by Brock Clarke
“Stole it,” I said, and I was whispering now, “from whom?”
My aunt was flipping through the in-flight magazine. She suddenly started to recite the name of each of America’s Greatest Steakhouses. She asked me, “Would you rather go to the original in Chicago or the newest branch in Scottsdale?” and I knew I wouldn’t get an answer to my question until I answered hers.
“Chicago,” I said, and my aunt nodded as though that were the correct answer.
“I stole the truck from its owner, Calvin,” my aunt said in her normal voice, not whispering. When she said that—“I stole it from its owner, Calvin”—it seemed to cost her nothing but the breath she’d spent on saying the words. But I very much wished she hadn’t said the word “owner,” because I immediately pictured a woman (Why did I picture the truck’s owner as a woman? I don’t know: maybe because a woman had stolen the truck), a woman who had come out of a store or her house and found not just her truck missing but her dog, too.
“You stole someone’s dog,” I said to my aunt.
“Well, as I said, he came with the truck,” my aunt said to me.
Some people put on dark glasses when admitting their guilt, or admitting to something that should cause them to feel guilt. But no, that’s when my aunt took off her dark glasses.
She took off her dark glasses. Her eyes were blue, like my mother’s, like mine, but the blue was somewhat muted, like the sky seen through a tissue. Against her weathered, cracked face, her eyes looked like two milky-blue marbles set in the sockets of a dark clay mask.
“You shouldn’t judge me, Calvin,” my aunt said. I waited to hear why not, but Aunt Beatrice had already put her sunglasses back on and was clearly not going to tell me any more about how I should feel about the truck or the dog or her than she already had.
40.
I forgot to say: I suspected, even before she’d confessed to stealing the truck and the dog, that my aunt had something to do with my house being under contract, just as she’d somehow gotten my passport. But I wasn’t going to accuse her of that. Not because I didn’t care or because I wanted to be agreeable. But because I wanted to find out—not just how she’d done them, but why—and I knew if I asked, my aunt wouldn’t tell me. Besides, you do not honor life’s great mysteries by asking the mysteries to explain themselves to you. Those might sound like John Calvin’s words. Or my mother’s. But no, they’re mine.
Five
41.
I woke with the airplane’s bump and controlled skid of a landing. In my shirt pocket was the form on which I was to declare that I had nothing to declare. I blinked once, twice, then held my eyes wide until they woke up, too. My aunt was already standing in the aisle. Her right hand was on the seat in front of me, her fingers drumming. The other hand was holding our passports, fanned out like a pair of aces. The airplane had the faint stink of people who have taken their shoes off and who have brushed their teeth with their fingers. And everyone looked terrible, like their faces had been dusted with chalk or cheese. In front of us a man in a blue pinstriped suit was making circles on his chin and cheeks and throat with a battery-powered electric razor. I looked outside. It resembled the outside of the airport in Boston and presumably most other airports. But someone was talking to us over the airplane’s PA system in Swedish, and then the man in front of us turned off his razor and started talking to his seatmate in that language. That was my first impression of Swedish: the language where something sophisticated sounds like it’s always getting half caught in your throat.
42.
“It’s time to grow up.” My aunt’s words were still bouncing around in my head. If Aunt Beatrice was right and I had yet to grow up, and it wasn’t too late for me to do so, I thought I’d better start right away, with something small, and then I’d build up to bigger things. I stuck out my hand. “I should probably hold my own passport,” I said. My aunt nodded, nodded gravely, as though this were a ceremony of some importance. “Probably,” she said, and then gave me my passport.
We then exited the plane behind a boy and his family. He’d been crying since the plane had landed, and now he was trying hard not to and still somewhat failing. The mother was carrying the boy. “He’s so tired,” she said to the boy’s father. Meanwhile, the boy was looking at us over his mother’s shoulder. He was sniffling; his eyes were red, his face tearstained. My aunt unzipped her purse, reached in, and then extended her hand toward the boy. In her hand was a coin, a small brown coin with a hole in the middle. The boy rubbed his face against his mother’s shoulder and then reached over the shoulder with his left hand and accepted the coin. And then the family turned left at the end of the ramp, and we turned right.
