gods with a little g

by Tupelo Hassman

  Tsk tsk tsk.

  LIKE A GIRL

  Cy’s head flops back on the couch and he snaps it up straight, takes another big sip from a beer that might actually be empty, acts like he’s totally with us, and then his head drops back again. He’s wasted, and he does this over and over. Sissy, sitting next to him, whacks Cy on the head every time he doesn’t pop right back up, and in the midst of this Cy vomits. But only into his mouth. He holds it there, his cheeks puffing out a little, and then he swallows the puke back down like it never happened, like no one noticed. I noticed but I’m not going to say anything. It’s impressive.

  No matter how much I drink, I can’t get wasted. I feel the beer going down my throat, rough with bubbles, sour-sweet, but then it is like I don’t feel any different at all. My head stays up, I don’t puke in my mouth. I’m just like before.

  Watching Cy get hit on the head over and over, the glossy, easy look in his eyes as it happens, gives me an idea, though, so the next afternoon I get to the tire yard early. It is just Sissy and me, which is what I hoped.

  Sissy’s eating from a bag of pork rinds. She walks through an industrial park to get here—everything in Rosary is a church, a retirement home, or an industrial park—and some days she passes a food truck. The Dickheads put in “roach coach” requests with Sissy, usually for packaged meat-like products like this one, bags of meat or salty tubes of Slim Jims, which they inhale before burping in truly life-changing ways.

  I sit down next to Sissy and she offers me the bag.

  “No, thanks.” My hands are sweaty and I wipe them on my pants. I feel ridiculous. Like I’m on a first date and trying to be cool. Which is not to say I know what it is like to be on a date.

  “So, Sis.”

  “So.” She crunches. The pork rinds have more of her attention than I do.

  “You’ve been in fights.”

  More crunching. “Yeah.” Sissy fights, she fights at home and at school. She has bruises, a wide shiny scar on her forearm that seems like it must be from a knife.

  “Not me,” I say. “I’ve never been hit.”

  There. I said it.

  The crunching stops.

  “Not, like, at home?” Not many families in Rosary spare the rod. So few don’t spank or hit or use a belt like the good Lord intended that those who don’t beat on their kids are shamed into silence. I am pretty sure that Dad doesn’t talk about all of the nonviolence at our house when he’s at the men’s weekly prayer group.

  “Not so much.”

  She looks at me then, really looks at me, maybe for the first time, and it is clear that she has figured something out.

  “Because your mom died.” Pork rinds again. “She’d hit you if she was here.” It’s like she’s trying to reassure me, like she wants me to know that even if my dad is fucking up, my mom would’ve done it right. I am loved.

  “Anyway. I want to get in a fight.”

  Sissy has another realization. “Bird never hit you?” It dawns on her that the world is failing me.

  I feel like I have never really understood Sissy until this moment.

  “Not … directly,” I say.

  “That’s fucking weird.”

  The conversation is getting away from me and I want to do this before the rest of the Dickheads show up. “Listen, will you just punch me?”

  WHAM.

  It’s like the tire yard’s heavy door slamming down. Onto my head.

  I was going to ask her to take me by surprise, but I was also going to ask her not to break my nose and not to knock me out and offer to trade some beers if she would do it. None of this matters now, because it’s done.

  She didn’t even put down the bag of pork rinds.

  There’s a smear of salt and grease across my cheek and I can smell it on my hands when I take them away from my face where I’ve been holding it in surprise, without even realizing I was. I’m feeling pain. But mostly what I’m feeling is something like joy.

  There aren’t really stars in Rosary. The smoke from the refinery smudges their glow and its bright twenty-four-hour lights reflect off any clouds, so whether it is clear or overcast, night never feels real here. We don’t get to make wishes and appreciate how small we are. We don’t get that gift of perspective. But this gives me some.

  There are stars now, twinkling brightly behind my eyes where I sit on the tire yard couch.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  I feel hungry.

  Sissy does not ask if I’m all right.

  “Sorry about your mom,” she says, adding, “And yeah, anytime.” She offers me the pork rinds again. We sit together then, crunching through the rest of the bag, and every bite is delicious.

