gods with a little g

by Tupelo Hassman

  “Aunt Bev, Mr. Epsworthy came in?”

  Where she had seemed tense all night so far, Aunt Bev relaxes. She’s suddenly so relaxed she doesn’t even answer with words, just an “Mmmhmmm.”

  I smooth the paper. She’s so casual. She doesn’t gossip about readings. I hear what I hear if I’m in the shoppe and I see names I recognize sometimes. Once even Principal Harrison’s, after her dog disappeared. It’s no big deal that she isn’t saying more.

  It should be no big deal.

  But I feel something. Like a something I’m supposed to pay attention to.

  And she says, “Well, an Epsworthy came in.”

  “What do you mean, ‘an Epsworthy’?”

  “You know the answer to this one,” Aunt Bev says, just as I realize that I know the answer to this one.

  The date on the receipt is from the last night Winthrop was home.

  * * *

  And I want to torch the place myself.

  Burn the witch.

  And then Aunt Bev looks at me. She looks at me like she loves me. And she turns down the classical music that has been playing on the radio. So I can hear when an alarm starts ringing through the Rosary night.

  “Helen, it’s for you.” Aunt Bev points out the door, and I’m on my feet.

  * * *

  What pulls us to a place? Why are there people we can’t help being around, people who aren’t really friends and aren’t family but just as sticky?

  An alarm is sounding and I’m walking toward the noise like I have no other choice. All of my avoiding of Fast Eddie’s hasn’t mattered at all, so why should it start now. I pass the empty lot, the Donut Hole, I pass the dry cleaner’s as the noise grows louder, a ringing that never stops. Until I’m in front of the bay door at Fast Eddie’s, staring at the shaft of light growing slowly wider on the concrete. And through the small opening, I see sandals strapped to legs that are too bare for the cool night air, toes that have just left the floor. It is easy to imagine the birds on that left thigh I can’t see yet, flying away.

  I drag myself up, squeeze under the door, scream her name. The chain hasn’t lifted her far, the door can’t gain real traction because she is so light, because of good luck, or divine intervention, or Aunt Bev’s meddling. But she’s still choking, and her eyes are wide, angry. Because she’s realized she’s an idiot or because her plan failed. Or because she knows what I’m going to do, what I have to do, the same as she would.

  I wrap one arm around her legs and hug her to me, lift her up, I pull down on the chain with the other to create slack, give her neck relief. The door slides up a little more and then her hands are in the chain, she gets it loose, and I let her go.

  GIRL TIME

  Mo drags herself over to the wall and sits there. I close the door and when I can’t figure out how to shut off the alarm, I sit down beside her. I can still hear her loud and clear when she finally lifts her head from her knees.

  “Fuck.”

  I agree. “Fuck.”

  Making this the deepest conversation we’ve had since we were kids. Just the two of us.

  We are still sitting there, our backs to the wall, the two fucks we have to give hanging between us, when Eddie pounds up the steps and unlocks the side door. He stops rushing when he sees us, turns off the alarm, says, “What the fuck?”

  Which is what we were just saying, so we don’t even need to fill him in. It’s great when you really know someone. You don’t have to talk. They just understand.

  Mo puts her head back down. Her shoulders start to shake.

  “Eddie,” I say, “got any beer?”

  * * *

  Eddie even opens our beers, another thing that has never happened before on this night of things that have never happened before. And then he goes away. Back into his office. He shuts the door. Out of habit, we touch our beers together, but then we stop. We don’t say, “Fuck Fast Eddie.”

  We just drink.

  Until Mo says, “You fucked Bird.”

  Which means we have to drink again because we have failed the Bechdel Test.

  Here we were alone, one of us just tried to kill herself, and the first thing we talk about is a dude.

