prey drive, about the opioid-fueled significance of human-canine eye contact—which Martin has just learned about in school—and the best organic dog treats, as people settle in for the association meetings. Martin thinks hard. He thinks a dog would make he and his mother into even more of a couple.

  The thought makes him feel as if his thumbs are enormous and his toes miniscule, his big head too huge for him to heft to the very park where he’d need to walk the dog. To beyond the park and far, far away.

  Martin? his mother prompts.

  Suck that, he says, staring at his show, though a sidelong glance tells him his mother is smiling now—as if he has cleverly provided the correct answer, the one she has in her endless wisdom known all along.

  She gets up and returns with large helpings of Caribbean coconut gelato. He places his bowl on his thighs and his skin shrivels.

  Martin, she says, and pops her spoon in her mouth—and spends a long time getting that ice cream down. I’m glad you’re happy, Martin, she says when she is done. Her eyes behind her glasses are fog and steel. Her smile says she knows, she knows, has always known.

  Knows what? A jagged impatience rips Martin’s chest. His hands seem like a monsters’ cupping the sides of his bowl. He thinks that tomorrow morning, when he stands next to the height measurement taped beside his bedroom door, he will discover he has cleared five-ten, a spurt of twelve inches, at least. Could be—when she’s not hunched over like she’s bearing the weight of the world, his mother is tall and broad shouldered and his dad is too. Once upon a time Martin’s parents could have passed for twins, Martin is sure, when his mother was more lean from not working so hard and being unable to work out. A time when his mother and dumb father saw eye to eye, sort of, when his mother would shut her books and rub Martin’s dad’s shoulders, sore from playing a gig half the night long while she studied, and she’d cook him pancakes and feed Martin some too. A time which Martin only dimly remembers.

  Martin’s mother is now frowning at him.

  Martin thinks harder than he ever has as he continues to stare at his mother’s soft, shapeless face. If she thinks she knows he is happy, then what has she ever really known?

  Martin, she says. Why are you looking at me like that?

  Science camp ends. School will start soon and Martin cannot fucking wait, sorry-not-sorry. He runs algorithms, watches his shows, visits his cats. Despite his mother’s mushrooming Post-its—NO! INCORRECT! HERE CROOKED FIX!—fewer workmen arrive each day and some days no one shows. Martin evilly considers writing his own notes and sticking them everywhere, a single repeating phrase he imagines used by people working black rotary phones in vintage movies. TO WHOM DO YOU WISH TO SPEAK? It’s similar to what his mother says on her phone at night in her bedroom, in secret still keeping the world safe. Or so she claims, it occurs to Martin. TO WHOM AM I SPEAKING? He decides against it. These days his mother is crabby with him for not emptying the dishwasher or picking up his used towels. She makes him microwave his own food. She microwaves her own and takes it upstairs and shuts her door behind her.

  School begins at last and Martin feels killer happy. Until one night during the third week of September his mother mutes the TV in the middle of Martin’s show. She would like to take him for a ten-day excursion to the Bahamas, over Thanksgiving. He’ll need to miss some classes.

  Martin’s favourite criminal jumps up and down and appears to spout zingers that come-up everyone, and which Martin is now missing. He stares and stares at the screen. What’s his pal saying?

  Martin, his mother says. I am speaking to you. Please respond.

  Searching for correct response. Unable to locate correct response. Okay, Martin says. Ha ha.

  It’s when I can get time off, Martin, his mother says in that crisp, keeping-it-together voice of hers, the one she used to unleash on the dad-o. And better believe that right now I can get one smart package deal, she continues. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea? Like a whole lot of fun? Martin?

  Sounds fucking bat-shit, Martin says calmly, gaze still averted.

  She presses unmute on the remote and they watch the rest of the show in silence. The show ends and Martin scratches his knee and his mother clicks off the TV and sits tight as Martin’s lid, the one he keeps tight on his big fucking head. And then somehow the remote is in his hand, his giant hand. As if it’s no longer attached to his still-puny kid’s arm, his hand jerks and the remote crashes into his TV tray. Batteries explode out, bouncing and rolling. His glass of lemonade tips over.

  Martin’s mother flinches, her smile soured. I’m worried about you, Martin, she says quietly.

  Martin feels his face flush. He is fucking eleven. What does she want from him? Yeah, he says uncertainly, voice cracking. Well, I’m worried about you.

  Her face convulses. Yeah? she says, twisting the word to an ugly sneer. You mean yes? she says. As in, yes you know I’m worried? And why would you worry about me? You think you know a lot, don’t you?

  The living room seems vast, bottomless. Martin’s feet seem to swim and swell before his eyes. He has the odd, panicked thought he should try to catch them before they get away. Yeah, he says again, louder this time. And you don’t? Think you know everything?

