Sweet things, p.8
Sweet Things, page 8
My grandmother had given me a red toothbrush with a round head and white bristles and if I stood on a wooden stool my father built so I could see myself in the bathroom mirror I could watch my mouth froth with every up and down stroke though I preferred the back and forth motion of the bristles on my teeth. The more Leslie hit me, the longer I wanted to clean my mouth.
Leslie’s mother was the social doyenne of the street. She would tell all the mothers in the neighborhood that her son was a perfect angel when they gathered at the Yawnton house for afternoon coffee parties. She told the other mothers I was disturbed.
I knew a secret about their house. Beneath the back bedroom was a crawl space with a dirt floor where Leslie’s father kept old lumber. Leslie called it his gold mine and had once dragged me in there by the hair to beat me up.
The day after the rocket man’s flight, when Leslie thought I had surrendered, he’d tried to enter his house but his mother was asleep and wouldn’t answer the door. I followed him to his backyard and hid in the bushes until he vanished into the crawl space where he beat the dirt with a spade. When I was certain he’d gone in too far to catch me, I shut the door and snapped the padlock in the latch. Then I went home and brushed my teeth because I knew I would have to lie if anyone asked where Leslie had gone.
The red plastic handle in my hand foamed with white froth. The taste of mint from Dr. Soane’s Dental Cream for Children made my teeth whiter with every stroke until I was certain they shone like the rocket man’s helmet as he climbed into his tiny room and a man in a white coat handed him his box of air so he could breathe when he touched the stars.
By the next evening, Leslie’s mother was frantic. She appeared at our door just after I had been put to bed. I heard her downstairs weeping and asking if anyone had seen Leslie.
“He said he was going out to play with your son, that dirty little liar of yours.”
My mother came into my room and asked if I knew where Leslie had gone.
I said I had. Leslie had gone someplace to find happiness but I could not imagine where.
“Try harder,” my mother said.
I shut my eyes and pictured a morning in my garden. The sun was shining. A grey rabbit hopped across the lawn and made a “Shush” with its forefoot then waved “So long!”
Auntie
“Don’t you feel breezy today?” she’d ask as she laughed.
Auntie never said where she was from or which side of the family she belonged to, but she loved to dance, alone or with a partner, and tried to teach us every step she knew. Her accent shifted from day to day depending on what she decided to cook for us, and she loved to cook as much as we loved eating what she prepared. We couldn’t remember when she moved in or if she ever said she’d move out.
In the beginning, Auntie’s shadow resembled a pencil but as she grew older she became, as one family member put it, more upholstered. We brought her to the beach one July afternoon and took turns sitting in the shade she cast.
We asked if she had ever been in love and she answered, “Of course, many times in many places but now she loved us all equally,” which was both sad and reassuring because all of us wanted to be Auntie’s favorite.
We returned one evening from a long bicycle ride. When we left, Auntie had been on the porch to wave goodbye, but by dusk, she wasn’t there to greet us. Mother was upstairs weeping at Auntie’s bedside, and we asked what had happened. Someone so great, so full of love would surely have lived forever.
Our disbelief was strong. We all wanted to wish her back to life. Moonlight was flooding in the window of our room and we were in awe when the curtains rustled and bulged and we agreed Auntie was hiding behind them, beckoning us to dance.
Rust
Our mother purchased a new two-door car that was gold and had plaid seats. We’d never had a vehicle where the front seats flipped forward so we could climb in the back. The dealer said it was ‘sporty.’ We reveled in the idea that our mother could put her foot down, gun the motor, and leave the world in our dust.
We decided to take a long, motor vacation across the country. Our father did most of the driving because he wanted to see how fast he could go and not get caught by a speed trap.
Our mother commanded the front passenger seat and assumed the role of disciplinarian and navigator with “Triptychs” from the Motor League that were narrow flipbooks that outlined our route and pointed out important sites along the way. We sat in the back and pretended not to notice.
The car was also our first automobile to have a radio in the dashboard. Before we bought the new, gold car our parents had driven clunkers that were as heavy as tanks because they had been made just after the war by factories that produced armored vehicles. The old cars had all the qualities of a tank except the turret.
The addition of the radio was a nod to comfort, although the windows had to be rolled down by hand in the front seats and in the back, they popped open on small, black snap hinges. Mother said power windows were an unnecessary expense. Rolling built muscles.
“Hey, do you want to see me outrun our shadow?” our father asked late one day when we had been tied up in a traffic jam caused by construction and were racing to make our motel reservation.
He put his foot on the accelerator.
We raced past a policeman and waved. Instead of chasing us down and pulling us over for a ticket, he waved back.
As we unloaded our bags and climbed up to our room in the gallery of the motel, we stared over the rail at our new car and admired its lines. Nothing, we agreed, could catch it. It was sleek. We agreed it could outrun everything including time.
The next morning when we rose early because my father was determined to get on the road before the highway jammed up again, we dragged our suitcases out of our room and looked down on our new car. It had been cool during the night. The car was covered in dew. The inside of the windshield looked like an aquarium. We argued over what we would write on the windows when we climbed in.