  SHOTGUNNING

  Dad is sitting at the kitchen table when I come in from the tire yard. He’s alone but I can smell dinner, grilled cheese with pickles, which is my favorite sandwich in the universe, and I’m still hungry from getting punched and there are plates on the table, forks and glasses. Just for two. I act like I don’t see him, just like I’m acting like I am coming in from Aunt Bev’s and nowhere else, drop my bag at the computer desk in the living room, and turn down the hall for the bathroom and the mouthwash to cover the smell of beer, to check that my face isn’t bruised, but he stops me.

  He is standing in the kitchen doorway.

  Grilled cheese with pickles. He hasn’t made that in years.

  This can’t be good.

  “Helen,” he says, “you’re home!”

  Like he’s been coached. Like he just got a copy of Appropriate Things to Say When a Known Person Comes Home.

  “How was your day?

  “Are you hungry?

  “I made some dinner.

  “I’m going to propose to Iris.”

  He says all of these things right on top of each other and I forget about smelling like beer and having a punched face. He’s staring at me and I’m staring at him and the kitchen goes long, stretches the way a room does after you shotgun a beer. Dad had only been a few feet from me when he started talking, but now he is far away and drifting. Dad’s on the other side of the world and that world is paved with linoleum and the smells of grilled cheese and pickles. On that side of the world, everything is upside down. The dead love again, or think they do, and they make favorite dinners, and they make conversation, and they make choices their daughters can’t ever live with.

  LOST

  DAD

  WHITE AND GRAY, SKINNY, SHORT HAIR THAT IS

  RECEDING, A MUSTACHE THAT IS NOT.

  FORTY-SIX YEARS OLD.

  LAST SEEN AT THE KITCHEN TABLE.

  ANSWERS TO: DAD. WHATEVER IRIS CALLS HIM.

  LIKES: RUBS ON THE BELLY, TO BE TOLD THAT LIFE IS VERY

  GOOD AND BEAUTIFUL, FORTY-YEAR-OLD WOMEN WHO CANNOT SHUT UP.

  REVENGE OFFERED.

  NOPE

  It isn’t necessary to sneak in a window or through the back door at Winthrop’s house. His parents aren’t home. I mean, someone is usually around but they just aren’t home, as in the question, “Hello, is anybody in there?” The answer to that is nope.

  So I take the key from under the roof of the stone pagoda on the porch and unlock the door. There is no other house in Rosary that I know of with a pagoda, with artificial grass rolled out on the porch, but these intrusions into Rosary’s sameness, like Mr. Epsworthy’s voice coming from the Lost City Bread van’s speaker on his eternal rounds of dire warning–slash–insurance commercial, are the only constant signs that Winthrop’s parents are with us.

  Tonight, I walk past Mrs. Epsworthy, who stays asleep in her spot in front of the television. I walk down the hall to Winthrop and Rain’s room. And then I crawl into Winthrop’s bed.

  Winthrop is the biggest spoon ever created. He’s a soup spoon, a ladle, and cuddling up with him usually makes me feel better right away, makes me feel all together, like I know where all this little spoon that is me, I know where I am. Spooning with Winthrop gives a body perspective. Or it usually
does, but even with my arm over his big belly now, I don’t feel better.

  “Helen.” That’s Rain, asking. Asking without a question mark. She was on her phone when I came in, with all the someones she is always talking to who are not going to be her date to the prom because they live in Sky and are waiting for her there, in her future.

  That’s all she says. “Helen.” Rain and Winthrop always call me by my full name.

  And you know how sometimes you think you’re doing pretty fine, like you’ve got it together, and then just one person says a teeny-tiny nice thing to you and that is the end of the bullshit you’ve been telling yourself about how you’re feeling? And how sometimes just someone who loves you saying your name is that one nice thing? The only nice thing you need? Maybe the only nice thing there is?