  She stops speaking to him for a few days and then it is mostly business as usual. How was school? Will that be Wasabi Warrior or Sweet Ginger Soy? She preps his pot stickers and they eat by the TV again. By late October she complains to Martin that the financial dude neighbour has turned the other townhouse owners against her. They barely
say hello. They’ve stopped responding to her calls for association meetings. They excluded her—and Martin too, if he can believe that, imagine doing that to a kid, she says, shaking her head—from their First Festive Fall Potluck. There goes her plan to have everyone chip in and jointly buy the easement rights to the shared guest parking lot at the end of their townhouse row—the lot adjacent Martin’s and his mother’s eastern end-of-group, and the rights to which are held by the offices for a childhood disability services organization that sit behind the townhouses. Martin’s mother has taken to grooming through the lot after she gets home from work and before dinner for stray pieces of trash left, she claims, by the employees, garbage she captures in large freezer bags and labels by date as evidence. In case, she says.

  Mid-November she pressures Martin to make his bed in the mornings. One morning, she threatens to withhold his allowance for the rest of the month when he hits his head on his bed frame and swears. Which, he protests, would not have happened had she not forced him to make his stupid—her word—bed. I’m sorry my bed is so stupid, he finishes the argument by yelling lamely, and swats a stray tear from his cheek. A tear for which he swears to loathe her forever and a day.

  For Thanksgiving, instead of a Bahamian cruise Martin and his mother join her North Sider sister and brother and their families at the brother’s Irving Park house, as they have for the past few years. Martin sits crammed in at a far end of the table from his mother and picks at his turkey. His cousins, seated next to Martin, are too young for anything but terrible fart jokes. His mother, at the opposite end of the table, listens expressionlessly while her brother, who is an architect, ridicules the layout of Martin and his mother’s townhouse, criticizes the construction materials and finishings he saw on his only visit, hating to make the trip to the South Side. Martin’s aunts and other uncle attend to their innocent, stupid brats and it occurs to Martin that once again he and his mother are a childless couple set apart from the crowd.

  When dessert finally comes, Martin devours several slices of the pumpkin and apple pies his mother bought at the organic supermarket. His blood uncle cracks a few unkind jokes in Martin’s direction about growing men, at which his mother chins up and stares above her brother’s head. She looks like she has smelled a terrible fart, not just heard some bad jokes about them, and is taking the high road, as she often counsels Martin to do.

  For the first time, Martin feels badly for her. Despite the grudges he holds over her recent general moodiness toward him, he suddenly longs to throw his arms around her as he used to when he was much smaller, when she was studying through dinner, through weekends, through his dad’s frequent absences, and she’d momentarily close her books and laptop and offer her bracing smile.

  Martin pushes his empty plate away and knocks back his glass of milk. He calls out the length of the table, past the unkind adults and dopey kids, to his mother. Mom, he says. Mom?

  She pushes her own plate away, leaving her pie half eaten. She coughs loudly and raps the table with her knuckles. The aunts and uncles and cousins go quiet. Martin quickly feels ashamed of having felt badly on her behalf, as if this might weaken her.

  Martin? she says. I believe Martin would like to say something.

  The aunts and uncles and cousins all turn to look at Martin. He clutches his stomach with both arms and rocks forward. Mom, he groans, facing into the white tablecloth. Mom, I have a stomach ache.

  His blood uncle grunts and shakes his fat head. The aunts try to hide their smiles. Martin’s cousins gum their pie innocently in his direction, whipped cream streaking their noses.

  Martin’s mother dabs her mouth with her napkin and drapes it on the table. She regards everyone solemnly, as if making a crucial determination. Then her gaze falls on Martin and she smiles as if she has found the very thing that will set everything straight. Let’s get you home, she says, eyebrows arched knowingly as she over-carefully articulates each word.

  Martin’s mother drives slowly through his uncle’s nearly traffic-less neighbourhood. She misses all the lights. It’s snowing and Martin has his window buzzed down a few inches. Frigid air and the occasional flake wash in. Eventually, the impressive buildings of Lakeshore Drive swim coolly, serenely into view. Some of the high-rise apartments are lit like aquariums and Martin thinks of the people in those rooms, paddling around in lives they maybe can’t leave. Some units are dark as if the people in them have drowned or not yet paddled forth from their mother’s insides.

  Martin? his mother says after several minutes of cruising among the few vehicles out at this time. I asked you to do something. The window, please. Up.