“That was very sweet of you,” I said.
“I bought his happiness,” my aunt said. And then what she’d done seemed less sweet. I searched my head for some relevant quote from John Calvin, or my mother, about not being able to buy one’s way into heaven. Surely there was one. Surely there were many. But I couldn’t locate one. Perhaps it was the jet lag, but John Calvin was already seeming far away. And besides, the boy did seem happier after he’d been paid off. I remembered my first impression of my aunt’s voice, how she spoke like a character in a children’s television show, or a teacher, and this encounter with the boy made it seem like my aunt did in fact have some experience with children.
“Were you ever a teacher, Aunt Beatrice?” I asked her.
“No,” my aunt said, “but I was just thinking of the time when one of my clients requested that I pop his whore of an ex-wife right in her fucking gob.”
We’d passed through passport control and were now walking through the terminal. I was trying to pay attention to everything: the signs, the restaurants, the people, what they were wearing, what they were saying. I didn’t know much, but I wanted to know what the differences were between what there was to know in Stockholm and what I’d known in Congress. I didn’t want to miss any of it. But when my aunt said . . . well, I’m not going to repeat it. You heard what she said. In any case, I stopped paying attention to anything else and paid attention only to her. I said earlier that my mother and my aunt walked in similar ways. But this is another way they were similar: they made me pay strict attention to what they were saying. Although of course they tended to say very different things.
“I’m merely quoting the client, Calvin,” my aunt said. “And after all, this was what I got paid to do, and so this is what I did: I drove to her house, which before the divorce had been my client’s as well. It is an estate of considerable size and little taste. Beige vinyl siding. No shutters. No chimney. Obscenely large garage. Many gazebos. Much statuary. A patio, brick. A grill, gas, with, on either side of the grill itself, two exposed propane tanks. It probably doesn’t need pointing out that the tanks looked like testicles. The couple had had no children, so there was no athletic equipment, no sign of sport or play. Circular drive. Large sloping lawn with nonnative grass, unnaturally green, chemically treated. Flower beds with not enough flowers and too much mulch. A house with overmulched flower beds is an unhappy house, Calvin. It’s true that this is a generalization. It is also true that most of the women I slapped lived on properties with overmulched flower beds.”
“Aunt Beatrice, what are you talking about?” I finally asked, but of course she didn’t answer me.
“I parked my car,” she said, “on the downward slope of the driveway, facing forward. Remember this, Calvin: always make sure your car is facing forward. You never know when you might later need to flee. I walked to the door, rang the doorbell. I remember its lonely echo. The sound suggested a too-large house, underfurnished rooms.” My aunt paused, perhaps still hearing that echo. I was hearing it, too. In one place or another (and there hadn’t been many places), I’d always been hearing it. “I waited for a moment,” my aunt continued, “then rang again. A man’s voice boomed from the garage, which was attached to the house by way of a breezeway, so called (it had no windows, could admit no breeze), d
emanding that my client’s ex-wife ‘answer the door already.’ This man was a real estate agent, who sold my client the house and then later stole my client’s wife. My client wished me to strike the agent, too, but I’d informed him, firmly, no, I did not strike men; that is not what I did. That was one of my rules. If that was something the client wished done, then he would have to do it himself, or he would have to pay a man to do it. There may have been women who made their living slapping men on the behest of other men, but I had not heard of them, and I had not met them, although I would have liked to have heard of them, I would have liked to have met them: one should always welcome the wisdom, the experience, of a fellow professional.”
My aunt paused again, perhaps to give me the chance to ask another question, which she would then not answer. When I didn’t, she decided to finally answer my earlier one.
“I thought I’d made it plain,” she said to me. “I was a woman who men paid to slap other women.”