  “Drink,” I say, in Rainbolene’s honor. The Bechdel Drinking Game is her favorite. She made us all learn it, since she said we would never be hearing about it on Rosary TV. Not the drinking game itself, that’s Rain’s invention. But the Bechdel Test they give to movies and books to see if the female characters are really treated like people or just like atmosphere, accessories for the male characters. One of the main tests is whether, in any scenes without dudes, the chicks talk about anything besides dudes.

  I say “drink” because I do not want to talk about this. Any of it. Not who’s fucking who. Not atmosphere. And I especially do not want to talk about it with Mo. Or myself.

  And I say “drink” because, well, that’s what we do.

  “He’s your stepbrother.” Mo adds this detail like it is important information for me to have.

  “Aunt Bev fucked Winthrop,” I say. “I think.”

  That she looks surprised makes me feel better somehow. It is surprising. “I don’t know if that’s super-weird or super-hot,” Mo says.

  And we laugh, like the Bechdel Test can’t touch us because here we are, bonding for real.

  But then we are back in it, to the plot being driven away without us behind the wheel, because Mo puts down her beer and says, “I’m pregnant.”

  THE ROSARY YELLOW PAGES

  Doctor Abstinence

  A Rosary favorite, and not just because his name comes first alphabetically. A visit to this practice is prescribed to all young women as soon as they think we might start giving in to temptation, as soon as they think we might become temptation. Aunt Bev says this is the doctor to be trusted least. She says, “If it walks like a duck and swims like a duck and flies like a duck, you know what it is? A quack.”

  Doctor God

  Doctor God doesn’t get up when you come in, He doesn’t even turn His head, and you are too afraid to take a seat without being offered and too afraid to stand, so you kneel on the scratchy carpet and it burns little squiggles into your knees, rubs you raw as if you were down there the whole time sucking Him off the way it takes a long time for an old, old man to be sucked off in the many porn books where old, old men get sucked off, which is all of them. And Doctor God is an old, old man. But He doesn’t want your mouth, or, He does, He wants to be in your mouth, but only so He can feel himself come out of it. He wants to be in and out of your mouth like he is in and out of everyone else’s. “Oh God,” He wants you to say. “How great Thou art,” and the like. This is His version of “Yeah, yeah, baby.” And He wants you to keep that baby, keep it right in there even though He’s the only one who can see it, if it is all right, if it is all going to be all right, and even though He is the only one who can see you in there, and even if, when He sees you in there, He can see that you aren’t all right. You aren’t all right at all.

  Doctors Kitchen Table and Coat Hanger

  It’s like no one can bend down. So you have to get up there, haul up there, where the plates were and the forks, where the silence was, and the “Please pass the potatoes.” There are potatoes being passed over you, through your knees that are up and planted on either side of where a plate has been and will be again. There’s a plate between your feet, someone’s food is getting cold, there’s a butter knife under one foot and a fork under the other and you don’t want to be impolite so you let the tines work into your heel. The flowers etched into the handle grind into the soft spots behind your toes, the spots where you aren’t supposed to put too much pressure because you don’t want to cause contractions. You don’t want to cause contractions, do you? Right here at the kitchen table? That would not be very polite. We don’t talk politics at the kitchen table and that includes all the politics around the reason you find yourself lying on this one right now, staring up at the light, watching the potatoes pa
ss over your breasts, the bottom of the serving dish slippery with steam. Talk about how good the potatoes are or talk about sports or talk about school. “What did you learn at school today?” That would be a good question to answer, even if no one asks it, you could talk about the three Rs now, Reading, ’Riting, and ’Rithmetic. Tell us something you learned, prepositions maybe, fragments, contractions. No, not contractions. Not here. That would not be polite dinnertime talk.