  He ignores her. He can barely remember the old apartment in which he was a baby and then a little kid and then an older one. The chipped-enamel stove, stained bathroom sink, the sound of his dad’s razor tapping against the porcelain when he rinsed it of stubble—these memories and more ripple and evaporate. Martin thinks his way toward the townhouse, mapped with his mother’s Post-its toward some future perfection only she can see. He can only see parts of his own future, like shooting as tall as his parents. Like leaving the townhouse, the city, off to college.

  Then what.

  Martin, his mother says. Do as I tell you.

  Or what. He slumps further in the passenger seat. The future, he thinks glumly, is as far away as the past.

  And then it is not—Martin’s mother lifts her hands from the wheel and jerks her head toward him. Listen to me, she snaps, and the car strays into the left lane.

  Mom, he cries.

  She rights the car and stares straight ahead. What’s going on? she asks after a moment, voice again practiced and smooth.

  Something thin and sharp rises within him. Buzz it up yourself, he tells her, voice as calm and precise as hers. You have the controls on your side, he tells her.

  That’s not the point, Martin, she says after another pause. Work with me on this.

  Sorry-not-sorry, he says in his new voice. You can do and say whatever you want. Just leave me out of it.

  At home Martin continues to feed the cats. He cleans their litter. He plays with them in the first-floor bathroom after school and on weekends. Hello kitties, he says. He tells them his best fart jokes. Each time he leaves, he closes the door carefully so the cats won’t escape. Bye for now, kiddos, he says.

  Public Storage Available Now

  Inside the Queen’s Little Queen.

  Butter.

  A toy syringe.

  Three Cheerios.

  Clot of red thread from the Dowager’s tin sewing kit.

  A darning needle—the Queen’s Little Queen bites back a gasp—blackened under a votive flame’s sizzle then withdrawn at the last second.

  Wider, the Queen commands, holding each object high and pronouncing on it before undertaking the insertion. The Queen’s Little Queen’s thighs quake—that’s our girl, big baby at fifteen, la petite ami. Stocked and restocked this past hour.

  A yellow button for the Queen’s beloved granny in hospice since last week.

  Blue for errant dadster ensconced this past month in a downtown love pad with his hottie-in-waiting. For her a tube of orange-flavoured Bonne Bell lip gloss.

  A bed sheet canopies the ceiling over the rarely used basement cocktail bar. Cut-out camels and albino elephants from National G, affixed to the sheet with safety pins, sway and flicker in the candlelight. There’s a Versailles ripped from a history textbook. Paper rubies from who knows. A Beautiful Homes photo of a glossy armoire carved with toucans and vines and monkeys chattering of rumoured tiny and tinier ivory-inlaid drawers. The Queen’s Little Queen, delirium ravaged, imagines cubby upon cubby stuffed with treasure. In one drawer, a miniature Queen’s Little Queen—our girl, all cunt.

  Break time. The Queens ascend the basement stairs to swig grape sodas in the dinky kitchen. Everything is dated avocado, very barf but the Dowager’s money doesn
’t grow on trees. She’s out wrapping raw steaks and chicken legs at the A&P so she can return long past dark bearing Hamburger Helper, shredded pink flesh, pineapple juice in a can. A carton of chocolate milk to wheedle into the Little One who usually refuses sustenance heartier than crackers and Cagney & Lacey reruns during evening visits. Yesterday’s morsel of dead ant from her own so-called home’s driveway doesn’t count. Nor do the thimblefuls of Liquid Plumber she’s begun to imagine.

  The Little Friend, her teachers have long called her. The Goer-Alonger, her own mother carps. Mother Rat, is how the girl thinks of the woman. Mother-Hunk of Spoilt Ham.

  But here and now our girl is the Queen’s Little Queen, sloshing the soda in her can. Make it last, she prays. But the Queen—desperate to avenge the recent disintegration of her realm, an apple blush spreading on her furious cheeks—crushes her empty bare handed and flips it into the sink. She claps twice. Tu! Vite!

  Hurts more this time. The Queen’s Little Queen’s tender tissues burn.

  Inside her, knuckles like newts from a spell, a headful of smoke.

  And silent prayer—Tale of No Time to Speak. Word buzz, a whole ball of wax.

  She shortcuts home across her school’s football field, a pasture of bright heavens above. Je suis, she reminds herself. Tu es. French test tomorrow. Anything to take her mind off.

  Like Tale of Once Upon a Time—news from the world at large, which she has learned at school—Some Immortal Sparks Fell. A plane burst over a place called Lockerbie. Or a plane plunged into the Sea of Japan, or more recently the Indian Ocean. She imagines the human cargos screaming like the legions of classmates cartwheeling their game-days’ silver and purple, frantically displaying their hearts of shaking pom-poms.

  Flight—failed, cast-down—is where the Queen’s Little Queen’s mind most roams.