“When?” I said. “Where?” But of course my aunt ignored this and continued with her story.
“A few moments later, I heard footsteps from inside the house. I took a step back, so that if my client’s ex-wife were to look at me through the peephole, then this is what she would see: a lady of a certain age, short gray hair . . .”
“Gray hair!” I said triumphantly. I can tell you what I thought my triumph was: my aunt had earlier pointed out that I was very bald, and now I was pointing out that she dyed her hair. I didn’t say it was much of a triumph. My aunt made that plain, too.
“There are wigs, Calvin,” my aunt said, but I couldn’t tell whether that meant she was wearing one now or then. “Short gray hair,” she said again, “tan windbreaker, very white sneakers, large sunglasses, common among the cataracted.” Aunt Beatrice adjusted her glasses to let me know that she was still wearing them. “Sometimes when I anticipated suspicion, hostility, I would wear a fanny pack. People find it impossible to suspect violence from someone wearing a fanny pack. But I was not wearing a fanny pack on this particular day. I was assured I would meet no resistance from my client’s ex-wife. I understood from him that she is guileless. That was not the word he used. The words my client used to describe his ex-wife were ‘the stupidest cow that I ever met in my whole entire life.’”
Aunt Beatrice didn’t need to tell me that those were her clients’ words, not her own. When she’d said them, her voice changed. It became lower—not like a man’s voice but as though her voice were coming from somewhere deep inside her. It was as though one of my aunt’s organs were speaking.
“The door opened inward,” she said in her own voice, “and when it did, I took a step forward. The ex-wife was standing there, right hand on the door, left on her hip. She was wearing a faded pink sweat suit.”
I noticed that my aunt said the words “sweat suit” in that same subterranean voice, and so I interrupted and asked if those were her client’s words, too.
“Those were not my client’s words, Calvin,” my aunt said. But she didn’t then explain whose they were. It’s possible she said them in that voice because she didn’t wish the words “sweat suit” to be hers either.
“As I was saying,” Aunt Beatrice said, and then she paused, dramatically, as though waiting for me to me interrupt her again, and for a second I felt as chastised as I’d been during all the many moments throughout all my life when my mother had used John Calvin to chastise me. But then my aunt laughed, and I saw the space where her tooth should have been, and the feeling evaporated. “I said the woman’s name. Just to make sure that she was the right woman. The wrong women were slapped all too often in our business. It was a stain. The woman said, ‘Yes?’ and when she did I noticed a certain slackness around the mouth, a slackness that is proof, I think, not of age but disappointment. A mouth is very good at telling, especially when it doesn’t talk. In any case, I slapped it, Calvin, with my right hand. Some of my colleagues, my competitors, wore gloves, but I did not. I preferred a bare hand, not for the feel but for the sound. A loud slap to the face is time interrupting. After I slapped a woman, the expression on her face tended to want to know not who are you, not what just happened, but where am I and what time is it.
“‘It is nine forty-eight ante meridiem,’ I said to the woman. I never told the women my name. I never told them the name of my clients. I never told them my purpose. I only told them the time so that they might have something by which to remember the experience, so that, even if they weren’t sure what had happened or why, they at least knew when. And then I turned and left. I was rarely called after, never pursued. On the way to my automobile, I passed by the garage. In it, I heard the real estate agent on his phone, loudly deploying his argot. Something, he was saying, was a ‘diamond in the rough,’ and it also required an ‘imaginative buyer,’ and, in any case, it was ‘definitely not a drive-by.’ As I said, my rules forbade me from slapping men, but they did not forbid me from sometimes regretting my rules.”
43.
I’ve already said much about how my aunt spoke. But in truth she spoke in many different ways. And here was another one: my aunt sometimes spoke in stories, which appeared out of nowhere and all at once. It’s tempting to say that they were like sermons. But they were not like sermons. Sermons—at least my mother’s sermons—were composed in advance and were meant to teach you a lesson. They were meant to teach you how John Calvin wanted you to live. My aunt’s stories, on the other hand, were mostly there to tell you that she already had.