  Well, imagine if you were just barely keeping it together and then you were double-teamed like the Epsworthys did to me right then. Just as Rain says my name like that, Winthrop closes his hand over mine, links our fingers together. And I start to cry, and not just a little bit. I press my face into Winthrop’s back to hide myself and the sad fact of my ugly cry face, but they know anyway. The room that was lit only by Rain’s phone when I came in goes black as she puts her phone away. And they listen, even though I’m not saying anything. And they don’t ask questions looking for answers I don’t have. And I love them.

  And I hate everything and everyone else.

  So basically, a normal day.

  * * *

  When I finally catch my breath and explain about Dad, about the impending disaster, Rain lets out a long slow sigh, almost a whistle, and Winthrop squeezes my hand harder, like he’s wringing me out.

  When I’m quiet then, no more snuffling and sobbing, and there is snot all over his T-shirt, Winthrop says what is really the only appropriate thing to say at a time like this. The single, only sentence that makes any kind of sense.

  “What you need is some ice cream.”

  Winthrop’s belief that few things are more powerful than ice cream sounds stupid until you give it one chance. And there’s always ice cream at the Epsworthys’. Usually Rain doesn’t join us for midnight ice-cream runs but tonight she does, because tonight it’s for a cure.

  Rain turns down the television in the living room and tucks the remote back into the pocket by Mrs. Epsworthy’s seat. Winthrop gets out three half gallons of fancy ice cream plus a giant tub of cheap Neapolitan. He sets them all on the kitchen table and removes the lids. Then he gets down to business. There is magic in every ritual.

  He lights the stove and puts the kettle on, then gets out bowls and spoons, sets them carefully before us, and just when the kettle threatens to whistle, he turns it off and pours boiling-hot water into a coffee mug. Next, the industrial-grade ice-cream scooper is stuck into the mug long enough for the metal to heat, so it can cut smoothly through the ice-cream flavors. He turns to me, and I point. Mint chip. Coffee. A stripe of Neapolitan. He rinses the scooper and reheats before each flavor, delivering perfect round scoops to my bowl.

  Once we’re all served, Rain raises her spoon and says, in her most serious voice, “I scream. You scream.”

  She pauses. And we all say together, solemn as a prayer, “We all scream.”

  FROM THE EDGE

  After I go “check the mail,” on those afternoons when Mrs. Gillespie asks me if she got a postcard, I get my shit together in the privacy of the bathroom, so I can answer her question properly. Then I go back to my seat at her elbow and say, as bright as if I had just come back from vacation myself, “Mrs. Gillespie, there’s no postcard today, but didn’t you get one yesterday?”

  There hasn’t been mail at the Piazza for any of the residents on the Thursdays I’ve been here. I’m relying on a different kind of yesterday. The rich one that made Mrs. Gillespie who she still is, the most alive person here, including myself.

  “Oh yes! I did receive a postcard just yesterday!” she answers, and then her smile isn’t only for me, it sticks with her as she remembers fondly now what it is like, being remembered.

  * * *

  “Will you pull my quilt up a bit, dear?” The top blanket in Mrs. Gillespie’s mobile blanket fort is a quilt, like nearly everyone’s here. But where most are knitted, hers is patchwork. Tons of tiny squares of fabric of every pattern and color, with here and there a bit of yarn pulled through to secure the squares where they meet.

  I don’t know if she really needs this pulling up of the quilt she asks for. Securing blankets over frail, cold bodies is probably the first thing they teach you in caring-for-old-people school. But I fuss around with it, smooth it over her shoulders, and look into her bright brown eyes when I’m done. “How’s that?”

  “That is just fine,” she says. She surprises me by saying my name: “Thank you, Helen Dedleder.”

  THE SACRAMENT OF THE PRESENT MOMENT

  Winthrop has a carton of eggs. Aunt Bev said that he would.