  Doctor Wish in One Hand

  Some don’t go to the doctor at all, any doctor, not God or Kitchen Table and Coat Hanger or Doctor Punch in the Guts. Some just pretend it all away. Here is where that gets you: on the five o’clock news, because there is a baby born in a toilet stall at a school in a town no one’s ever heard of. Because no one noticed. First, you are invisible to others, so it is easy to ignore yourself. You know just how you are supposed to be: tiny, unseen. It’s easy to unsee yourself. Then, you know you are a pig, a big fatty eater, so it is easy to think you’re getting bigger and rounder because you can’t stop stuffing your fat face. Doctor Wish in One Hand, Spit in the Other, and See Which One Fills Up First, he writes you an Rx on his Etch A Sketch. It doesn’t say anything, it’s a maze he’s drawn, a tiny square with a bigger square around it with a bigger square around it with a bigger square around it until the entire screen is one unbroken line and there you are in the center, forgotten, and trapped, and he shakes you up until one day, from somewhere in the fat elsewhere that is you, a baby falls out. But you didn’t know it was in there. But you didn’t know anything was in there. But you didn’t know there was a there to even be in. How could you know?

  Doctor You

  This is the practice Mo went to when she needed to solve her problem. The DIY School. Luckily, she didn’t make it to that first appointment, or I interrupted it, and got her to reschedule with Aunt Bev, who made her an appointment in Sky.

  BURN THE WITCH

  If I were going to put Aunt Bev out of my misery, I couldn’t. Trying to catch her not paying attention is like trying to catch the future itself, and then keep hold of it while it wiggles and hisses, just like the snake that wraps around her finger, liquid metal in the candlelight. Good luck with that.

  “Just lucky, I guess,” Aunt Bev says when I ask her about turning off Rachmaninoff that night, the night she pointed me out the door and down the street to Fast Eddie’s and I found Mo trying to push away from this life. Aunt Bev’s being sarcastic when she says this, then she is serious. She asks me if anything she has ever done has confused me into thinking she doesn’t know her own business.

  “Don’t answer me,” she says. “Just think about it, Helen. Make sure you know the exact address of that doubt inside yourself, because one day you’ll need to get back there and burn it all down.” She walks out the shoppe door and gets into her pickup, where Mo is already waiting. They are off, so that Mo can pee in a cup to prove what she already knows and get an appointment before it’s too late. Aunt Bev used a connection from her Sky days and got Mo a very believable fake ID. The newest illegal service provided at the Psychic Encounter Shoppe is free of charge: transporting pregnant minors across the bridge to Sky, where the real doctors are.

  TRUTH

  We’ve already been out. We walked around the block twice, tossed the ball up and down the walkway. We sat on the steps. Then I lay down with Pen on the plastic grass that covers the Epsworthys’ porch, green as a golf course and twice as unnecessary. I’m trying to take a nap in my pajamas and sweatshirt, curled up there, with the dog that isn’t mine, on the porch of the house where I don’t live.

  Rain comes to the door, opens it, and asks if I’ll be staying until Winthrop comes home, if she should let her parents know.

  She shuts the door before I can answer.

  Then she comes back and yells at me through the screen.

  “Helen, you are a ridiculous person if you don’t think that you are in love with my brother.”

  She shuts the door again, and when she comes back, before she can yell something else at me, I speak. “It turns out that I am not a ridiculous person.”

  And she says, sounding so like Winthrop when she does it makes my chest ache, “Oh.”

  And then she slams the door again.

  The next time, she comes out and shuts the door behind her. She hands me a glass of water and sits beside me. Beside us. Pen’s tail makes hollow thumping noises against the porch.

  “It sucks here without him,” she says, we could say together.

  Because there it all is. The entire truth of everything. It’s like Rain just came out and ripped a bandage off of me and nothing is clean underneath. Nothing is ready for the light. And I bury my head in my arm until the sleeve of my sweatshirt is soaked and snotty.

  “Have you heard from him?” I finally say. My voice is hoarse and I’m asking the wrong question, not the one about whether he’s okay, if he’s getting beat up, whether he’s still himself in there, whether he’s still in there, in there. Whether I matter to him anywhere.

  She looks nervous and then I am nervous. She says, “Hold on,” and goes back inside. When she comes out, she’s holding a small stack of letters, honest-to-God USPS mail. She holds it above my head and says, “Truth?”