That’s when my father found the first problem. The flaw was not in the engine. It had been manufactured in Detroit, he told us.
The flaw was a spot of rust on the rear passenger side panel.
My mother stood and looked at it with him.
They both tried to rub it off. The paint had bubbled and the metal had turned reddish-brown.
“It is just going to get worse,” they said in unison, looking at each other.
“It is still under warranty,” mother said.
“It is going to get bigger,” father replied. “It must have happened when we drove through the gravel patch in the roadwork yesterday. Gravel is rough on paint jobs, especially new ones.”
We could tell they were worried.
The further we got from home, the more we kept pulling over in picnic areas to inspect the damage. It was getting worse.
It reminded us of ringworm which we had caught from playing in a barnyard with some piglets, or worse, a patch of psoriasis.
When we asked our mother if the car had psoriasis she said, “No, but the patch on the rear panel,” that now spread all the way to the back bumper and had begun to populate on the chrome “was just like that, only cars aren’t human. They don’t have progressive skin diseases.”
The problem spread from the paint to the chrome and got worse whenever we lost a radio signal. It was as if the mod-gold color was held on the body of the vehicle by waves or signals. We kept insisting our mother dial around for a station.
“There’s nothing on the radio.”
“Keep looking!”
By the time we reached the seashore and could smell the salt air but the car was beginning to vanish. The frame was crumbling but the windows were intact. The beach, we told our father, was good for the car.
“There are lots of Top 40 stations on the radio.”
“No,” he said, “the salt air is making the problem worse. We’re going to have to head to higher ground.”
The ocean was fun for us but we could see what our father saw – the car was dissolving. We knew he was worried we might not get home.
We’d have to walk all the way, through the construction and dust and rain and heat on the shoulder of the road, lugging our suitcases in one hand and using the other hand for balance.
As we drove home, we noticed the car was not the only thing that was succumbing to the oxidization of metal, as our father put it. Entire towns were beginning to rust.
At first, the decay was not entirely noticeable. The houses and churches were white clapboard. But when we reached the factory cities, the places where we’d seen workers filing out of factories at the end of their shifts were being eaten by rust.
We paused at a pull-off and heard the sound of rust chewing metal.
Had we caused it?
Perhaps.
Maybe in outrunning our shadow, which we were sure we had when we started out, we had left a trail not of dust but of rust. We could see bridges being eaten away as we crossed them and the cars behind plunging into the abyss of deep rivers where they dissolved as they were swept away.
The Trailer
(London Independent Short Story Prize finalist)
He was certain he had lived his life before. His performance in this life, the still images other people would mistake for memories, boiled down to a handful of brief scenes where his best acting gave a taste of what the feature film would be. There were moments he felt Oscar-worthy and instances when the drama of life was too powerful to be contained in a trailer for the coming-to a theatre-near-you blockbuster.
Sonorous voice intones, “This is the story of a man in search of love who finds instead…”
Between those short, punctuated bursts of reality cut together by the marketing department, he couldn’t remember his life. There had to be more to it, but production had wrapped ages ago.
He bought himself a trailer when he quit university and parked it deep in the bush. His only visitors were deer and bears. The bears tried the windows when they thought he wasn’t home. When they stood on their hind legs they reminded him of his aunts who found his remote location and peered in the windows.
“Couldn’t you do something better with your life?” they asked.
The full-length feature would connect all the scenes of dramatic tension – such as the time he ran from his girlfriend when she stood with her eyes closed and her lips puckered as moths circled the light fixture on her front porch. Her arms were open in a bear hug to hold him forever until her jaws clamped around his face and tore off his identity.
If he hadn’t seen the end that was cut from the trailer, he wouldn’t have gotten away. He wouldn’t have stopped to bend down and weep, breathless from running five blocks from her house, and wonder where his ball cap fell off, and who was wearing it now.
Arums (Lothlarien Review)
“If I had arms like an octopus I’d wrap them all around you and give you a big birthday hug,” Aunt Harriet wrote on the pink card with oversized arum lilies on the front and a poem inside that rhymed “a friend so kind” with “you in mind.” She was large and her kisses were wet as oceans.
When Harriet passed only days after the card arrived, his mother canceled his party for the second year – he’d had chickenpox when he was seven – and packed him in the car.
“Nothing is fair,” she told him, “not life, not death, not even love, and of those three life death happen anyways and love was the most difficult because it is hard to hold onto.”
It rained all the way south. Spring was barely in bloom and the car windows fogged. His mother refused to drive with the radio on but the beat of the wipers and the steady thread of boredom put him to sleep.
When they arrived, Aunt Thelma had turned the mattress in Harriet’s room for them, and when they woke and his mother adjusted his suit she insisted he wear his clip-on bow tie because all the men in the family wear them.
Aunt Harriet lay in her box in the living room window, the bier embellished with arrangements of arum lilies. Their open mouths made the flowers appear to gasp or cry out for help. The rose scent of perfumed women and the headiness of the flowers in the fierce humidity made him think he was wrapped in a dog’s panting.
