Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries)

Do I grow slinky? I think of carrot sticks and ice and follow Jeffrey’s lead. I am snapping my fingers, wiggling, bumping, grinding. Mom, giggles Jeffrey. That’s too kinky.

  And later, alone, the night outside grows inky, like my thoughts, my thoughts.

  I am dying for a Twinkie.

  Tom is home tonight from Scranton. We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think. Jeffrey comes clunking in on a small broken three-wheeled fire engine.

  Dad, Mom said to ask you if I could have a BB gun.

  Jeffrey, I say, flabbergasted. I told you you could not have a BB gun.

  Your mother’s right on that score, says Tom, sounding weird—on that score, what the hell is that, he sounds like some oily sportscaster.

  Geeze, mutters Jeffrey, maneuvering the firetruck into a three-point turn and back down the hallway. Fuck it damn it all, he says. I am startled.

  Watch the mouth, young man, shouts Tom.

  During lunch hour today I stop by Mr. Fernandez’s school. There are about fifteen kids there and they all seem quiet and good and engrossed in making block forts or cleaning up finger paint. Jeffrey looks up from behind some blocks, yells hi Mom, then resumes work on some precarious architectural project, which is probably also supposed to be a fort. I find a seat nearby and watch. Jeffrey suddenly stands up and looks fidgety, holding his crotch with one hand. Yikes! I gotta go! he shouts and bolts out of the room. While he is in the bathroom, I ask Mr. Fernandez about Jeffrey’s language, whether he has noticed anything, any obscenities.

  No, says Mr. Fernandez, looking puzzled.

  Jeffrey emerges from the john, pulling up his pants.

  Amahara chews an office property pen and says, aw, he’s probably just reading it on bathroom walls is all.

  Fuck it damn it all? He’s only four-and-a-half.

  Sure, she says, absently cracking plastic between her snaggle teeth. Like: Aint got no toilet paper, fuck it damn it all. Or no nukes, fuck it damn it all. Or no nukes hire the handicapped. Or nuke the handicapped. Or fuck the handicapped, damn it all.

  I make a face. Amahara, I say. You’re just free-associating.

  Best things in life are free, she sighs.

  With Amahara, clichés can take on epiphanic dimensions.

  Best things in life are free, she repeats with emphasis, getting up, casting me a dark glance, and walking out the door, leaves me to wonder what she is driving at.

  Tonight by his bed I discover a chewed crayon and a letter Jeffrey has written. It says Dear Jesus and God Hi.

  Sunday. This cool cloudless afternoon I feel a pulsing at my neck and head and hips to escape. I drop Jeffrey and Tom off at the cinema for a Disney cartoon fest they both said they wanted to see, and I drive thirty miles or so out into Bucks County toward a gorge and waterfall I read about last summer in an Inquirer article entitled, “Nooks for Cooks—Great Spots for the Gourmet Picknicker.”

  All the way out I listen to the car AM radio, bad lyrics of trailer park love, gin and tonic love, strobe light love, lost and found love, lost and found and lost love, lost and lost and lost love—some people were having no luck at all. The DJ sounds quick and smooth and after-shaved, the rest of the world a mess by comparison.

  I have to drive a mile on a narrow string of a dirt road, praying, as my father used to say, like a goddamned mantis that no one will come barreling toward me from the opposite direction. I then leave the car parked at the end of it—along with only one other car—and walk another quarter of a mile in. The trail is black and muddy with spring and as I slop along in old sneakers, I can hear the rush of the water already just a short distance away. Slop City, Batman would say if he were here. Slop, slop.

  The trail down from the woods into the gorge is veined with large knobby roots and as I make my way down along them, strategically leaning from tree trunk to tree trunk, it occurs to me that I should be thinking I am too old for this, and yet I am not and instead am marveling, marveling. The smell of the soil is wet and silty and few of the branches of the softwoods even have buds on them yet. A raccoon, elegantly striped and masked as for a small mammalian ball, has come out of the bushes and approached the creek. I make little noises at it, noises I think might be appropriate raccoon noises: a trilling, clucking sort of chatter. The raccoon cocks its head to one side, curious. I try human language—Hey, Mr. Raccoon—and it yammers at me angrily, scurries away in a furry blur.

