Dick
The evening sun was a giant peach in the rearview mirror, apocalyptic and
gaseous as it burned toward the horizon behind Ann Ponders. The daily L.A.
paradox: toxic beauty. She was grateful for a polluted day on which to
move; it capped an argument she had been making for months. For clean air,
she told herself, they were leaving the only home her children had ever
known. Her husband and son had taken the first car early in the morning.
But then the cat had escaped, moments before Ann was to drive the family’s
second car away, and she and her daughter had spent the day in the empty,
hot house, waiting for the fickle creature to return.
“You know,” said Ann to her eighteen-year-old, trying not to sound as
furious and exasperated as she felt, “I can’t get used to the new reliable
you. The girl who left keys hanging in the door and burners burning. The
girl who forgot her brother at Von’s.”
“You told me to cancel the utilities, I canceled the utilities.” Lizzie’s
voice said she was innocent; over from her apartment in Westwood to help,
she had left no margin for error. All day they’d sat on the tiled floor in
the vacant dining room, or on the countertops in the kitchen,
air-conditioning disabled, refrigerator door hanging open, fan inoperable.
“And I told Cole he had to meet me at the checkout or, guess what? I’d
leave him.” Lizzie removed a pack of cigarettes from her waistband, free,
in her father’s absence, to be a person with bad habits. Ann had sworn not
to tell him, but she wouldn’t have, anyway.
Ann hauled herself up from her slump on the floor, ready to make another
useless perimeter sweep. “Kitty kitty kitty?” one or the other of them had
been calling for hours, circling the yard, culvert, street. Neither cared
for the cat – it peed on pillows, sharpened its claws on pants legs,
licked itself neurotically – but the boy, the eleven-year-old who’d
ridden away with his father at dawn, needed Winky. Taking Winky fifteen
hundred miles east to their new home, their hideout in the mountains, was
non-negotiable.
“Hate that fucking cat,” murmured Ann; the image saving the animal was of
it curled in the armpit of her sleeping son. She hated a few other things,
such as the way she looked in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, especially
when compared with her daughter, who looked beautiful in whatever she
wore. What consolation did age provide? Ann wondered. Bragging rights for
having arrived at forty-five or sixty or ninety-nine? You didn’t come
through intact, that much was clear. Moreover, the interesting things
happened early, a piece of information Ann was consciously, uncharitably,
withholding from her daughter. Packing away their belongings, she’d found
crayoned pictures addressed to her from Lizzie, pledging exclamatory,
boundless love, filled with hearts and a round-headed tribe of people
grinning their drunken smiley faces. The toddler who’d given herself to
those drawings was gone, her features turned angular, her smile caustic,
her thoughts sour and secret. Easy to love little children, harder to love
grown-ups. Ann had been shocked to discover that, at fourteen, her
daughter had shaved her pubic hair. When she was fifteen, Lizzie’s
notebook had been full of stick figures having scary sex, not to mention
the sickening song lyrics pulsing from her bedroom stereo, or the Fuck Me
and Cunt she’d markered onto her own shoes. Now, unbidden and often, Ann
would be visited by one or the other of these images, a slide show
starring her sunny child who had become an alarming adult.
The only help was to picture her boy, Cole, coming toward her with, say, a
cookie in each hand, one for himself, one for her.
Lizzie’s cell phone tweetered in her hip pocket. She studied its pink
faceplate nonchalantly. “Grandma,” she told Ann. When she raised her
eyebrows and held out the ringing phone, Ann shook her head and stepped
back, as if her mother could reach through the line for her. “I’m not
here.”
Lizzie had put on her listening expression as she engaged the line.
“Neither is Grandma,” she said. “It called accidentally. Grandma,” she
yelled into the phone. “Pick up, Grandma. It’s the cafeteria,” she told
Ann. “I can hear silverware. Old people muttering.” Even if Ann’s mother
had called on purpose, she wouldn’t remember who or why. Alzheimer’s had
been stealing her for years now. Eleven months ago, when she learned about
the airplanes deliberately aimed at the World Trade Center, it was as if
their collapse took what was left of her with them. “You know, I once
lived in New York,” she’d repeated that day, those words and no others, a
refrain to accompany the repeating footage on television, a refrain that
was perhaps her last coherent response to the world.
“Or maybe it’s bingo,” Lizzie was saying, tuned to the tabletop or the
linty interior of her grandmother’s handbag. Shock had unglued her mother,
Ann supposed, the perfectly understandable desire to stop knowing any more
things. A defense mechanism of the mind, a pressure valve in the heart.
She’d had to be moved from one part of her assisted-living facility to
another, demoted to the wing where the rooms were more like cells and the
assistants more like wardens. The pill brigade, the nightly tuck-in, the
sniffing hygiene police – wardens or stagehands or ventriloquists whose
patients were wooden dolls it was their charge to animate. And Ann’s
mother, who lived this sentence, this shapeless ongoing performance,
occasionally making her random accidental calls, a fleet piece of will or
inadvertency exerting itself. Ann could leave L.A. because her mother
would never know she was gone.