  And I want to puke but I say, “Truth.”

  “Did you tell us not to come to your dad’s wedding reception because you”—she stumbles for a second—“had other plans and didn’t want us in the way?”

  But I didn’t do that. I didn’t lie to them. Did I? If I didn’t lie, why do I feel so guilty? How do we ever tell the truth if we don’t even know what it is?

  I tell the best truth I can find. “No,” I say. “I didn’t want my dad to ruin prom for everyone.”

  As I say this, the real truth hits me in the face like an uppercut at the tire yard.

  And the real truth is a powerful motherfucker.

  I didn’t want to enjoy Dad’s wedding. I told my best friends not to come to make sure I would have a terrible time that night, so that no one, especially Dad, would catch me having fun.

  I told them not to come to hurt my dad.

  * * *

  The moment when you learn that the worst person you know is yourself, that is a pretty horrible moment. And every noise I make is a sob and every sob is like a backward scream, inverted, a scream at myself to do better, to be better. To start deserving what I am so lucky to still have.

  * * *

  Rain sits down again beside me, holds me. She says, “It’s okay,” over and over, and Pen is up and snuffling around my face, grunting, sniffing for the injury that must have caused all of this, until I catch my breath.

  Pen settles herself beside me again, and Rain shows me the bundle of mail in her hand. She lifts the stack of letters up above our heads and then throws them up in the air, all over the porch.

  As they fall all around us, she says, “This way you can say that I did not give them to you. You found them, you terrible snoop.”

  I reach for the closest one.

  Rain’s address is in Winthrop’s handwriting, and there is his name, and what I guess is his identification number. There is the address of the correctional complex where he is, a PO box very far away. Underneath Rain’s name and address is a stamp, sloppily applied: This was mailed by an inmate confined to an Alaska State Department of Corrections Facility. Contents are uncensored.

  I open it up and Rain says, “They’re all kind of the same, but I told him if he didn’t write me something at least twice a week that I’d start writing to him every day.”

  Rainbows,

  The “food” here is an actual crime being committed against my person on a daily basis.

  I hope this proof of life is sufficient as I am about to join in another rousing game of pinochle.

  Until freedom,

  Winthrop

  PS Thanks for not writing me back. I have not changed my mind.

  DOG YEARS

  I take Pen back out. We go to the pa
rk. I didn’t notice earlier what a clear night it is. A clear night in Rosary. The sky is big and flat and nighttime-blue, shot through with silver like a nickel that’s been in Dad’s uniform pocket too long and spun through the wash. And I spin around, looking up at this sky until I feel dizzy and the trees become a tunnel with light at the end. When we get back to the Epsworthys’, Pen drinks an entire bowl of water and curls up on Winthrop’s bed. I stay with her until she falls asleep. She has a good dream. It must be good because I watch her tail go flip flip flip, flip flip flip flip flip flip flip, which is exactly how I would sleep knowing that Winthrop is coming home to me.

  BULL’S-EYE

  The next afternoon, when I hear Iris’s car in the driveway earlier than usual, I get Pen to sit and stay in the closet and I slide the door shut. But she doesn’t like that, so I open it just a tiny bit to let in the light and then I sit back down with my Histories of Man textbook, assigned summer reading. I am trying to figure out what to do, because Iris’s dog allergy is something I’ve been warned to take seriously and haven’t, because it only seems to be related to Pen, because Pen is a pit bull. So it is really a pit bull allergy. So it is really just fear. And I just couldn’t worry about that today. Today I wanted to curl up with Pen in my own bed.

  But it isn’t Iris home early. It’s Bird. And he is drunk as hell. I don’t know how he managed to not wreck the car or our front door or the pictures that line the hallway when he brushes along them on his way to my room.

  “Hell.” He pushes the door open. I can smell him. And I can see him. His dick is somehow stuck in his pant leg, it’s pointing straight down but fully erect so the whole shape is evident. He points to it anyway. “I need you,” he says.