  In the middle of the creek there are long flat slabs of slate and I can jump from rock to rock and without much difficulty land myself in the middle of the largest and sunniest of them. A few yards down, an old stone bridge spans the gorge, crumbled but stubborn, its stones chipped and spilled, its mortar cracked; it is like the weighted arc of a wise mouth, a large, tight-lipped stitch across the jagged brown banks. I turn from this, turn toward the shimmer upstream, the bright white of the water, god, the light of it, as it skis down over the rocks and ragged beginnings of mosses, all around the zig-zag of flaking shale, layered as old pastries. The light, something the article never talked about, flashing from bud and wave and ripple, everything lined and measured by it, in this sunken rip, the blinding living ice of it knocks me out, flat like a lizard on a rock I just lie here and begin to feel the sun warm my skin even through my clothes, and then I am taking them off: my jacket, my sneakers, socks, sweater, pants, underwear. The sun heats the hairs of my goose-bumps, soaks into my shoulders, the vast incontinent continent of me; sun closes my eyes, this sun, my sun. The creek roars around me, waking from winter, strong and renewed. I have the urge, lying like that, like a fat snake, to squeal or shout. I stand up and dip my right foot into the creek. No one is around and I leap from flat rock to flat rock whooping like a cowgirl. God, you devil you, moments like these I do believe are you, are gods that hold you and love you happy that’s what a god should do, hold you and love you happy someone is stealing my wallet.

  Behind me there is a barebacked man in denim fumbling with my jacket pocket three rocks away.

  I run behind a bush.

  Now he is clambering up the slope thinking I haven’t seen him. I can bring myself to say nothing and he gradually disappears into the trees. I turn away, listen again to the water. I am suddenly getting cold. I go back to my rock and lie down, the earth moving, chafing beneath the blue membrane of the sky like a slow ball-bearing.

  I rub my shins and get dressed.

  Luckily I still have my keys. On the way back to pick up Jeffrey and Tom from the movie, the radio plays Barbra Streisand movie soundtracks. I take my time. In college there were three books I liked: Walden, Agamemnon, and Waiting for Godot. These were operations I understood. I hum to the radio. A Smokey the Bear commercial booms on and says that only I can prevent forest fires, I sweat with responsibility, and then the slick, mentholated DJ returns, announcing that now we return to The Way We Were. I drive slow, like an old man after a war.

  Sorry I’m late, I yell out the window, parking lot gravel crunching beneath the tires. They are the only two people left at the cinema, and they are standing there like two lone cornstalks by the highway marquee, big and little in navy blue wind-breakers. I reach over to unlock the door and they both climb in the front seat, Jeffrey in the middle. Tom slams the door shut.

  Sorry I’m late, I say again, and Jeffrey puts one cold hand on my face to try to make me jump and Tom rubs his palms together beneath the glove compartment, saying don’t you have the heater on?

  I am too warm already, but I flick it to high. It responds with a roar and we are off down the road, a Mayfair dryer on wheels. How was the movie?

  Radishes are round, quotes my son. Radishes are red. Specially when you take them and bite off their heads.

  That’s what Danny the Dragon said, explains my husband.

  It wasn’t Danny the Dragon, argues Jeffrey. It was the duck that said that.

  Tom, I chide, don’t you know a duck from a dragon? A light turns yellow and I speed thro
ugh it.

  Tom looks out the window to his right: I’m telling you, it was the dragon.

  Jeffrey looks straight ahead. There’s no such thing as real dragons, right Mom?

  I steal a quick look over his head at Tom, whose nostrils are flaring. We have stopped for a light at Quaker Boulevard. That’s right, dear. I think, uh, they were mostly killed off in wars or something.

  In the Vietnam war? he asks, so sincere, so interested.

  In the War of the Roses, blurts Tom, impatiently, his hands tucked under his arms. Also heavy dragon casualties in the Glorious Revolution.

  You’ll confuse him, I sing through my teeth, flooring the gas as the light changes.

  He’s already confused! Tom suddenly shouts, angrily pounding the dashboard as Jeffrey hides his face in my sleeve. I tell you it wasn’t the fucking duck!