Lizzie said, “Grandma is telling Mrs. Carlyle to stop scaring her. ‘You’re
scaring me, Mrs. Carlyle, you’re scaring me.'”
“Mrs. Carlyle is dead,” Ann said. “Your grandmother always thinks someone
is scaring her. It used to be me.”
“How?”
“By being myself.”
“Same way I scare you,” Lizzie said cheerfully.
“I guess.” The secret life, the naughty self. Packing, Ann had uncovered
an old cache of drug paraphernalia – stale pot, brass pipe, razor, and
rolled dollar bill – duct-taped inside her own bathroom towel cupboard.
Her clever, duplicitous daughter, who knew that her parents would never
think to look right under their own noses, this girl who also was prone to
losing or forgetting things. “About your grandm – ”
“Jesus! I’m going to visit. Whose speed dial did she just hit, anyway? You
have reminded me eight million times. Why do you have to endlessly repeat
things, like I’m an idiot?” Lizzie reached around to scratch her back with
her cell phone antenna, the pretty knob of her shoulder thrust forward,
her halter riding up over the hollow stretch of her belly, the whole
smooth suit of skin she wore without thinking. She clapped the cell shut
like a castanet. “Goodbye, Grandma. Can we go sit in McDonald’s?”
“I don’t want to miss Winky.” But really, Ann didn’t want to be in public
showing so much of her own flesh. She’d imagined herself hidden in the car
all day, the car that was old and stuffed full of heavy breakables, likely
to overheat, a yowling cat in a box who would dictate drive-through food
and quick pit stops, a series of factors that had led her to her skimpy
and regrettable outfit. Wife-beater, her shirt was called; fringed
cutoffs.
“Can I go sit in McDonald’s?” She wasn’t rude, Ann reminded herself; she
was just asking a question. If her son had asked, she’d let him go. Why
always this flare of anger with her daughter?
“Go ahead,” she said, pretending Lizzie was her son. Her son, who would
have returned bearing an order of fries or clown cookies for his mother.
Lizzie walked away swinging her hips, the lovely thinness she had
accomplished with starvation and speed, more evidence of that plaguing
paradox. The McDonald’s yellow sign could be seen from the Ponders’ stoop,
Toys R Us behind it, Mobil, Exxon, Wendy’s, competing like waving hands in
a class of eager but dumb children. In Ann’s future home, in Colorado,
there would be no plastic signs within sight. Never again from her front
yard would she hear the muzzled sound of a genderless voice at a
drive-through intoning, “Please pull forward.”
Water still sputtered from the bathtub spigot, although only the cold,
which was tepid and chlorine-scented and already vaguely rusty. Ann sat on
the rim dousing her legs. When the knock came – the doorbell was
electric, she reminded herself – she had an absurd apprehension that her
mother, in record-shattering time, had somehow finagled a way over here
from the center, some cabbie or unwitting do-gooder who’d found her in
bedclothes on the street, waving her bingo card. How did she continue to
remember Ann’s address when she couldn’t often remember Ann herself? And
say she did remember – the truth of her situation dawning however briefly
upon her – then Ann suffered her mother’s fury as if a colossal
conspiracy had been cooked up behind her back. So it had, Ann thought.
Soon her mother forgot – an expression like bliss, like the uptake of a
painkiller – and returned contentedly to playing the coy dingbat, the
innocent coquette from cocktail parties of Ann’s youth, her flirting,
drunken mother. The knock sounded again. More likely it was Lizzie at the
door, returning for cash. Ann vowed not to get mad at her forgetful girl,
this girl who, staying at UCLA, would be charged with visiting her
difficult, declining grandmother … On the stoop she found her son’s
friend Dick.
“Dick!”
“Ma’am.” He wouldn’t look at her face, but in a blinking circle around
her, as if following the flying course of a gnat. His odd-shaped head
showed the track lines of a recent buzz cut, a monthly ritual his father
executed in the family’s front yard. “I came to say goodbye to Cole,” he
said diffidently. Dick never showed much life around adults, as though the
effort would be a wasted one, or maybe he was afraid, the native dread a
smaller creature has of a larger one. Alone with Ann’s son, however, he’d
been silly and affectionate. She had eavesdropped on them, touched by how
they loved to laugh, how politely deferential they were with each other,
butts wedged into a single captain’s chair in front of the computer,
drawing cartoons with their heads tipped together, building forts that
featured not weapons but foodstuff and flashlights. “Watson,” they
addressed each other in hissing British accents, partners in mystery and
adventure.
“Oh, Dick, I’m so sorry, Cole is gone!” Ann flushed – guilty. She’d
engineered this separation of best friends. Subtly but relentlessly,
slowly undermining connections to L.A. this last muddled and frightening
year, nudging her family off its foundation and onto the road, away.