A bald man, heavyset with his shirt buttons pulling, stood next to him as he stared at his aunt in her stillness.
“I’m your Uncle Grant. Thelma and Harriet’s brother. I don’t think we’ve met.”
The boy said nothing.
“Your Mom’s raising you. She’s a brave woman. They’re brave women. Has anyone given you had the talk yet? I want to get to know you, teach you how to tie a bow tie like mine, and tell you where to hold your hands on the steering wheel when you get pulled over.”
The boy didn’t understand. He’d watched his mother drive. He turned and went outside to the porch.
In the grey daylight, the houses in their stiff front faces looked alike, but what made each one different was the paint on their clapboard, some of it peeling, some blue, some yellow. He leaned over the porch railing.
In the flower bed directly below, a single white lily had bloomed, its mouth open to the sky as if it wanted to suck down the clouds by catching raindrops to quench its thirst so he and his mother could go home.
He went down the steps and tried to snap the stem, but the shaft was supple. It bent in his hands. The sinews held fast. The flower drooped. He knelt and using his pocket knife, cut through the stalk, mangling it with each pass of the dull blade. He would give the flower to Harriet, lay it beside her in her box, and write a small card that said, “You in mind.”
The women in the kitchen didn’t see him tear the bottom off Harriet’s last shopping list or notice as he laid the arum beside his aunt. He wanted her to know he loved her though she had always been far away and ruined his birthday.
He heard his uncle calling out, almost in a shout so everyone could hear, “Where’s that boy?”
Grant grabbed him by the shoulder and took him out to the porch and made him look over the railing at the lily stub.
“Why did you take your aunt’s last flower? She grew lilies. That was her last. She poured her love into them, every year kneeling close to the earth and saying she thought she heard angels there. The last lily was her way of saying goodbye to everyone, and you’ve ruined it. You got mud in her coffin. What were you thinking?”
He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to cry.
He ran upstairs to his aunt’s room where he and his mother slept and buried his face in the pillow until everything was dark with a terrible lightlessness that pricked him with shame and emptiness from the weight on his shoulders down to his stomach.
His aunt had so many arms, so many ways of reaching out and drawing people to her, and the void he saw as he pressed his face to the pillow resembled ink, and he thought he would ask her forgiveness by writing a story about her, perhaps with the title “You In Mind,” and the ink was right before his eyes.
Sweet Things
Karla and Millicent walked into Melnyk’s Drugstore one Saturday afternoon in July for some candy and before they were able to leave both were convinced they were going to hell. The afternoon was a slow and blazing day and the sidewalks shimmered in the heat where spats of grey chewing gum around the pharmacy’s entrance stuck to the soles of the girls’ shoes if they stood more than a quick step in one spot. Most of the customers were out of town, or cutting their lawns, or picnicking down at the waterfront, and Doug Melnyk, who had known both the girls since they were toddlers, decided to leave the prescription counter and sit behind the cash in case someone came in to buy a newspaper or made a grab for the till.
The bell over the door rattled a few notes. Karla swung the door back and forth and listened as they rattled. The greeting chimes were a pleasant sound she’d always loved. Melnyk stood up to greet them.
The girls said nothing.
He watched as they moved up and down the aisles, stopping to sample the tester bottles of perfume or pry open the caps of shampoos to smell the fragrance.
Karla leaned into Millicent and whispered in her ear before they approached the druggist, and the girls elbowed each other to see who would speak first.
“Where is your ice cream freezer, the one with the metal doors on top?” Karla asked.
“Well girls, the freezer mechanism broke. Worst time of year it could have clunked out on me. This is popsicle season. I have Lifesavers and chocolate bars although I wouldn’t say it’s chocolate weather.”
“What is a Baby Ruth?” Millicent asked.
“It has chocolate and peanuts and some sort of nougat. People think it’s named after the baseball player, but I read up on it and it got called that for Grover Cleveland’s daughter who died of diphtheria almost twenty years before it was invented.”
“Yuck,” said Karla, making a face. “Diphtheria? Will I get it from the candy bar?”
Melnyk smiled. “No. It has almost been eradicated. My grandmother had it when she was a girl and almost died, and right around the time Ruth Cleveland died of it. It used to carry off the elderly and young ones just like you two. People would catch it in the summer. They’d burn up from it, I guess like they’d been tossed on a fire.”
The counter was set on a high platform, and Melnyk stared down at Millicent who had taken two bars off the rack and slipped them into the back band of her blue jeans.
“You know, Millie, that’s stealing.”
“I didn’t steal anything.”
“Really?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Well, in that case, I’d wager you are going to come down with diphtheria sometime soon,” the pharmacist said. The color drained from Millicent’s face. She turned to Karla. “You can put them back.”
“You told me it would be easy!” Millicent shouted at her friend. While the thief and the owner were distracted, Karla pocketed her own handful of bars off the rack.