  I’ve been so touchy, murmurs Tom in bed as we stare at the ceiling together in the dark. I turn my head to look at him. He has been crying. Sharp triangles of hair are plastered to his forehead. Help me, Riva, he gasps, and his face cracks open again, but this time waterlessly. I feel the heaving of his rib cage. He brings his arm up over his face and hides in the angle it forms. I move toward him, on my side, press myself against him, cradle his head, pry loose his arm, and say: Tom, tell me. It’s Scranton again, isn’t it? He starts to shake his head no but then gives up. He nods yes and somehow it helps lessen the heaving. His eyes look at me, frantic, desperate. I place my hand gently to his cheek, but I do not kiss him.

  I am sure the lady at the health food store is dying. Her eyes are puffy and her lips are dried, stuck together. If she opened her mouth, it would sound like Velcro pulling apart. The door clacks and tinkles behind me.

  Hi, I say cheerily. Well, you know, guess what, Scranton’s back in the picture again that tenacious dame. What can you do? No water can be thicker than water, you know what I mean?

  I have no idea what I’m saying. I just want to save her life.

  Tom’s okay, I continue. I mean, we all have our bad habits. Me, for instance, I eat graham crackers like crazy.

  Her mouth lets in air, a grinning fish. Sorry to hear that, she says.

  But I don’t know whether she means Scranton or the graham crackers, and so I just say yeah, well, I’m sure I need some sort of vitamin, and look woefully toward the shelf.

  Amahara, can you come here please and take care of Mrs. Baker’s account?

  That old bag?

  I grimace. Mrs. Baker is standing not six feet away. What I mean, Amahara recovers impressively, picking up a marked-down patent leather purse and smiling at Mrs. Baker, is that you really do need a new bag.

  Perhaps I should do something else. Teach or something, I am saying to my mother who has relapsed into senility again but who is demanding that I confide professional and domestic secrets. She will insist she doesn’t remember a thing, that I should tell her my troubles again. She already has forgotten her announced intention to leave St. Veronica’s.

  Has this Tom got a new mistress? she asks sternly, as if that would explain my discontent with Leigenbaum’s.

  No, no. That’s not it, I say quickly and turn the subject to the gum she is chewing, which smells like suntan lotion.

  Honey-coconut, she says. No problem with my dentures either.

  There is a long silence. I look at my hands.

  Good stuff, reiterates my mother. Honey-coconut. Made by Beech-Nut.

  Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert symphony, something about travel and money again, and we lay there, both of our breaths bad, both of our underwear dangling elastic, and then you turned toward me with a gaze like two matches, putting the horoscope aside, you traced my buried ribs with an index finger, lingered at my collarbone, admiring it as one might a flying buttress, murmuring: Nice clavicle. And me, too new at it and scared, not knowing what to say, whispering: You should see my ten-speed.

  Jeffrey get in here, I yell out the back door. It’s getting dark and dinner’s ready. He is playing Murder the Leaf in the backyard with his friend Angela Dillersham. They carry large sticks.

  Jeffrey do you hear me?

  Yeah, he says and mumbles see ya to Angela, then shambles toward the back porch. Fuck it, damn it all, I hear him say, dragging himself up the stairs and I slap him as he comes in the door and send him crying to his room without his spaghetti or his fruit cocktail or his stick.

  Where’s Jeffrey? asks Tom.

  He’s being punished, I say, twirling spaghetti into a spoon.

  But you sent him to bed without dinner two nights ago, says Tom, petulantly poking a wrinkled grape. Fuck it, damn it all, Riva, he’s going to starve if you keep this up.

  Go to your room, Tom, I say.

  But he doesn’t. He stays. He looks at me, blinking and amazed.

  We are in Tom’s room. My curtains and my clothes are here, but more and more it has taken on a disgruntled greenishness that is Tom’s, a foggy haze like a fish tank that needs to be cleaned. We have to talk about this, he says.

  What is this? I ask.

  Scranton. Julia. You know. It’s at the root of it all.

  It all? I ask, a tyrant for precision.

  Yes, well, this giant ravine between us, he explains.

  Ah yes. Ravine. I think of my stolen wallet. There were pictures. And an eye donor’s card. And then I think of the sun, the son.