  Even before we got out of the truck I could see the splatter all over her front window, the red palm of the fortune-telling hand painted there shining with goo. As if the giant the hand belongs to had jerked off and then, instead of one of his dirty giant T-shirts, he used the Rosary Psychic Encounter Shoppe to clean himself up. Aunt Bev didn’t say a word about the yolk dripping down her window, across the life and love lines and the $10 promise she’s never kept. She didn’t sigh, didn’t do anything, not even look down at the concrete, at all the eggshells broken there. I started to wonder if she’d noticed, but once we went inside, she put down the bag of groceries we’d just bought and started filling a bucket in the sink. She squeezed some soap in, poured in some salt, and as she watched the bucket fill, the bubbles rising and reflecting the light, I knew to keep on keeping quiet.

  “Your mind must be clean to create clean,” she always says, has said to me since I was little, whenever she’d hand me the broom. We sweep after every customer, sweep right out the door, and shake the dust we cannot see into Rosary’s already-polluted wind.

  As she lifted the heavy bucket out of the sink, Aunt Bev said, “Winthrop is still sitting back there. Go get him. And bring the eggs. We’ll eat.”

  Hang out with psychic people long enough and you learn not to ask. Not them. But you ask other people. I’m not surprised when I do find Winthrop sitting back behind the shoppe on the old plastic chair under the bird feeder. I am surprised that he is holding an egg in his hand, almost like he’s going to throw it at me. There’s an open carton of eggs at his feet.

  “Winthrop, what the fuck?”

  “That’s nice, Helen.” He puts his hand down. “That’s a lovely way to talk.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?” I say, pulling him up, but when he looks hurt, doesn’t make a joke, I stop. “She wants the eggs.”

  Inside, Aunt Bev hands me the bucket and the squeegee for the front window and fresh rags. She crooks her finger at Winthrop slowly, her eyes drawn to a squint. Seeing her face, I am kind of glad to escape to window-washing duty. It’s not that Aunt Bev would have wanted Winthrop to call the cops when he caught someone egging the shoppe—she wouldn’t. It’s that Aunt Bev doesn’t appreciate heroics. She’s the kind who will punish you for trying to save her, because, she says, “If I did not want to be in this mess, I would not be in this mess.”

  When I come back from rinsing, and wiping until the squeegee squeaks clean across every line on the giant red palm, fate and life and love all shiny and new, Winthrop, who is always so bold when we talk about Aunt Bev and so quiet when he is actually around her, is sitting at her kitchen counter with a big plate of scrambled eggs in front of him and he is laughing.

  Aunt Bev sets a plate for me. “Now, tell me about going to the prom together.”

  “It’s not like that,” we say, nearly at the same time, and Winthrop adds, “Rain is our date too.”

  “Rain asked us to be her date,” I try to clarify, but Aunt Bev stops me.

  “I understand,” she says. She smiles
at Winthrop. “I hear that you are a good dancer.” Before he can agree—and Winthrop does agree—she is up and at her old radio, turning the dial from the classics station, which is her favorite, to an oldies station. “Duke of Earl” sings through the room and Aunt Bev puts her hand out to Winthrop, who is already on his feet. This is a dream come true for him. Aunt Bev doesn’t need a crystal ball to figure that out.

  He twirls her across the old Oriental rug and he sings along like he listens to oldies or something, sings like he does at the Piazza, “You know I’m gonna love you … for I’m the Duke of Earl,” and his voice, like his moves, is full of surprises.

  When “Duke of Earl” ends, “Stand by Me” comes on, and Aunt Bev makes a big show of needing to sit down, like she’s been dancing for hours, fanning her hand in front of her face. “I’ll let you cut in this time, Helen, but next time, you’ll have to fight me for him,” she says, and Winthrop takes my hand, pulls me close, and we move around the room together like two teenagers in love.

  HOW TO SHAKE YOUR HIPS

  We make individual trips to the Rosary High nurse with complaints of headache or upset stomach or, in Winthrop’s case, what he insisted was “the vapors,” as he held the back of his hand to his forehead in a faint. Once in the nurse’s office, we each took our opportunity to grab a stack of the pamphlets eternally available there, Abstinence and Teens: A Hot Couple and 1, 2, 3, No! The paper is kind of heavy but the cartoons on them are in full color and the corsages I’m making, using every trick Mom ever taught me, are turning out beautifully.