“Gone?” Dick said, his face falling.
“I’m so so sorry, Dick.”
“Gone?” he repeated. Had Cole forgotten to say goodbye? Dick lived down
the street. The two boys had come home from the hospital only a week
apart; as toddlers, they’d pedaled their Big Wheels back and forth on the
sidewalk, then braved kindergarten together with matching backpacks and
lunch boxes. For years they’d gone around with their arms slung over each
other’s neck. “We’re not gay,” they had informed Ann sincerely one day.
“We’re like brothers.” When Dick called on the phone, he would always
announce himself: Hello, this is Dick. That name like a punch line, a
throwback from the 1940s: Dick and his sidekick Jane, their dog, Spot. It
wasn’t until the boys had been friends for a few years that Ann realized
her own husband shared Dick’s full proper name. Her husband, Richard,
however, had never let anyone call him Dick. What had Dick’s parents been
thinking eleven years ago?
But Cole probably seemed like a strange name to Dick’s parents. Their
bedraggled ranch house was surrounded by chain link, inside of which
roamed two Rottweilers – “the living moat,” Dick’s father boasted. These
dogs would leap and froth when anyone approached the yard, eventually
turning their ecstatic fury on each other, one chomping into the other’s
throat until there was a whimpering retreat. In the house proper, Dick’s
family bred Rottweilers; a litter was nearly always on the way or
occupying a kids’ plastic play pool in the living room. The home smelled
intensely, nauseatingly, of dog – Dick carried the potent, gamy odor with
him, on his clothes and in his hair. You could smell it on the pillow
after he’d spent the night. His father, who insisted that all children
call him sir, believed in discipline and respect, rules and belts. On the
rare occasion that it was he instead of one of Dick’s brothers who came to
retrieve Dick, he stood rocking on his heels at the Ponders’ front stoop,
refusing in his clipped manner – “No, ma’am” – the invitation to step
inside, as if Ann had greeted him naked, holding a highball.
The boys would come tearing breathless from Cole’s room, laughing and
shouting, brought up short by the sight of Dick’s father in profile just
outside the door.
Then the sober palm would be clamped onto Dick’s shoulder, the command to
thank Ann for her hospitality, and the forced march home.
Today she stared at the boy, aware that she would probably never see him
again. “Do you want to come in, Dick?” But what for? She had no treats to
offer, no games to play, not even a chair to sit on.
“No,” he said. “Thanks,” he added, pawing at her stoop with his foot. “Can
I go up in the treehouse?” he finally asked, rolling his gaze painfully to
her face.
“Of course!”
Rather than come in the house, he squeezed along the side yard, beating
through the unruly oleander. Ann followed from inside, watching at the
kitchen window as he climbed the ladder. His hands were like Cole’s,
slender and dextrous.
The boys had been born during the Gulf War. That was the safe topic Ann
could fall back on with Dick’s mother. Their politics did not agree –
they knew to keep their husbands separated and not to mention the bumper
stickers regarding guns on their respective vehicles – but biology had
made them good enough friends. Even as Ann gave birth, she had thought
about some poor woman in Iraq having a baby. Bad enough to be in Los
Angeles, ignored as the entire maternity ward gathered around the
television to watch the eerie green light of deployed Scud missiles. What
if you were over there, hearing – feeling – them detonate?
Moreover, she and Dick’s mother liked the other’s little boy. Dick’s
mother had four sons, Dick her youngest. The oldest had joined the army
recently; Dick was supremely proud of the fact. His other two brothers,
the twins, fell between, bullies, brats. But Dick was neither a bully nor
a brat; like Ann’s own son, he was rangy, unathletic. They were children
who deferred by instinct, not peacemakers but peacekeepers, knobby-kneed
guys who had to be prompted to eat and encouraged to defend themselves
against the other boys. Ann liked to think that Dick might find her home a
respite, her family a good influence. And now he’d missed his chance to
say goodbye.
She could have apologized for hours. Dick sat dejected in the treehouse,
not even swinging his legs. Finally he climbed down, squeezed through the
oleander, and was heading down the flagstones to the curb when Ann opened
the front door. “Goodbye, Dick,” she called.
He turned without stopping, his shoulders utterly slumped, scuffing his
feet in baggy pants far too big for him. This gang-inspired fashion
statement was another on the List of Reasons to Leave L.A. “Your cat is
dead,” he called back. The words, delivered in his typically uninflected
way, took a moment to register. It was as if he were reporting that Ann
had mail.
“Dick,” she cajoled. He understood that she questioned the truth of what
he’d said. He had a history of outrageous lies – this habit he shared
with Cole of make-believe and stories.
“Really,” he said flatly. “Look in your swimming pool.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Some Fun
by Antonya Nelson
Copyright © 2006 by Antonya Nelson.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Scribner
Copyright © 2006
Antonya Nelson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-1873-6