  I’m sure it’s hard for you to believe, he continues. After all I said and promised last year and now all this … again …

  All this? I ask, getting good at it.

  Julia.

  Oh, right. Scranton. I have always hated her name.

  You must feel you’re caught up in some vicious cycle. His voice sounds kind, sympathetic. At least I know I do, he is saying.

  Cycle? I feel sarcasm flying up into my throat, shrill and inarticulate as a blue jay. Vicious cycle? I shout again. Hey. Listen. You should see my ten-speed.

  I grow incomprehensible.

  Easter. We try not to make too much of it. Jeffrey finds all the beans, saves me the purple ones. The air’s warming, it’s hard to sleep, and caterpillars sound like wind munching, denuding the spring trees. The days smell like a hamster cage, leaf bits littering the walks.

  I long for you, I short for you, I wear shorts for you.

  Jeffrey eats all his dinner tonight. He has been sweet all day, brought me a potato print of what he calls the limpbirdie bell. Before bed I read him a story about a Mexican boy and a pinata, and Jeffrey says: Am I gonna do that, too, Mom? Smash my horse pinata? And I say that his horse pinata is different, it’s a gift from Mr. Fernandez, and it’s supposed to just hang there and not be broken. He yawns and stumbles off to plunk and deedle-dee, his sound words—where has he gotten this other stuff from?

  Is God a giant like Hercules? asks Jeffrey just before drifting off. And I sit at the bed’s edge and say God’s a giant like the sun or like the sky, a huge blanket that all the planets are swimming in.

  Could Hercules kill a gorilla? asks Jeffrey.

  I slather heavy peach makeup over the rash by my mouth and go to see Mr. Fernandez at the lunch hour again. He insists Jeffrey is fine, although I’m still worried about his language. I sit next to Mr. Fernandez at a low, made-for-kids table, watching Jeffrey and the others play. He notices I am glum and places his hand on mine, says nothing.

  Mr. Fernandez, I ask him finally. Are you happy?

  He looks straight ahead for a minute.

  Riva, he says, at last. You’re not asking the right questions.

  What’s a right question?

  Ah, he says mysteriously.

  Ah? I ask. It sounds like tonsilitis. He nods, grins through his beard.

  A little girl with short hair pale as the inside of a lemon rind runs up and places her cheek against Mr. Fernandez’s knee. She has wet brown cookie remnants at the corner of her
mouth. Can I have some juice now, please? she asks, running her fingers up and down the corduroy grooves of his thigh. She stops and looks up at me quizzically. A tiny cookie bit falls from her mouth. What kind of juice do you like? I ask her, solicitous, false-friendly, ridiculous.

  She looks at me, knits her brows, takes Mr. Fernandez’s hand, and turns away, pulling him toward the refrigerator at the far end of the room. He looks at me and shrugs and I shrug back. Not asking the right questions.

  Things seem tense at work. People are wooden, scarcely polite, their eyes like fruit pits.

  In bed with Tom. He holds me. I am sorry, he says. I love you. I love Jeffrey, I love that kid.

  So do I, I say carefully.

  There’s a long moment before he says: What should we do? Do you want a divorce?

  You are my husband, I say with difficulty, like a stroke victim, my tongue plugged in my throat like a scarf or a handbag.

  I’m thinking of writing an herb book, says the woman in the health food store. Her hair lies in unwashed strings on the shoulders of her pink-gray sweater and against the pink-gray slope of her face.

  It’s good to have a project, I say, trying to sound cheerful, encouraging. Something to live with, something to always return to.

  Something you love, she says, and holds up a green sprig of something, looks at me, smiles weakly.

  Today I did a thousand dollars.

  Things. Sometimes you just have to do them.

  What do you want to be when you grow up, Jeffrey? I ask, chopping squash, squashing chops.

  A car driver.

  A car driver?

  Yeah, you drive cars, he says and starts to zoom around the kitchen, three-point turning into cupboards.

  Jeffrey, come and stir this brownie mix for me.

  Okay, he says obediently, and we sit next to each other on stools at the counter. He is fidgety, restless. I push his hair back out of his face with my one clean hand. I can cradle his whole head with it, it seems.