44.
Anyway, by the time my aunt finished her story, we’d reached our hotel. We’d exited the airport, gotten in a cab, were driven into Stockholm, and I’d missed all of it.
And since we never did make the return trip to the Stockholm airport, I couldn’t have told you what that particular journey looks like. I assume it is watery. Stockholm is water. There might be parts of Stockholm that do not involve water, but I never saw them. For instance, there was our hotel and, in front of that, a broad stone-and-brick promenade and then water—rippling, sun-dappled water. I couldn’t tell whether it was a river or a lake or the ocean. Ferries were everywhere, so many that I couldn’t believe they weren’t crashing into one another. I said Stockholm is water, but Stockholm is also islands. I could see a few of them even from where I was standing. I guessed the smaller ferries went to those nearby islands. But there were bigger ferries, too. I assumed they went to more distant places, and I was right.
45.
The man at the hotel’s front desk greeted us in Swedish. “Hi hi” is what he said.
“Ohio,” my aunt said back, startling both the man and myself. It took me a few moments to realize that Aunt Beatrice wasn’t talking to him. No, she was finally responding to my earlier question, asking where and when she had slapped that woman. “I slapped that particular woman during the first Clinton administration,” my aunt said to me, although the man at the desk was listening, too. “A very frustrating time for the men of Ohio.”
46.
And in this way, I began to piece together where my aunt had been all my life. This was in 2016. I was born in 1968. My aunt had been in Ohio sometime between 1993 and 1997. Earlier than that, at some point, for some amount of time, she’d lived in Stockholm. At that time that was what I knew.
47.
After saying “Ohio” in English (although I suppose it would have sounded the same in Swedish), my aunt spoke Swedish to the man at the front desk. I stood there with my head down, like a child. And then I understood the boy my aunt had earlier bought off. I mean, I understood why he was crying. Not because he was tired. But because he didn’t understand the language. As I learned over the next few weeks, there’s nothing like hearing people talking in the language of the country you’ve just arrived in to emphasize how incredibly little you know about where you are.
48.
The hotel room was actually two adjoining rooms, and in each room was a king-size bed, and in each room the beds were one of the few things
that were not made of marble. And by the quality of the hotel rooms, I understood that my aunt was rich. And then I remembered the truck my aunt had stolen, and I wondered if my aunt was rich or if she’d just stolen from rich people, or if there was a difference. My aunt, I suspected, would say that there was no difference. As for John Calvin, he once said that “the torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.” But I don’t know, my aunt’s conscience must have not have tortured her much if at all: she was already in her bed, white sneakers slipped off, sunglasses still on, fast asleep.
49.
To Grow Up
Dear readers, my aunt Beatrice and I are taking a trip. No small undertaking, for someone like me: as you know, there’s nothing I like better than to stay at home and warm my toes by my trusty Traplodge AA and, oh, I don’t know, maybe read a book or, more likely, tell my pellet stove posse about all the happy news (click on these links for rebates! service plans! model upgrades!) coming from the pellet stove industry.
But as you know, my mother has died, and when a parent dies, the world shrinks a little and becomes indistinct: Before your parent dies, you are their child, but after they die, then what are you? What are you supposed to be? What are you supposed to do? Luckily, I have my wise aunt on hand to tell me what I’m supposed to do: she tells me I’m supposed to grow up. She also tells me how I’m supposed to grow up: by going out and meeting the world. And it turns out that the part of the world I’ve gone to meet happens to be Sweden: the home of the mighty Lingonnaire, the original pellet stove, the pellet stove of all pellet stoves! You won’t be surprised to hear that they’re as common in Sweden as the pancakes and the meatballs. Even our hotel rooms have come equipped with them. My aunt is asleep in her room next to her stove, and I am writing to you in my room next to mine. And as my posse knows well enough, there is nothing like the even, radiant heat of a pellet stove to make wherever you are feel like home.